Gitanjali

This joyful work for lyric soprano and orchestra is a setting of five of the poems from Rabindranath Tagore’s ecstatic collection entitled Gitanjali. I had set one of these poems, ‘Light, my light,’ in the original Bengali in the third movement of Lustro (1972). In fact I once had a recording of Tagore singing this and other songs from Gitanjali, but my settings are very different. Tagore translated Gitanjali into English, with help from W.B. Yeats and advice from Ezra Pound. The success of the English version won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913; he was the first non-European to win this prize, and when he heard the news he said, ‘So, they give it to a Hindu?’.

Of all my works for solo voice, Gitanjali is undoubtedly the most ecstatic. The influence of Richard Strauss is perhaps more felt than actually present in the tonalities of the songs. I wrote the work for Donna Brown, a soprano with a serene and flexible voice.

The première was conducted by none other than my old friend Franz-Paul Decker, who wasted no time in insulting both Donna and me. First he recalled Son of Heldenleben: ‘Let me see... ven vas dat? I did it in Montreal and in Rotterdam. It had a disgraceful reception. Zay didn’t like it at all!’ He then picked out some passages in the new score that he thought should have been notated differently. He tore into Donna when she hummed a wrong note. ‘Do you have perfect pitch? No! Shall we ask za composer what he wants? He ought to know.’

Donna sang the work three times: at the premiere in Ottawa, for a CBC recording and with Esprit Orchestra in Toronto, but my hopes for a wide acceptance of the piece were premature. R. Murray Schafer