Liner Note to the Premiere Recording, by Russell Platt:

The cycle Love Songs (1984-87) was premiered on April 29, 1988 by soprano Carol Chickering and pianist Robert Kopelson at CAMI Hall in New York City, on a concert of Perpetuum Mobile, a new music series Hagen ran throughout the 1980's. The texts Hagen chose are all contemporary but for William Blake's Ah! Sun-Flower, but its inclusion sets the tone for the cycle: this is truly a voyage from innocence into experience, with the McFall Sonnet a grand postlude. The set is inscribed as a gift "for Ned Rorem, on his 63rd birthday," but it is as much a declaration of independence as a tribute to an older master. How appropriate that the cycle's opening flourish in I Am Loved should take off from the motif which opens The Dancer, the last song of Rorem's great cycle The Nantucket Songs. Hagen's chordal pattern is a different one, but the debt is clear; Hagen contrasts repetitions and developments of the motif with quieter sections in warm, patient harmony, and brings it back triumphantly at the close. Hagen's text, a diary entry of his mother's, is all optimism, the fervent love of a young marriage; the final, parlando exclamation is a kind of signature appropriate to this confidential message.

The Little Uneasy Song of poet Reine Hauser (its dedicatee) is marked 'Drowsy,' and Hagen sets the scene with an ostinato -- an effective symbol for nature's indifference to the poet's ruminations -- and with a cozy scheme of third-related triads dominating the harmonic fabric. The song opens up in the middle section, the piano moving faster while the voice/protagonist sings in broader, grander gestures; her defense of romantic innocence ("I just want to hear the sun's sweet sound") is genuinely touching. Blake's Ah! Sun-Flower is deceptively friendly, an accompaniment pattern of freely constructed open fourths and fifths clouding the G major harmony until the close.

A mood of encroaching gloom is heightened in the next three songs. Lost Love and Requiem are highly physical love poems, fashioned in the strangely evocative high-school English of Ze'ev Dunei, an Israeli news cameraman whom Hagen met at Yaddo. The first features a subtle development of C minor and E major tonalities while the second is directly bitonal, with a constant mixture of E and B flat major triads, joined in its opening piano gesture. (This tritonal clash was a major structural element of Hagen's opera Shining Brow, where it symbolized the conflict between the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his lover Mamah Cheney.) Both offer generously sensual word setting -- the low plunge on 'big water,' the drawn out rhythms of remembrance still smelling 'the fresh coffee' -- and trace a formal method which Hagen will use not only in the concluding 'Sonnet' but in the Merrill Songs: telling a story in song by way of a miniaturized strophic technique, in which phrase sections have similar beginnings but varied developments. The centerpiece of this group, Sarah Gorham's Washing Her Hair, has a casual, conversational feel, but we are gradually made aware of illness, a family scene loving but tense. The vocal part moves in close intervals and is highly syllabic in word setting, while Hagen's accompaniment is sketched in warm, jazz-inflected extended triads.

The Satyr, to another Gwen Hagen text, is an intermezzo, rough and fast: the young bride's optimism has collapsed into a mood of biting satire. Hagen instructs the pianist to play "atop the keys," in the manner of a prancing debauch, and the harmony is astringent, except for a delicious and deliberate eleventh-chord cliche. With all hope lost, the final Sonnet asks, How are we to live? Fully, Hagen and McFall respond, no matter what. The tempo scheme and the carefully timed double climax suggest a three-part form, but the song is actually through-composed in that Hagen takes his opening piano idea into ever more interesting developments. What starts as sexy seventh-chord Poulenc ends up being infected with the sumptuous Straussian disease of dissonant polytonality -- Germanic shame and French savoir-faire uneasily coexist. In the cycle's final bars major triads descend from above in the manner of Der Rosenkavalier, but the sweetness is mixed with pain, as an A sharp (B flat) poisons the E major close, struggling to the last.

