PROGRAM NOTE
Gaius Valerius Catullus (84-54 B.C.) was the first great epigrammatist in the Latin language. Drawing heavily on Greek models, Catullus created a literary genre that is characterized by brevity, pithiness, and immediacy. Epigrammatic poetry, in contrast to more elevated genres of Roman poetry, seeks to describe everyday life. The poems of Catullus are by turns tender, humorous, mournful, and even abusive and obscene. In Catullan Epigrams I have attempted to express musically Catullus’ poetic meters. In contrast to English verse, which is based on stress accent, Classical Latin verse is quantitative. That is, it represents a succession of short and long syllables. In setting these texts, I have attempted as much as possible to preserve the relationship between short and long, while still maintaining the normal stress accent of each word. The rhythm of the music, in other words, follows the rhythm of the poetry. For the sake of variety, I chose poems in three different meters. The first movement, featuring solo soprano, alternates between the stylized birdsong heard at the opening and homophonic sections in which the poem is declaimed. These latter sections represent perhaps the most straightforward presentation of the poetic meter found in any of the movements. Incidentally, the “sparrow” which the poem addresses is often interpreted to be taken as a double-entendre. The second movement, an abusive comic piece (though quite tame compared with some of Catullus’ other poems), is particularly rich in text painting, for the poem is full of vivid imagery—the old bridge, the muddy lake, the young bride, etc. The “Colonia” Catullus addresses likely refers to a township in the vicinity of Verona, the poet’s hometown. This community, situated in a marshy area, evidently had an old, rotting causeway across a swamp. Catullus uses the poem to abuse an older man who neglects his young wife. The third movement is a setting of Catullus’ moving funeral epigram for his brother. The rhythms here are not as strongly beholden to the poetic meter as they are in the other movements, and much of the musical texture is based on Renaissance music. On the words quae more parentum (“the custom of our ancestors”) there is a brief quotation of a passage from the Renaissance motet Nymphes des bois, Josquin des Prez’ great funeral tribute for Johannes Ockeghem.