Description
Dissolvere by Paul Burnell.
Composed 2020 for piano with optional instruments in three parts and optional drone.
Duration: 6.00 approx.
Optional: drone on D4 from beginning, stopping at end of bar 96. Suggested drone instruments include - violas, 'cellos playing a natural harmonic, organ, synthesised strings, wine glasses.
In a large ensemble, those instruments which cannot easily play quietly may be positioned 'off-stage' - as if playing in the distance.
Programme note:
Dissolvere is an Italian verb, borrowed from Latin, meaning to dissolve, dissipate, disperse or fade away.
Excerpts from 'Ode to a Nightingale' written by John Keats in 1819:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
The English poet John Keats was born in London in 1795 and died in Rome in 1821.