Mirabai Songs (1982)

It’s true, I went to the market

All I was doing was breathing

Why Mira can’t go back to her old house

Where did you go?

The Clouds

Dont go, don’t go

One of the most successful of contemporary American composers, best known perhaps for his opera The Great Gatsby, John Harbison learned his art from teachers as distinguished as Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Boris Blacher. Although British audiences have had little opportunity to test the impressive claims made for his music - "original, varied, and absorbing, relatively easy for audiences to grasp and yet formal and complex enough to hold our interest through repeated hearings” - the intriguingly exotic Mirabai Songs are certainly both thoughtful and accessible. Since the first performance of the work by Susan Larson and Craig Smith in 1983 it has become established as one of the most frequently heard items in an uncommonly extensive catalogue.

The following note was written by the composer for Dawn Upshaw’s recording of the Mirabai Songs on Elektra/Nonesuch. “In his wonderful anthology, News of the Unwise, Robert Bly, translator of Mirabai’s poems, describes in fascinating terms the evolution of her consciousness. Here it will be sufficent to outline her story. She lived in sixteenth-century India. When she was still in her twenties, her husband was killed in a war. Rather than join him on the funeral pyre, as was the custom, she dedicated her life to the God Krishna, wrote poems to him, and sang and danced them in the street. For this unorthodox life she was roundly criticised, criticisms she anwers in some of the poems. Her deeper answers involve the ecstatic, the erotic, the devotional, and the artistic, but her independence and resolve, and her dancer’s vitality lead my setting toward narrative and characterisation, unusual territory for a song cycle.”

There is also a version of the Mirabai Songs for voice and chamber ensemble which, while it presents a beguiling surface, reduces the dramatic effect of the piano part in the original version.

Programme notes by Gerald Larner ©2004

It's true I went to the market

My friend, I went to the market and bought the Dark One.

You claim by night, I claim by day.

Actually I was beating a drum all the time I was buying him.

You say I gave too much; I say too little.

Actually I put him on a scale before I bought him.

What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels.

Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now.

Be with me when I lie down; you promised me this in an earlier life.

All I was doing was breathing

Something has reached out and taken in the beams of my eyes.

There is a longing, it is for his body, for every hair of that dark body.

All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy came by my house. His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it from the side, smiling.

My family says: Don't ever see him again! And imply things in a low voice.

But my eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules, and know whose they are.

I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you want to say of me. Mira says: Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?

Why Mira can't go back to her old house

The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's body; all the other colors washed out.

Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearls and my carnelians.

Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.

That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher taught me this.

Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.

I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.

I don't steal money, I don't hit anyone. What will you charge me with?

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders: and now you wish me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.

Where did you go?

Where did you go, Holy One, after you left my body?

Your flame jumped to the wick, and then you disappeared and left the lamp alone.

You put the boat into the surf, and then walked inland, leaving the boat in the ocean of parting.

Mira says: Tell me when you will come to meet me.

The clouds

When I saw the dark clouds, I wept, Oh Dark One, I wept at the dark clouds.

Black clouds soared up, and took some yellow along; rain did fall, some rain fell long.

There was water east of the house, west of the house; fields all green.

The one I love lives past those fields; rain has fallen on my body, on my hair, as I wait in the open door for him.

The Energy that holds up mountains is the energy Mirabai bows down to.

He lives century after century, and the test I set for him he has passed.

Don't go, don't go

Don't go, don't go. I touch your soles. I'm sold to you.

No one knows where to find the bhakti path, show me where to go.

I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood and you set a torch to it.

When I've fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest.

Mira says: You who lift the mountains, I have some light, I want to mingle it with yours.

Translations by Robert Bly

Used by permission of G. Schirmer, Inc.