The Last Night

The Last Night transforms the atmosphere of a poem by Clark Ashton Smith into music for mezzo-soprano, viola and piano. Reading the poem, I imagined a frozen landscape seen from above: black, white, grey and blue with a trace of red, distorted yet strangely calm. Rather than illustrating individual words, I tried to translate the images, emotions and reactions evoked by the poem into a musical equivalent. The work is essentially a song, with viola and piano extending and colouring the vocal line.

Clark Ashton Smith: The Last Night

I dreamed a dream: I stood upon a height, A mountain’s utmost eminence of snow, Whence I beheld the plain outstretched below To a far sea-horizon, dim and white. Beneath the sun’s expiring, ghastly light, The dead world lay, phantasmally aglow; Its last fear-weighted voice, a wind, came low; The distant sea lay hushed, as with affright.

I watched, and lo ! the pale and flickering sun, In agony and fierce despair, flamed high, And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom. Then Night, that grim, gigantic struggle won. Impended for a breath on wings of doom, And through the air fell like a falling sky.