Poetry, prose and music combine to highlight key female literary figures and their influence on music. Readings of Emily Bronte, Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson and others each precede song settings by composers including Schumann, Barber, Copland, Libby Larsen and Jonathan Dove.
Soprano: Susanna MacRae
Piano: Claire Habbershaw
Reading –
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: To the Imitator of the First Satire of Horace (1733)
Music –
Jonathan Dove: Five Am’rous Sighs
Text: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Matthew Prior*
- ‘Between Your Sheets’
- ‘Finish’
- ‘My heart still hovering round about you’*
- ‘A Receipt to Cure the Vapours’
- ‘The Lady who offers her Looking Glass to Venus’*
Reading –
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847), excerpt
Music –
Nick Peros: Sleep Brings No Joy to Me
Text: Emily Bronte
Reading –
Clara Schumann: Diary extract (1856)
Music –
Robert Schumann: Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, op. 135
Text: Mary Stuart
Reading –
Martha Jane Canary, ‘Calamity Jane’: A letter to her daughter Janey (1896)
Music –
Libby Larsen: Songs from Letters
Text: Martha Jane Canary, ‘Calamity Jane’
- ‘So Like Your Father’s’ (1880)
- ‘He Never Misses’ (1880)
- ‘A Man Can Love Two Women’ (1880)
- ‘A Working Woman’ (1882–93)
- ‘All I Have’ (1902)
Reading –
Alice Duer Miller: Are Women People? A Book of
Rhymes for suffrage Time (1915), ‘The Revolt of Mother’
Music –
Paul Ayres: Anti-Suffragist Reasons
Text: Alice Duer Miller
- Our Own Twelve Anti-Suffragist Reasons
- Why We Oppose Women Travelling in Railway Trains
- Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
Reading –
Christina Rossetti: Twice, excerpt
Music –
Liza Lehmann: When I am Dead my Dearest
Text: Christina Rossetti
Ian Venables: Portraits of a Mind, ‘Echo’, arr. Graham J. Lloyd
Text: Christina Rossetti
Ian Venables: At Midnight
Text: Edna St Vincent Millay
Samuel Barber: Thy Love
Text: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Reading –
Emily Dickinson: They Shut Me Up In Prose (1862)
Music –
Aaron Copland: Nature the Gentlest Mother
Text: Emily Dickinson
Reading –
Emily Dickinson: Hope Is the Thing With Feathers (1891)
Music –
Jake Heggie: I Shall Not Live in Vain
Text: Emily Dickinson
