Extinguish my eyes (1949)

Piccola serenata (1979)

A Julia de Burgos (1977)

Though written midway between the musicals On the Town and Wonderful Town, Bernstein’s Two Love Songs - both to words by Rainer Maria Rilke in English translations by Jessie Lemont - have nothing of Broadway in them. They are far too serious for that. Extinguish my eyes does, however, put the composer’s characteristic rhythmic energy to dramatic use, the pressing syncopations of the piano accompaniment reflecting the inner urgency contained, except when it breaks out into spectacular declamation, in the vocal line. The Piccola serenata, set to nonsense words in celebration of Karl Boehm's’ 85th birthday and first performed by Christa Ludwig and James Levine at the Salzburg Festival in 1979, is rather less serious. A Julia de Burgos, on the other hand, is serious to an extreme of angry virtuosity. As a setting of Spanish words, it might look like an anomaly among the ten pieces included in the Songfest “cycle of American poems.” It owes its place there, however, to the fact that Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) was an American citizen from Puerto Rico - and, more to the point, to the fact that she was an early and extraordinarily passionate exponent of women’s lib. The conflict between her two roles, “the housebound lady” and the “unbridled” poet, is expressed here in rhythms so impetuous in their unsettled metres that they trip over themselves in their impatience to express their frustration.