The Garden of the Heart

The inspiration for The Garden of the Heart was a description of a paradise garden from the thirty-fourth night of the Thousand and One Nights. I had used this description before in the novel Ariadne, where I had copied it out in swirling arabesques. This time the description became the basis for a narrative: a woman has returned to the garden where she and her lover used to meet, knowing she will die there, and beseeching her lover to return one last time to listen to her voice in the dancing water of the fountain.

The Garden of the Heart was written for Maureen Forrester, who was, by this time, past her prime, but would, I hoped, give the vocal line just the right touch of senescence to stimulate sympathy – in the same way as the declining voice of Julius Patzak singing Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde resulted in a better recording of that decadent work than any other made since.

I first composed the vocal line from beginning to end. I intended the accompaniment to consist entirely of the same material with the instruments anticipating and recalling phrases sung by the singer, overlapping and underweaving like the arabesques of Persian art. I wanted the score to shimmer like a garden full of flowers and birds and fountains, surging forward to greet the singer then hesitating and falling back to make room for other voices. The orchestration of this piece is one of the most delicate and sensuous I ever achieved. The work was written over the summer of 1980 when the birds in Monteagle Valley were at their most joyful, and the evening air was filled with the scent of the earth. R. Murray Schafer