Abstract

Night Song for tenor and orchestra is a setting of the poem “Night Song” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated into English by R.J. Hollingdale. The piece is 24 minutes in length, and is scored for lyric tenor and orchestra, with instrumentation as follows: 3-3-3-3; 4-3-2-1; Timp., 3Perc., Pno., Cel., Harp, Str. In Nietzsche's text, the speaker is the philosopher-prophet Zarathustra, who serves as Nietzsche's mouthpiece for the doctrines of the Übermensch and the Will to Power. Driven by these ideas and by the terrible knowledge of the Eternal Recurrence, Zarathustra finds himself isolated and starved for human connection. "The Night Song" begins as a florid lament expressing sorrow in solitude and longing for true companionship but devolves into madness as the speaker’s thoughts turn inward on themselves, expressing the dark desires stemming from his isolation. In correspondence with the poem, two musical paradigms struggle for dominance throughout the piece; the first is melody-driven, lush, and triadic while the second is rhythm-driven, cold, and dissonant. The changing role of the tenor evokes this division. During the opening lament, the vocal melodies drive the harmonic and dramatic progression of the piece. When the text becomes more introspective, so does the vocal line: its range shrinks and its melodies fragment while winds and percussion take over the primary thematic material. This is meant to illustrate the illogical and destructive nature of the unbidden chatter produced by the mind lacking an outside object to focus its attention. The contrast between these musical paradigms explores the psychological dynamics of isolation implicit in the text and the way in which they relate to the intense but distant relationship of artist to audience.