The Heart of the Stranger (1986)

Song Cycle for Voice and Piano (or) Twelve Instruments

  • Version 1: low voice and piano

  • Version 2: low voice and 21 players (2fls.altofl.2obs.enghn.2clars.bassclar.3bns / 3hns.3tps / hp.vib.mar / db)

Duration: 21’

Movement Titles: Symmetry | Evening Twilight | It Weeps in My Heart | To Nobodaddy | Dawlish Fair | Under the Night Sky | O, When I Was in Love With You | An Irony | Specimen Case | Song

Text: Andrei Codrescu, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, William Blake, John Keats, Kim Roberts, A.E. Houseman, Gwen Hagen, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke (E)

First Performances:

  • Version 1: (voice and piano) 11 June 1999 / Ham Concert Hall, Las Vegas, Nevada / Paul Kreider, baritone / Daron Hagen, piano

  • Version 2: (21 players) Premiere: 20 September 1999 / Baylor University Concert Hall, Waco, Texas / Paul Kreider, baritone / The Baylor Wind Ensemble / Michael Haithcock

Dedication: "To Paul Kreider."

Publisher: Carl Fischer | Purchase Sheet Music | Rent Parts for 21 Player Version

Recording:

Daron Hagen and Paul Kreider, June 15, 1999, Las Vegas, NV. p/c: Rebecca Kreider

Program Note:   

The Heart of the Stranger was compiled over the course of many years and first performed as a cycle by Paul Kreider, accompanied by the composer, on the Arsis CD Love in a Life (CD119) on 11 June 1999 in the Ham Concert Hall on the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus.

Symmetry was composed in New York City on 16 April 1999 especially to begin the group. Evening Twilight was composed on 23 February 1989. The words are adapted from the seventh and eigth paragraphs of the prose poem. It is dedicated to painter Rosamund Casey.

It Weeps in My Heart was composed as a gift to Robin Leebardt the day before I wrote the Baudelaire. A line of Arthur Rimbaud is used as a subtitle: "It rains softly in the city." The translation of Paul Verlaine is my own.

The setting of William Blake's rueful poem To Nobodaddy was composed on 16 June 1999 in New York City as a musical greeting to my godson, Emerson Rhoads, on the day of his birth.

John Keats' Dawlish Fair, a quatrain that originates in a letter written to John Rice from Teignmouth on 25 March 1818, is earthy and, by contemporary standards, unsettling in its very male High Romanticism. I chose it for that reason when I set it on 8 August 1990, dedicating it to composer Paul Moravec. The Keats is followed by a setting of Washington poet Kim Roberts'  

Under the Night Sky, which I composed at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on 26 July 1991. It is dedicated to composer David Del Tredici, who accompanied me in its first performance the same evening for the poet.

My brother Kevin and I premiered O, When I Was in Love With You at the Morphy Recital Hall on the University of Wisconsin Campus, in Madison, Wisconsin, on 18 January 1980, a few days after I confected it.

Gwen Hagen's entry in her journal from 1951, An Irony was composed on 16 May 1999 and is dedicated to tenor Barry Busse.

I first set Walt Whitman's Specimen Case in the Barber-Menotti studio at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia on 27 September 1983. A decade later, I recycled the piano part as the accompaniment to Frank Lloyd Wright's searing final aria in Shining Brow. Theodore Roethke's Song was composed expressly to close the cycle on 18 May 1999 in New York City.