Update Title: EFD37ABC-C0A3-42B4-B113-1E2133149F28

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Upon accepting a commission from the International Horn Society to write a
major work featuring the horn, Mr. Benson had in mind another song cycle
for the distinguished mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, professor of voice at the
Eastman School of Music. After much thought concerning an appropriate
text for such a cycle, he remembered that the distinguished American novelist
John Gardner had studied the French horn at the Eastman School of Music as
a young man, and had performed as a professional musician on the
instrument. He wrote to Mr. Gardner, proposing collaboration on such a
work. Mr. Gardner responded favorably. After several exchanges of
correspondence and discussion regarding and particular subject matter of the
cycle, Mr. Benson received the six poems. The titles given in the program
for the various songs are by the composer, suggesting aspects of the poems
which are both descriptive and in their small way, symbolic.
 
Mr. Benson asken Mr. Gardner to provide a program note, and he responded
as follows:
“In SONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD I wanted to write something
that the composer might treat either as a song cycle or as an internalized onewoman
short opera. I thought of trying to dramatize the way a woman’s
exclusive love for her husband and children can, when she grows old,
become love— and anxiety— for life itself. The idea provided me with a
setting: the old woman awakening from a nightmare of the whole world’s
death, comparable to the death of two of her children. I thought it was
psychologically right that the old woman, in her terror, would turn to sweet
thoughts of her girlhood and the man who would become her husband (the
second song), and I thought that, because of her age and wisdom, that
innocence and love would be generalized to all the world, a world all green
yet subtly suggesting autumn— the houses are ‘red, orange, yellow.’ From
there her thoughts might move, I imagined, to the warmth and security of
family in an obscurely dangerous world (‘for the bear’s in the woods and
owl’s in the sky’), a world still seemingly safe because of love and
community. In the fourth song I state the tragedy that motivates the cycle.
For all our hopes, for the seeming security of community, death sometimes
strikes. Hastily, defensively, the old woman flees to a happy memory (in the
fifth song) of the marriage of one of her surviving daughters. All will be
well, the old woman desperately tells herself. She sees that her own motherlove
is not necessary. When she dies, God’s love will take over for hers, and
so, without guilt or anxiety or terror, she can sleep. And if there is no God?
Never mind, there will be motherly love until the last generation, and even
then still hope, still the prospect of ‘a brand new sun.’”

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