In the days leading up to our concert, Together We Sing, the author of our programme notes provides an alternative look at the pieces featured on Saturday 6^th June.  The series may be interspersed with other posts but will be more or less daily!  We hope you enjoy it.  This is the final piece we sing in the concert but there’s a bonus post tomorrow to round off the series.

Sure on this Shining Night

In classical Greek mythology, Elysium, or the Elysian fields, was the home of the blessed after death, the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the pure.  Over time, the word has come to mean any place or state of bliss or delight and James Agee’s 1934 poem, Description of Elysium, seeks to capture the essence of a tranquil and paradisical realm where peace, health and joy abound in contrast to the troubles and impermanence of the earthly world.

Agee’s language is lyrical and poetic, drawing the reader into a world of marbling water, wind-beloved trees and blue mountains. In Agge’s Elysium, there is no fear, no time and no decay: the mind itself withers away, leaving only a state of pure being.

Morton Lauridsen’s setting of the middle section of Agee’s three-part poem, Sure on this Shining Night, is the third movement of his choral cycle, Nocturnes, with its common theme of Night and was written to sound, and be sung, like a piece for the American musical stage. Sure on this Shining Night has also been set by Samuel Barber as part of his 1938 song cycle, Four Songs.

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

The late year lies down the north.
All is healed, all is health.
High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.

Sure on this shining night
I weep for wonder wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.