At That Hour When All Things Have Repose is the inspiration for the album’s title and the first of my Ten Poems of James Joyce in this art song recital. A soft, rubato melody rises above the opening bass octave. The emphasis on the monosyllables establishes the text’s iambic rhythm. But the effect is a slowing of the tempo, thus achieving the “repose” intimated in the first line. “Play on, invisible harps, unto love” is emphasized by corresponding arpeggios in the piano, mimicking a harp. After a dramatic sweep to high C-flat, the soprano line, beautifully rendered by Danielle, descends back to a condition of repose. 

In 1917, James Joyce suffered a sudden and painful attack of lumbago while walking along Bahnhofstrasse, the chic main street in Zurich, Switzerland. His condition was compounded by increasing blindness due to glaucoma. Bahnhofstrasse underscores Joyce’s angst as he discovers youth is fleeting. Yet, being middle-aged, he realizes he’s not old enough to benefit from the "old heart's wisdom" that comes in the autumn of life. The musical language is minimalist and meditative, composed of repeating cycles of broken chords in the accompaniment that reiterate a simple, eerie motif as the melody floats wistfully above. 

The existential theme continues in On the Beach at Fontana, which recalls an excursion that Joyce and his young son took on the Adriatic coast. It evokes the experience of paternal love, most especially the fear that would come with losing the boy. Agitato sixteenth notes in the accompaniment mimic the father’s fast-beating heart. Halfway through the piece, the soprano line strikes us with a series of dissonant tritones. Danielle adds a steely surety to these gorgeous dissonances as she renders the lines, “Around us fear, descending, Darkness of fear above.” 

Just as On the Beach at Fontana evokes the poet’s love for his son, Simples captures his affection for his daughter as she gathers herbs in a garden in Trieste. It’s a lighthearted interlude before delving back to a more wistful theme. Alone conjures the image of a lazy, solitary evening. But a sensual thought enters, provoking “A swoon of shame.” Danielle masterfully sustains the word shame over six measures as it disappears into the nothingness of a faint hum. Flood dwells upon frustrated desire in a tone that is almost vain but always bombastic. Kerry appropriately evokes a hint of Eros in “Love’s full flood, Lambent and vast.” 

Strings in the Earth and Air is a tender hymn of nature with impressionist overtones. The song’s sultry vocal line emerges from a progression of minor and dominant ninth chords in this jazz-inspired rendering of Joyce’s verse. Replete with ecclesiastical imagery, Night Piece is a reverent, if not haunting portrait of “night’s sin-dark nave.” With its soaring melody, the music swells into a tender exultation of the night sky. Joyce’s characteristic neologisms abound. A “star-knell” tolls as “upsoaring” clouds surge “voidward,” high above the “adoring waste of souls.” 

Tutto è sciolto (“All is lost now”) is taken from an aria in the second act of La Sonnambula (“The Sleepwalker”), an opera by Vincenzo Bellini, one of Joyce’s favorite operatic composers. The aria is sung by Elvino who is distraught by the discovery of his fiancée, Amina, in Count Rodolfo’s bedroom, which she entered while sleepwalking. The title hints at the emotional turmoil of a failed seduction of a young girl Joyce once knew. 

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight completes the Joyce cycle. It underscores the anguish of aging and achieves its clarity of expression through its precise images. The “Players in the Mirror” likely refers to the English Players, a Zurich-based amateur theatrical company with which Joyce was involved during World War I. 

Questa fiamma (“This Flame”) is the prelude of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, my rhapsody for voice and orchestra, adapted from the poem by T.S. Eliot and composed for Danielle. The text consists of six lines from Dante's Inferno, which Eliot uses as an epigraph. The condemned soul of Guido da Montefeltro—now a tongue of flame in the eighth circle of hell— confesses all he knows, mistakenly assuming it would be impossible for Dante to betray his confession to the living. Sung in the original Italian, it is musically rendered as a sarabande, a slow, stately dance in triple meter. 

When two of our dearest friends decided to marry, I wrote Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa (“Love and the gentle heart are one and the same”) as my wedding gift to them. The ceremony was in Florence, Italy on March 4, 2020, just before the world began to lock down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. What better text could I set than a love sonnet from La vita nuova by Dante, the revered Florentine poet? Danielle and Kerry’s heartfelt performance during the wedding reminded us that fear is not the most powerful emotion. 

The first piece I wrote for Kerry is A Dream. It’s a setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s sonnet of the same name, and it expresses a profound yearning for a love long lost. It is, at once, emotive and melancholic. 

The Mount and Fragrance are settings of poems by New York-based poet Mark Riddles in which he recasts familiar biblical passages in the sensory language of sight, in the case of The Mount, and smell, in Fragrance. The cycle was commissioned in 2015 by The Casement Fund, which supports new directions in creative writing, especially in connection with the other arts. 

The Mount draws its inspiration from the mystical vision of the Transfiguration recounted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Phrygian dominant scales evoke the distinctively exotic sounds heard in Middle Eastern musical traditions and Jewish liturgical chants. Using the melodic themes established in The Mount, Fragrance presents olfactory images of rising incense and flower blossoms combined with Lazarus raised from the dead to symbolize the human journey from the profane to the sacred, mortality to incorruptibility. 

Shir Hashirim (“Song of Songs”) is the third movement of Kohelet, my cantata in five movements for mixed chorus, soloists and orchestra. A setting of Song of Songs, this duet for soprano and bass-baritone combines lush, modal melodies and colorful harmonic textures with a reduction for piano. My wife Lauren, a Hebrew speaker and linguist by training, transliterated the gorgeous Biblical Hebrew text for me. 

With Requiescat (“May She Rest”), I heard the blues a-calling me. The text by Oscar Wilde expresses his feelings of grief that accompanied his sister’s death two months before her tenth birthday. I rendered Wilde’s memoriam with a blues stride accompaniment, reminiscent of my arrangement of Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday. The subtitle—A “Wilde” Stride—is most apropos. 

In the weeks leading up to recording, Kerry experimented with the closing line. It’s a jazzy, downward progression of four dominant ninth chords accompanying four syllables, Re-qui-es-cat. When the Eureka! moment struck, Kerry was all jazz hands. “You’ve got to think Kelsey Grammer,” he explained, “Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs!”

-Henry Dehlinger