flower, forget me (2022) 14'

program note

flower, forget me was commissioned by Konzerthaus Dortmund, for the baritone Benjamin Appl, specifically to go on a program with Schubert’s great song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin.

I am not sure that they knew it when they asked me, but Die Schöne Müllerin is one of my favorite pieces. Die Schöne Müllerin is an act of radical storytelling, completely ahead of its time in subtlety and complexity, whose radical nature is hidden from our sight by the emotional narrative and the beautiful tunes.

One interesting fact is that Schubert didn’t set to music all of the poems in the original cycle, by the poet Wilhelm Müller. He left out a few, and my first thought for this piece was to set some of the missing poems to new music. On re-reading them, one of these un-set poems immediately jumped out at me— Blümlein Vergißmein (The Flower Forget-me).

In this poem, which appears near the end of the cycle, the young miller hides in the forest, throwing himself on the ground in despair, describing the flowers that could match the darkness that he feels all around him. Then I began to remember the flowers in other texts that Schubert set to music—the flowers with which Death tempts the boy in Der Erlkönig, the creepy boy tormenting a rose in Heidenröslein, etc., and of course all the flower imagery in those Schöne Müllerin poems that Schubert did set.

Flowers show up a lot in the texts that Schubert used, as they did in much Romantic era poetry. Flowers are the perfect metaphor for futility and death—seeing their fragile, bright, short lives might make us think of our own. I began to wonder how many of Schubert’s songs engaged this kind of imagery. I went alphabetically in the German through every single Schubert song text and compiled every instance of when a flower is mentioned as a reminder of our mortality. All told, I have used excerpts from 33 songs, translating them very roughly and trimming them into a single text. And then I set to music the Müller poem that Schubert didn’t set.

This is the same process I used to make the text for my piece death speaks, in which the libretto is made out of all the moments in Schubert song texts when Death speaks to us, directly, in words.

I would like to thank Benjamin Appl and Konzerthaus Dortmund for asking me to do this project. Not only is it a tremendous honor, but it is also meaningful to me personally, as my grandfather Max Atlas lived in Dortmund in the years before the First World War. After the war he moved to Düsseldorf, met my Grandmother, and they settled in Wuppertal.