Questa fiamma (2017) - 3'
prelude to The Love Song o J. Alfred Prufrock
for soprano solo and piano
COMPOSER'S NOTE
Questa fiamma ("This Flame") is the prelude of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, my rhapsody for high voice and orchestra which I adapted from the poem by T.S. Eliot and composed for Metropolitan Opera soprano Danielle Talamantes.
The text consists of six lines from Dante's Inferno, which Eliot uses as an epigraph for his poem. In the epigraph, the condemned soul of Guido da Montefeltro—now a tongue of flame in the eighth circle of hell— agrees to confess what he knows to Dante, mistakenly assuming it would be impossible for Dante to betray his confession to the world of the living.
Sung in the original Italian, the epigraph is musically rendered as a sarabande, a slow, stately dance in triple meter. It is a prelude to the dramatic monologue that follows in which Prufrock, the protagonist of Eliot's poem, reveals with equal candor the burdens of his unmet desire.
I arranged this version with piano accompaniment especially for recital programming.
To learn more about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: A Rhapsody for Voice and Orchestra, which includes the full orchestra version of Questa fiamma, click here.
THE TEXT
S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
TRANSLATION
If I thought my answer was
To a person returning to the world,
This flame would cease to flicker.
But since from this abyss
No one ever returns alive, if what I hear is true,
Without fear of disgrace, I respond to you.
Dante Alighieri, 1265 - 1321
Inferno, Canto XXVII, Verses 61-66