Program Note:   

During the 1980s I would occasionally take high tea at the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to enjoy the place’s ambience and oddly lost-in-time feel. I always felt as though I was surrounded by lurid ghosts dancing to the insipid, blithely decadent salon fare—Gottschalk and Boulanger confections, Strauss waltzes and Herbert operatic paraphrases. There is an undercurrent of impending doom to these works, as though they were being performed by the tea band on the deck of a sinking ship.

Asked by Livia Sohn and Benjamin Loeb to provide an operatic paraphrase for a volume of opera fantasies (Naxos CD 8.573403) they were putting together, I provided Valse Blanche: How Love Comes, Tangiers, October 1958, a reworking of music from my opera A Woman in Morocco.

By turns lubricious, chaste, tormented, and torchy, the set of variations work through the two major themes in the opera, limning the doomed relationship between two lovers in a Tangiers pensione in October 1958. The violin takes the role of Lizzy, a young American journalist; the piano portrays Ahmed, the Moroccan major domo of the hotel. It may, of course, be the other way around.

Valse Blanche is part of a diptych which also includes Valse Noire: Assignation at the Palm Court, 28 June 1914, for cello and piano.