Three Kingsongs

Program Notes

The first two poems I set in Three Kingsongs are anything but royal hagiographies. Warner’s King Duffus chronicles the 10th-century Scottish monarch who, having been revived from a witches’ curse, longs for the pastoral comforts of his half-death. Shelley’s renowned Ozymandias depicts the crumbled statue of a pompous ruler, the ruins forlorn and neglected in the vast desert. “Duffus” is driven by a motoric riff that evolves from the flames of the witches’ burning to the gentler nostalgic tones of the king’s musings. “Ozymandias” is a slow Saharan blues, featuring evocations of the swirling sands. The singer uses falsetto for the voice of the ancient king, finishing the song at the very bottom of the baritone range. The Cheah-Chan Duo commissioned the first two songs in 2013. I wrote a third “kingsong” for them in 2018. I deliberately chose a lighter, more modest text for this closing song. Henley’s “If I Were King” could be read as a grown-up version of the child’s utopia in A.A. Milne’s more famous poem of the same name. The music is characterized by a repeated gently rising bass line, punctuated by semi-ironic fanfares, with the text nobly declaimed by the baritone.

Mvt. 1: King Duffus

Three Kingsongs
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Ernest Henley

I. King Duffus

When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned,
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.
For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.
Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?
There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:
My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.
I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.
Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?

- Sylvia Townsend Warner. Text reprinted with permission.

II. Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

III. If I Were King

If I were king, my pipe should be premier. 
The skies of time and chance are seldom clear, 
We would inform them all with bland blue weather. 
Delight alone would need to shed a tear, 
For dream and deed should war no more together. 

Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear; 
Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather; 
And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere, 
If I were king. 

But politics should find no harbour near; 
The Philistine should fear to slip his tether; 
Tobacco should be duty free, and beer; 
In fact, in room of this, the age of leather, 
An age of gold all radiant should appear, 
If I were king. 

- William Ernest Henley