The Chorus at 75

I first encountered Dylan Thomas’s work in 1959, my last undergraduate year at Columbia College. It was a revelation. Both the sound and structures of Thomas’s words were astonishingly musical. Not by accident, either: “What the words meant was of secondary importance; what matters was the sound of them … these words were as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments,” he wrote in his Poetic Manifesto of 1951. I was irresistibly drawn to translate his music into mine.
One poem captivated me: “Fern Hill,” about the poet’s “young and easy” summers at his family’s farm of the same name. I wanted to write this work as a gift for my high school music teacher, Mrs. Bella Tillis, who first encouraged my musical ambitions. She introduced “Fern Hill” with piano accompanying her (and, once, my) school choir.
“Fern Hill” is a blithe poem, yet touched by darkness; time finally holds the poet “green and dying,” but the poem itself, formally just an A–B–A song extended into a wide arch, sings joyously of youth and its keen perceptions. I set it for mezzo-soprano solo, chorus, and orchestra, aiming to match the forthright lyricism of the text. (The direction “with simplicity” is everywhere in the printed score.)

— John Corigliano

 Sung Texts

Fern Hill
by John Corigliano
Text by Dylan Thomas (“Fern Hill,” 1945)

CHORUS
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

CHORUS & SOLO QUARTET
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

MEZZO-SOPRANO
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

MEZZO-SOPRANO & CHORUS
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

CHORUS
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

CHORUS & SOLO QUARTET
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

For years and years, I’ve been transfixed by [William Blake’s] text: what I felt I was seeing in the music beneath Blake’s words was a kind of longing for the present. It’s almost a road map that he created for how to be truly in the moment. And it starts with that opening line: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” Blake, in his ever-mystical way, invites the reader to enter into the infinite world of a grain of sand. Even there, in the smallest, most insignificant thing, lies our entire experience. This displays a deep understanding of the dense, fractal, ephemeral world that exists at every level of our known universe.

I decided to take those four lines and then see if I could create an hour-long piece that was, in a way, a journey deeper and deeper into that grain of sand. And hopefully find at the end of it that there is an essential magnificence that is as grand and beautiful as anything large or seemingly phenomenal. Even in the simple, there is perfection.

— Eric Whitacre

Sung Texts

Eternity in an Hour
by Eric Whitacre
Text by William Blake (“Auguries of Innocence,” c. 1803)

I. To see a World
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. 

II. In a Grain of Sand
In a Grain of Sand 

III. And a Heaven
And a Heaven

IV. In a Wild Flower
In a Wild Flower 

V. Hold Infinity
Hold Infinity
VI. In the palm of your hand
In the palm of your hand

VII. And Eternity
[Wordless]

VIII. In an hour
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.