ECHO (2010)

INSTRUMENTATION

High Voice, Piano

DURATION

6 minutes

TEXT

Come to me in the silence of the night;
   Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
   As sunlight on a stream;
      Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
   Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
   Where thirsting longing eyes
      Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
   My very life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
   Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
      Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

–Christina Rossetti

PROGRAM NOTE

Echo for high voice and piano was premiered by soprano Devon Hadsell and pianist Daniel Lessler in Ramo Hall at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on May 5, 2010.

19th-century English poet Christina Rossetti’s predilection for themes of spirituality, desire, and the power of memory is epitomized in her early work Echo, written at age 24. My setting of the text is ethereal and thick with mystical sonorities, suggesting a woman who, in vain, beckons a lost love, a connection she’s forever fated to experience in dreams alone.

– Jules Pegram (2010)