At once sensual and existential, this collection of songs—composed across 125 years—meditates on nature and nostalgia, sex and love, the ephemerality of the human spirit, and the eternal, transformative power of art. These song cycles of Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, George Crumb, and Robert Spano coalesce into a testament to the limitless potency and fragility of love—both its resplendent joys and its tender sorrows. Despite love’s transience and riskiness, the album compels us to ruminate on Rilke’s witticism that “for one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…’’ Each of the cycles presents us with existential questions of life and death, love and loss, but the album is structured in couplets. Debussy and Spano draw upon Ancient Greece, Grieg and Crumb draw upon enchantments of nature, the temporality of love, life, and memory. Claude Debussy’s ethereal Chansons de Bilitis (1899) evokes a lusty, Grecian fever dream where the tumescence of love and desire comes to the fore. Robert Spano’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2020) lends voice to Rilke’s enigmatic eponymous poetry. Spano’s setting of the songs—the intimate conversation between piano and soprano—“draws one voice out of two separate strings.” Meanwhile, George Crumb’s Three Early Songs (1947) emerge as whispered secrets, darkly-hued odes to impermanent nature—night, a flower, and wind. The songs lead us to ponder the difference between the actual and the seeming. Chansons de Bilitis is a sensual, sultry tease in more ways than one. The poetry penned by Pierre Louÿs is a literary forgery. Louÿs, in an introduction to his original poems, claimed that the verses were found in the tomb of a sixth-century (fictional) poetess named Bilitis. She was made out to be a contemporary of Sappho and the poems were written as pastiches in the style of Sapphic erotism. This deception only fueled the work’s popularity. And although Debussy only sets three poems, Louÿs wrote 143 poems separated into three volumes that span scenes of pastoral youth (Book I: Bucoliques en Pamphylie), to burgeoning Lesbian—referring both to same-sex attraction and to acts associated with the isle of Lesbos—sexuality (Book II: Élégies à Mytilène), and to life as a courtesan at the employ of Aphrodite (Book III: Epigrammes dans l’île de Chypre). In this way, maturation narratives—bildungsroman—form a motif throughout this album. Louÿs was inspired by sex tourism, to be blunt. At the insistence of friend and fellow writer, André Gide, Louÿs traveled to Algeria to indulge in sensual exoticism (and orientalism). A young Arab woman, Meriem, had come highly recommended by Gide who wrote of her and her music as something that “stupefied me like an opiate” as it “drowsily and voluptuously benumbed my thoughts.” Meriem would become the muse for Chansons, which Louÿs began to draft in Algeria; the dedication of the collection reads “in memory of Meriem ben Atala.” The turn of the twentieth century was rife with literary and musical games—anagrams, witticisms, forgeries, and puns. Louÿs even includes a fake scholar in the introduction to his work named G. Heim, meaning “mysterious” in German. And the title seems to me to be a play on words suggesting the feebleness, the feeblemindedness, débilité (de Bilitis) of love, sex, and the trickery of artistry. Exoticism too was par for the fin de siècle course—just think of the Orientalism of Delibes’s Lakmé (1883), Ravel’s Shéhérazade (1898/1902), and Debussy’s own “Pagodas” from his piano suite, Estampes (1903). Each piece relies on coded musical identifiers that suggest otherness—nonconventional percussion instruments, incessant and layered rhythms, and sonic chinoiserie. For those sonic elements, Louÿs called upon his dear friend, Debussy, to orchestrate music to underscore his poetry. Debussy complained that the turnaround time was too short. Nevertheless, he was hard up and needed the money. Debussy took to Louÿs’s manuscript for inspiration despite having written that “music and poetry are two songs that search in vain to accord with one another, and even in their very rare cases where they are in accord, have the effect of a bad pun.” The first song, “La Flûte de Pan,” Bilitis is learning to play the syrinx or pan flute. This would have been a sensible and efficient choice for Debussy who was coming on the heels of his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which foregrounds the flute in reference to the Greek myth of the nymph Syrinx. Pan, a forest demi-god, awakes from a nap and pursues the nymph Syrinx. Syrinx who is sworn to remain chaste, flees. In fleeing, she runs past a river and implores the water nymphs to turn her into a strand of reeds. As Pan reaches for her, she transfigures into a reed and Pan is left clutching her reed-body. He sighs and his breath passing over the stems produces a sorrowful melody. He cuts the reeds and makes an instrument (Pan’s flute), content to possess the nymph as if in melody if not embodied. But here the song tells of a naïve exploration of breathwork and sensual allusions to what Julie McQuinn calls the “erotic power of the syrinx, [and] its ability to seduce with its floating melody.” Debussy achieves this suspended sensuality by relying on Greek modes (altered musical scales) that enchant and morph hypnotically from one idea to the next. “La Chevelure” (“Tresses of Hair”) depicts two lovers’ bodies becoming one—“gradually it seemed to me, so intertwined were our limbs, that I was becoming you, or you were entering into me like a dream.” It builds chromatically, tempo ever-increasing, there’s a fervency to love-making where bodies entwine, dissimilate, and dissolve into each other. The Chansons cycle ends with “Le Tombeau des Naïades” (The Tomb of the Naiads) which continues to tease out the symbolic imagery of locks of hair. Only now, the world has frozen over, life is