Programme Notes

In late 2018, just before I started my Masters Degree at Trinity Laban, I was introduced to Kerry Firth - a most fine soprano. As the academic year progressed and we got to know each other better, we discussed my writing a song for her, and this is the result.

The year 2018-19 saw me creating two different settings of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but both were derived from the collection Sonnets of the Portuguese. In this setting, I attempted to capture the intensity of feeling that poet, then known as Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, was feeling for her future husband, the poet Robert Browning. This intensity was amplified due to her knowing that her tyrranical father would disapprove of the couple's relationship. In the end, the couple married, and both poets went on to be very successful.

The music has a central theme which is referred to several times in the piece, and the stability of the harmony changes as the song progresses. On the repeated utterances of "I love thee", the harmony moves into many different key centres, before reaching a climax at "I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life".