how the words came to be

Many of you wonder, how did I take poetry out of this?

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Well, the first thing I did was to use the subject of the movements (First movement – dramatic unrest; second movement – serenity; third movement – rondo). Once I had those, I followed the contour of the notes.

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With the rise and fall of the notes, so did positive and negative feelings follow which I used to write down how I felt at that moment in the piece. An example of rising notes would be from the second movement where the violin comes in in a series of arpeggios going up, accompanied by the words, ‘pristine white, like cathedral spires, pierce the skies’. Although not every rise of the notes are positive feelings; such as the passage from the first movement, ‘reaching for the heavens’ – it indicates a longing for something more.

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The first movement consists of a back and forth between musical lines, and that is what I tried to convey in my words. Lines such as, ‘it is a tug of war, for the melody, who it sings for’ and ‘Why? Oh, why? Can one not sing? Shall the muse be only thought, ever taught?’ convey the same ideas and emotions, like an exposition and a recapitulation. Highly charged passages are also filled with powerful words, ‘She sings and sings, to fill in the desire of a passion unrestrained’.

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The second movement is slow and peaceful, almost church-like. Thus, ‘….like cathedral spires….’. With its beautiful melody, I felt as though this movement could also relate to feelings of love (‘Oh, love, how lovely it is to meet you’, ‘Overflowing, one cannot comprehend such beauty’), quiet happiness (‘And these days are golden and light with the fluttering of your love’), and of course, as the orchestra strikes with a sudden change of color at the end, the violin strikes through – Alas!

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The third movement is joyful and filled with unbridled energy – ‘Let us dance, let us sing, let us be merry and jovial’. As the violin switches up an octave, so does the view, in some way – ‘See! The lark flies! Red and gold aflutter in the breeze!’. As it changes to the second theme, so do the words take on a slightly melancholic tone – ‘The past shall not return, the present ever a walking pace, the future unforeseen’, ‘So will be our days left to fate’. And as the main theme comes back, so does the invitation to ‘stay with me, let us be with music ‘til the end’, ‘And may our music never end.’