bleak and the piano embodies, as Steven Rumph suggests, “Bilitis’s fragile state of mind, the indeterminate, directionless harmonies and the static repetitions of the cycling ostinato aptly portraying the numb aimlessness of her trek.” What has become of life? How is one to continue having lost—momentarily or indefinitely—their identity in the name of love? Grieg’s Haugtussa (Fairy Maid) is based on Arne Garborg’s 1895 poetic epic. Although Grieg only makes use of eight of Garborg’s poems, he sketched a more expansive version of the nationalistic epic. It was, at one point, to include a choir in a setting akin to a folk cantata. What we are left with, instead, is a distilled peek into the heart and mind of a young woman who lusts after a townsman. It tells of a young woman with the gift of second sight; she sees animal auras of those around her and communes with the deceased. She sings of wrestling bears, battling foxes, ripping wolves from limb to limb, and yet it is the pain of heartbreak—caused by an unfaithful boy—that sullies her spirit. Grieg’s eight songs center on pubescent attraction and latent desire—from childlike flirtation, to the he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not of desire, to entrancing fantasies of nocturnal bliss, and eventual disillusionment. Grieg himself wrote that “Haugtussa is a masterwork, full of originality, simplicity, and depth and possessing a quite indescribable richness of color.” That color is evident in the whimsical curlicues and harp-like filigree in the piano, resolutions that allude to the longing and desire of Tristan und Isolde, and the peasantry of open fifths in “Killingdans” (“Little Goats’ Dance”). The poems are bookended by an incantation and an elegy. The opening seduction spell, evoked by the twinkling of the piano and bleary Impressionist accompaniment, frames the tension between reality and desire. The young girl claims dominion over both realms and declares, “You will be mine.” But by the end, the young maiden is left only with a wistful envy of nature told through a pastoral elegy. She laments the fact that the babbling brook roams free and is immune to heartache. The river’s endless flow is tempered by the girl’s resigned Liebestod—love’s death—on its banks. Debussy draws upon nature to illustrate the human experience, so does George Crumb. Here, nature, comes to the fore as a force in itself. The songs, composed as a high schooler in 1947, introspects on the mysteries of existence. As early works they lack the signature idiosyncrasies that have come to be associated with Crumb—extended techniques, graphic notation, extreme dissonance. Instead, we see a composer who is steeped in the art song tradition, a young composer who cut his teeth on Debussy and Bartók. The pithy cycle sets three songs—one by the English Romantic poet, Robert Southey (1774-1843) and two by American poet and Pulitzer Prize recipient, Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). The first song, “Night,” depicts a moment of sublimity—awestruck at the expansiveness of the sky. Ravelesque piano gestures shimmer and evoke a nocturnal aura. “Let it be Forgotten,” explores ideas of memory and memorialization. How lasting is the impact of life? We come to understand just how impermanent a human’s legacy is—only nature will subsist. Existence is ephemeral. “Wind Elegy,” continues with themes of loss and mourning. After death, the world continues. The sun shines, birds mate, the wind blows. Yet here, touchingly, the wind acknowledges the dead, for the body has now transgressed from the living into the realm of perpetual nature. Death is the moment when the body becomes most natural. Brief and fleeting was life, as transient as a zephyr. Deep existential musings are most abstractly brought forth in the Sonnets to Orpheus by Robert Spano, based on poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. Known for his mystical, metaphysical abstraction—albeit evocative—Rilke’s poetry carries a sense of spiritual yearning that seeks transcendence beyond the physical realm. The incorporation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus here “rhyme” with the Chansons de Bilitis. Both draw upon Grecian mythological tropes, nature, transformative episodes, and the power of art. Robert Spano composed the Sonnets during the COVID-19 pandemic, between May and July 2020. It was a way of creating community working alongside Kelley O’Connor. The two created an artistic “pod,” where they discussed the intricacies of setting Rilke for mezzo-soprano, while adhering to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) health constraints. Rilke provided a way of meditating on and mediating the role of music in a world where everything had suddenly halted, where the future of art was unknown. Pessimistically, for much of the world, COVID-19 was a moment to confront one’s own liminal and transient existence. Optimistically, Spano and O’Connor birthed a new cycle that looked ahead to a post-pandemic premiere. It is telling that of the 55 original sonnets that Rilke penned, Spano selected only five—“A Tree Arose. O pure transcendence!” “A God Can do it;” “Breathing, you invisible poem!” “Hail to the Spirit that Can Connect Us;” and “Silent Friend of the Many Distances.” Taken as a whole, the songs suggest the power of art to overcome, to provide meaning, and to reaffirm being. They become an affirmation of life and a testimony of the living. The central poem seems to play on the concept of breath and breathing—terms that carry special weight during the airborne transmission of COVID-19—to reify the interconnectedness of human life. How could an act as innocent as breathing be recodified to induce anxiety? And yet, it is this same breath that leads to the connection of souls, the connection of souls to nature, and as Rilke writes, the “breath of the invisible poem” that is life. — Marcus R. Pyle, Ph.D. (2025)