On the Beach at Night (2017)
For Bass-Baritone, Cello, and Piano
Duration: 12’
Text: Walt Whitman (E)
First Performance: 9 March 2018 / Augustana College, Rock Island, IL / Seth Keeton, baritone / Karl Knapp, cello / Lara Bolton, piano
Dedication: “Commissioned by Seth Keeton”
Publisher: Peermusic Classical
Program Note:
On the Beach at Night is a scena that tracks one father’s efforts to reconcile the moral and ethical responsibilities of parenthood with the clear understanding that the child has been born into an era of rising fascism and impending war. Accordingly, Hagen’s treatment of the Whitman text seethes with anguish, as though he was setting Auden, or T.S. Eliot. The music’s emotionally intense, broad, multi-stylistic range—from the hyper-romantic, Othmar Schoek-ian descriptive sections (most clear in the climactic, operatic treatment of the word “weeping”), to the emotionally cool, Britten-esque modernity of the extended parlando sections (as the singer thinks aloud) and the harmonically easeful, tenderly lyrical sections (in the descriptions of the child and the stars), position the piece firmly among Hagen’s emotionally and psychologically complex operatic treatments. There is little or no consolation in this brooding and pensive work, which joins Hagen’s settings of The Bixby Letter and We Few in its exploration of men caught in extremely difficult situations.
Stands a little child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And night at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.
From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring moons shall again shine.
Something there is,
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than the sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
WALT WHITMAN