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Programme Note

In 1965, on the eve of my marriage, I wrote a set of five songs for soprano and piano based on the poetry of five poets whom I then greatly admired; William Carlos Williams, Frost, Dickenson, Roethke, and Rilke. The Rilke song, which sat in the middle of that cycle, had always been my favorite and when I was asked by the Da Capo players for a small contribution to their 20th Anniversary Concert, it seemed to offer an excellent opportunity to embellish it with a modest instrumental setting to see whether it might benefit from a richer instrumental environment.

My memory of my feelings 25 years ago, when first encountering this English translation of Rilke’s poem “On Nights Like This,” was the sense of haunting that permeates these eerie lines of grief – ghostly projections of a dead girl’s unrealized destiny by her brother. The most striking aspect of these brief few lines’ pervasively strange and ironic outlook, for me, was the poet’s projection of an utterly normal yet impossible “suitor’s” courtship of a “lovely” sister whom he perhaps never knew and yet whose death he cannot accept.

This instrumental transcription is affectionately dedicated to the players of Da Capo and Lucy Shelton.

--Stephen Albert