— Russell Platt, 1997

Introduction to the 2012 Edition, by Carol Kimball:

Love Songs was given its first performance by soprano Carol Chickering and pianist Robert Kopelson at CAMI Hall in New York City, April 29, 1988 in a concert of Perpetuum Mobile, a new music series Hagen headed up throughout the 1980s. There are eight songs in the work; it might be termed a cycle, since the songs are loosely knit together by a common theme that runs through all the poems and is delineated in the title: love in numerous guises. Russell Platt has termed it “a voyage from innocence to experience.”6

Hagen shaped this collection by selecting eight songs from many of the early songs he had composed. It originally existed as a group for female voice and piano, but Hagen later set the cycle for cello and piano. The cycle’s range covers almost two complete octaves, with a great deal of the tessitura lying in the middle register. 7 As with Echo’s Songs, this cycle is a collection of wide ranging poetry. Two of the poems are by Hagen’s mother, Gwen Hagen. Other texts are by Reine Hauser, William Blake, Ze’ev Dunei, Sarah Gorham, and Gardner McFall.

The text for the first song, I am Loved is a diary entry by Hagen’s mother. Hagen initiates the song with a fanfare-like flourish, which returns seven times in the song, slightly changed towards the end. This figure is quoted from the last song of Ned Rorem’s The Nantucket Songs. 8 Hagen dedicated this cycle to Rorem on his sixty-third birthday. The first vocal line follows the piano with its own fanfare, leaping upward exuberantly, but reverts tenderly to a quiet moment before becoming animated again. The final vocal phrase is parlando, an intimate confidence.  

Little Uneasy Song is marked “Drowsy.” Hagen achieves this mood by using two different ostinato figures in the piano. As is usual with almost all his songs, Hagen has the ability to create a song from a musical figure from which he grows a fully formed piece. Because of the construction of the ostinati and the interplay between vocal line and piano, we are not aware of the ostinati as such. They simply create a full and lovely texture over which the poetic figures unfold. 

Ah! Sun-Flower is a delightful setting, full of blurry tonality, as Hagen uses open fourths and fifths coupled with a busy eighth note figure in the piano. The voice merrily travels on its way, modulating from G major to F major and back again, but the final dénouement for piano and voice to rest together in a G major triad is withheld until the final measure.

Lost Love is a series of sensual memories—all that is left of an amorous liaison. Hagen’s setting is one of simplicity for both voice and piano. A continuing pattern of moving eighth notes in the piano keeps the stream of consciousness flowing. 

Washing Her Hair is one of those tricky texts that begins simply enough, morphing into something quite different. We witness a warmly intimate situation, but are suddenly made aware that something serious is taking place. Illness is present in the family. Hagen’s musical delineation of the story as it unfolds is dramatically and beautifully realized. We are drawn into the moment almost without knowing it.

Requiem is another physical remembrance akin to Lost Love. Again, the text evokes memories of a dead relationship. Hagen heightens the poetic images using bitonality, juxtaposing E and B-flat major triads. The clashing harmonies perfectly illustrate the anguish beneath Dunei’s words. This setting is a wonderful example of Hagen’s use of a small rhythmic figure to generate an entire song, its harmonic structure providing variety as well as unity. 

The Satyr of Greek mythology becomes an analogy for a lover/husband. The poem chronicles the transformation of a provocative, charismatic figure into a prosaic, rather boring individual. The joyous memories of early marriage have disintegrated into disillusionment. Hagen directs the pianist to play “atop the keys” to suggest the satyr’s dance-like movements.

Sonnet. The last song is a poem by Gardner McFall, who would create the libretto for Hagen’s sixth opera, Amelia (2010). Here, love is seen as the saving grace, the thing that makes it possible for the human journey to continue. Again, Hagen uses the opening material in the piano as the glue that ties the song together, but transforms and develops it to create variety of texture and sustain forward movement.  This song is the “summing up” of the songs that have gone before, and its hopeful mood and broad lyricism ties up the collection in an eloquent manner.

Love Songs is an imaginative collection of texts. The poetic mood of each is sustained throughout by Hagen’s musical settings, which also expose the interior heart of each poem. Like Echo’s Songs and Love Songs are full of crystallized moments, presented in stylish settings and both works contain seeds that continued to develop and flower in Hagen’s later works.

—© Carol Kimball, December, 2010