Whitacre Eric

The story behind the Whitacre/Plitmann “Five Hebrew Love Songs”

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The German town of Speyer, where the Five Hebrew Love Songs was first performed. Image accessed via Pixabay.

Sometimes the genesis of a now-popular piece can be almost unbearably poignant in light of the situation on the ground now. Such is the case with the popular Five Hebrew Love Songs with music by Eric Whitacre and lyrics by Hila Plitmann. Both composer and lyricist have been extremely open about the meaning of the words. Here, for example, is a relevant paragraph from Whitacre’s website, describing how the songs came about in 1996 as the result of a request from the violinist Friedemann Eichhorn:

Because we were appearing as a band of traveling musicians, ‘Friedy’ asked me to write a set of troubadour songs for piano, violin and soprano. I asked [then-girlfriend] Hila (who was born and raised in Jerusalem) to write me a few ‘postcards’ in her native tongue, and a few days later she presented me with these exquisite and delicate Hebrew poems. I set them while we vacationed in a small skiing village in the Swiss Alps, and we performed them [Plitmann sang the soprano part] for the first time a week later in Speyer.

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Robert Frost and Randall Thompson’s Frostiana (with other rabbit trails along the way)

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Robert Frost in 1941; image accessed via Wikipedia

Introduction

This will be very long for a blog post/article but too short for a whole separate book, so note the Table of Contents box above that you can use as needed or desired. My goal here is to focus primarily on Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, looking at the circumstances of its composition and the seven poems individually that comprise it, but with plenty of info about Robert Frost the man and poet and also a bit about a couple of other composers who have set Frost’s poetry to music. An individual video is included for each song, with a full performance of the Thompson suite at the end. Other bonus videos are included!

Let me start by explaining my own history of singing music set to texts by Robert Frost.  As a member of the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area I’ve sung “The Pasture” by Z. Randall Stroope, “The Road Not Taken” and “Choose Something Like a Star” from Frostiana by Randall Thompson, and “Sleep” by Eric Whitacre, which started out its life as a setting of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then, as a grand finale to all this Frost-y stuff (sorry), I’m getting to sing the entire Frostiana in May of 2022 with my group. If you’re reading this before May 6-7 2022, you can follow the link above to visit the choir’s website and attend the concert. It’s going to be g-r-e-a-t!

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Who are the two heavy hitters involved in the light, shimmering piece “A Boy and a Girl”?

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And they are: Eric Whitacre, one of today’s most popular American composers of classical choral music, and Octavio Paz, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, essayist and diplomat. Quite a team!

Let’s start with Paz and his poem. While the title’s translation from the original Spanish is typically rendered as “A Boy and a Girl,” I ran into an interesting blog post that had this to say:

As a side note, the title “Los Novios” is very difficult to translate into English without losing something.  The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new.  The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural.  While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message.  Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey. (from “The Lovers”: A New Translation of Octavio Paz’ “Los Novios”)

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The Story of Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep”

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In a sense, Mr. Whitacre has already done my work for me. You can read the charming story of his writing this piece to the words of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then finding out that the poem was no longer available for use, putting the song “under his bed,” and then getting his friend Charles Silvestri to write new lyrics, by going to his website and reading the story here. I’ll give you just a taste here to whet your appetite for the whole thing:

This was an enormous task, because I was asking him to not only write a poem that had the exact structure of the Frost, but that would even incorporate key words from “Stopping,” like ‘sleep.’ Tony wrote an absolutely exquisite poem, finding a completely different (but equally beautiful) message in the music I had already written. I actually prefer Tony’s poem now.

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Eric Whitacre’s Sweet Seal Lullaby

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Note to readers: This post originally was originally written in reference to a Christmas concert by my own choir; thus the holiday reference.

Why are we singing a lullaby to a seal? Are seals somehow part of the Christmas story?

Let’s get the connection between seals (the animals) and Christmas out of the way first. There isn’t one. So that’s settled. (There are Christmas seals of another type,, though—remember those? The little stamps with holiday themes that you’d stick on the envelope flap of your Christmas cards? They’re issued by the American Lung Association and have been around since 1907, when the main push was to find a cure for tuberculosis. As I revise this post in the fall of 2020 they’ve shifted focus to COVID-19. You can still order them and also post them digitally to Facebook, etc.)

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