Six Languages, One Libretto: The Poets Inside Rivers

By Jonathan Raabe

The music of Rivers quotes Hindemith, Tárrega, the French Romantics, and Mozart. The words are assembled the same way, and from about as far apart.

Corrado Margutti’s libretto draws on poets writing in several languages across roughly a century and a half. Martino Anibaldi and Diego Franciosi of the ITER Research Ensemble, in their note on the work, describe the result as “a true choral story rich in nuances and interconnections, with a ‘libretto’ that combines Pascoli and Mackay Brown, Rilke and St. Theresa of Lisieux.”

That is a strange list. It is meant to be.

The epigraph: Cesare Pavese

Before any of the poets, there is a line on the title page of the score, from the Turin novelist and poet Cesare Pavese (1908–1950):

“What world lies across this sea I do not know / but on the other side of every sea is another shore, and I will reach it.”

It sets the terms for everything after it. Not arrival — the certainty that there is something to arrive at.

Fernando Pessoa

The fourth movement is the one that gives the work its name, and the score credits its text to Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), from his English collection The Mad Fiddler, dated March 1, 1913: “Many rivers run / Down to many seas.”

Pessoa is the most thematically apt choice in the entire libretto, and it is worth one paragraph to say why. He was born in Lisbon, raised largely in Durban, South Africa, and educated in English — he wrote and published in English before he wrote in Portuguese. And he wrote under more than seventy invented authors, the “heteronyms”: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and dozens more, each with a biography, a style, and opinions of his own, who argued with each other in print. When he died, a trunk was found containing some 25,000 pages.

A piece about many things becoming one current names its title movement after a man who was himself many people.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The sixth movement is Herbsttag — “Autumn Day” — one of the most widely translated poems in the German language, written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris in 1902. It opens:

“Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.”

Lord: it is time. The summer was very great. What follows is about ripening, and then about being alone — whoever has no house now will not build one, whoever is alone will stay that way.

This is the movement where Margutti hides Hindemith. A poem about not having a house, in a cycle about people who have left theirs. The German original is freely available, and there are a great many English translations, which is itself part of the poem’s history.

The others

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) — Italian, classicist, and one of the country’s most-taught poets; a writer whose subject was very often loss inside domestic detail.

George Mackay Brown (1921–1996) — Orcadian, and almost never off the islands. A poet of a small northern place, set beside a Portuguese modernist and an Italian priest. Distance is the point.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) — a Carmelite nun who died at twenty-four and whose writing has been read by more people than that of anyone else in this list.

And David Maria Turoldo, the Servite priest whose presence in the cycle Spera personally required. We have written about him separately.

Why assemble a libretto this way

The cycle closes on Cordero de Dios — the Agnus Dei, in Spanish, the last song of the Ordinary of the Mass. A secular oratorio that ends on a prayer, having passed through Portuguese, German, Italian, French, and Latin to get there.

Anibaldi and Franciosi make the structural comparison to Monteverdi, “and his extraordinary talent for working on the edge of the two genres” — sacred and secular — “yet without giving up an organic path, a unity of form within the variety of affects.”

Which is a technical way of saying what Spera said more simply. There are many rivers, and they all go to one sea.

The score prints every text with its source, so here is the full map. Prologue: George Mackay Brown, “Children in Need.” 1: Federico García Lorca, “Balada de la placeta,” from Libro de poemas. 2: David Maria Turoldo, “All’ultima sera.” 3: Giovanni Pascoli, “Noctis partes alteræ,” from Catullocalvos. 4: Fernando Pessoa, “Rivers.” 5: St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “Le cantique éternel, chanté dès l’exil.” 6: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Herbsttag.” 7: the Agnus Dei, sung in Spanish as “Cordero de Dios.”

The performances

Friday, October 9, 7:30 pm, Mountain View United Methodist Church, 355 Ponca Place, Boulder. Saturday, October 10, 7:30 pm, St. Paul Center for Music and the Arts, 1600 Grant Street, Denver, and by livestream. Sunday, October 11, 4:00 pm, United Church of Christ, 1500 9th Avenue, Longmont.

Tickets and details: Rivers & Streams.