BlueRedStreaks
CHORAL

The One Who Is Coming...

Copyright ©2003 Ann Millikan. All Rights Reserved.
Text: Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Duration: 10:00

Instrumentation: SSAATTBB choir

The One Who Is Coming… is a setting of an excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. These letters are Rilke’s correspondence with a young student who was attending a military academy Rilke had attended many years before. Perhaps because he felt similarly out of place while there, he responded to this hopeful-poet’s letters with a profoundly personal mentoring. The excerpt I have set is from the letter he wrote in Rome, December 23, 1903. The One Who Is Coming… begins in antiphonal chant on the Magnificat tone from Vespers, becoming increasingly dissonant as Rilke’s series of questions presses in on the reader, then releases into vibrant and richly melodic counterpoint, and ends in a slow homophonic chant that ebbs and flows like a work song.
 
SDPC 170 01 Score $15
SDPC 170 02 Choral part $5/copy
 
 
Copyright ©2010-21 Ann Millikan. All