A Bouquet of Roses from Morten Lauridsen

Lauridsen and His Love of Poetry

Choral composers are always on the hunt for suitable texts. Unless you’re writing something along the lines of the “Humming Chorus” from Madame Butterly or Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” you have to find suitable words. As I’ve outlined in other material, choral texts can have many sources: You may be commissioned to write a piece with the proviso that you use a certain text, or you may love a certain poem and decide to set it to music, or you may have an idea for a melody and look for words that fit, or you may ask someone to write the text for you, or you may write it yourself.

For Morten Lauridsen there hasn’t been any question about where to find his texts: his deep love of poetry has led him to compose eight vocal cycles setting poetry drawn from a wide range of languages and time periods. He reads poetry every day, and back when he was teaching music classes at the University of South California he was famous for starting every class by reading a poem. He said in an interview that “I read so much poetry, and if I find a poem by a poet that interests me, then I’ll go out and buy his complete works, and read that. . . . The same thing happened with Rilke, and I was astonished to find that at the end of his life he wrote four hundred poems in French!  I had no idea of this because he’s so well known for the German poetry.”¹

Before I get to the poems that comprise Lauriden’s rose cycle, let me reiterate what I’ve said several times in these posts and will almost certainly say again: that poetry can’t be boiled down to a specific set of meanings. If you could just summarize a poem with a few sentences and get everything from the poem into those statements, what would be the point of writing the poem in the first place? This caveat is especially true in a discussion of lyric poetry, that is, poetry that doesn’t tell a story but instead evokes a mood or expresses an emotion. So it is with Rilke’s poems about roses: the flowers were favorites of his, with their layers of petals overlapping a hidden center. Note that I didn’t say roses were a favorite “symbol” for Rilke. The flowers don’t “stand for” something but are only themselves: beautiful and enigmatic, self-sufficient and yet inviting contemplation and appreciation. I ran across some excellent program notes that give this insight: “Of course, all of these texts are not merely naturalistic paeans, but love songs: as each rose bears its own personality, so does a lover.”²

Let’s get to the poems themselves. Note that I’m using my own translations for the poems, as I didn’t like any that I found online. Quelle effronterie, n’est-ce pas?

“En Une Seule Fleur“–“In One Sole Flower”

The lover thinks of the rose as being much more than it is. It’s an artifice, but the loved one is delighted and gives back a hundredfold, never doubting how the lover feels. (Little sidenote here, not to be taken as definitive about the poem itself but suggestive: Have you ever had a relationship in which the other person thought of you so highly that you felt drawn to fulfill that opinion? You always felt as if you were being challenged, in the most loving way possible, to be your best self?) The commentary cited above has this to say here: “The crux of the poem is that the rose is inherently generous in sharing its beauty.”

“Contre Qui, Rose?“–“Against Whom, Rose?”

Lauridsen describes this section as “a wistful nocturne,” probably referring to the dreamy and pensive tone of his music and not necessarily to the words of the poem, which are more agonized and pleading than dreamy. Why, the poet asks of the rose, do you have to be so defensive? Why are you so prickly? (Literally.) Why won’t you let your defenses down and accept my care and attention? Don’t you realize how much I have defended you from enemies who are totally unimpressed with your thorns? Instead, you wound me, the one who loves and defends you. I find the phrase “from summer into autumn” to be intriguing. Could Rilke be reminding the rose that its life is short, that it only blooms for a part of the year? (I’ve tended quite a few real roses in my time during that all-too-short blooming period, and believe me–they demand a lot of attention, and the thorns don’t help me in my efforts.)

“De ton rêve trop plein“–“Of your dream too full”

The dreaming rose is covered with dew, causing its stem to bow down towards the sun. But the dew dries and the flower expands in the morning light. What on earth are the “tender shapes between cheeks and breasts”? Blessed if I know for sure, but if you look at a picture of a woman (or if you are one yourself you can look in the mirror) and trace the line from cheek (perhaps right in front of the ear) down to the neck to the beginning of the breasts, you’re going to get a gentle curve not unlike the curve of a petal. Of course Rilke could have just said “those gentle curves of your petals” if that was all he meant. He is indeed feminizing the rose, but–let me emphasize once again–it’s still a rose. Just to be clear.

“La Rose Complète”–“The Perfect Rose”

The French word “complète” means “perfect.” You can imagine a rich red rose, fully open but without any withering or drooping petals or any missing ones. It’s at that peak that lasts only briefly. Rilke recognizes this quality of the flower, almost as if the flower has “being.” His awareness of the rose’s beauty unites his will and his heart, or his mind and emotions. Every part of him admires the rose; he is the rose’s “perfect friend” as the rose is his. We don’t have to say, “And so the rose stands for his beloved” or some twaddle like that. The rose is just itself.

I’m reminded of another brief poem about a flower, this one by Tennyson:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Flower in the Crannied Wall”)

If you could understand everything about just one thing, both of these poems are saying, you’d know everything about everything.

“Dirait-on”–“So they say”

“Dirait-on” is Lauridsen’s attempt at a French folk song, and he seems to have really liked the phrase “so they say,” or, perhaps more accurately, “one says,” using it as a chorus for his song. He wrote this piece first, and it became so popular that he decided to add four other poems to make up his cycle. To me that little two-word phrase seems almost unbearably poignant. The lover hears “them” say things about his beloved, and it’s sort of painful, if that makes sense. Do they really understand the rose as he does? Rilke’s lines praise the rose for its self-centeredness, or perhaps for its self-efficacy. Again, we don’t need to have the rose “stand for” something or someone else; it is simply itself. And it “invents the tale of Narcissus fulfilled.” This reference is to the myth about the young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and who then wasted away and died when he realized that his love could have no return. But the rose needs nothing to make itself complete, so, unlike Narcissus, it is “fulfilled,’ that is, totally self-sufficient. It puts a new spin on, or “invents,” the old story.

Videos

Below is a plethora of videos from which you may pick and choose according to your interest and time. First, one about Lauridsen’s views on poetry:

Then separate performance videos for each song:

Although this video doesn’t show the actual singers, the sound is great:

Next, an utterly charming video in which Lauridsen himself talks about how he composed “Dirait-On.” It has some interspersed choir singing and that video is low res and distorted, but the sound is great:

And then, just because I kind of thought that this song from Oklahoma has the same feeling as “Dirait-On”–people will talk!

One final note: I don’t do much if any musical analysis in these posts, but once in awhile I run into someone else’s material that I find helpful. If you’d like to read a short, clear description of the actual music Lauridsen wrote, I’d recommend this article:

“Morten Lauridsen, Les Chanson des Roses, 5 Songs for Chorus, Description by Thomas Oram“

© Debi Simons

1. Composer Morten Lauridsen: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie ↩︎
2. Emerald Ensemble “Flower Songs” October 2019 Program Notes and Translations by Gary D. Cannon ↩︎