The Angel in the Forest – Programme Note
Tenor/ATB (12-piece ensemble recommended)/6 Cellos
Gertrud Kolmar (trans. Philip Kuhn and Ruth von Zimmerman)/Old Testament
Vocal Score - NOV166243-01
Full Score - NOV166243
The Angel in the Forest – Rod Nelson 2012 A/P
The Angel in the Forest, following on from Julian Marshall’s first Kolmar Cantata, Out of the Darkness, is also taken from the Welten cycle and serves as the text for Julian’s second Kolmar Cantata. It offers a disturbing if understated glimpse into the nightmare world about to engulf Europe. As with Out of the Darkness, The Angel in the Forest suggests that a new life can be found in an escape from the city. But refuge is to be discovered not in the mountains but in the countryside which holds the promise of an innocent, perhaps even prelapsarian world, with its “musing fields”, flowers and grass: a place where the animals “don’t speak evil”. And yet at the heart of this poem, is something perhaps even more disturbing than Out of the Darkness because the early promise of hope bound up with the protagonist’s ability to escape, is slowly eroded at every turn.
The Angel in the Forest appears to offer its readers little or no solace other than the imagined possibility that comfort-from-hardship could still be found in a steadfast companion. But even that promise appears to be cut away at the end of the poem. “We will thirst and hunger, suffer together, / Together, one day, sink down by the dusty wayside verge and weep …”. And yet this powerful ending seems also to suggest an allusion to the opening of Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon / There we sat / sat and wept / as we thought of Zion”. And if this was Kolmar’s conscious intent then it is precisely through this final reference that the poem succeeds in turning its moment of despair into yet another promise of something “other”. By transposing the allusion away from the waters of Babylon onto the dusty wayside of a seemingly infinite road Kolmar might well be suggesting that even at the depth of despair this place of the poem’s ending is, in fact, merely a resting place: a place to take stock, in order to remember “Zion”, to mourn for what is lost and thus, through renewed strength, continue onwards.
This is Julian Marshall’s second passionate engagement with another significant fragment from Kolmar’s neglected and often forgotten writings. As in his first cantata, Julian has again paid tribute to the poet’s remarkable and powerful feminine creativity and, in so doing, succeeds in commemorating Kolmar’s life so cruelly silenced at the very moment she seemed to be about to peer into and articulate its very depth.
© Philip Kuhn, September 2018 – abridged from programme note
Form
The piece is in five sections (or movements), lasting, in total, around 30 minutes.
They are:
Give me your Hand
Come, Autumn
Because the Sun
Perhaps
Your Arms
The Angel in the Forest received its first full premiere at St James’s Church, Piccadilly on October 20th 2011 with James Gilchrist (tenor), a cello sextet (led by Sophie Harris) and the Schoolhouse 6 (vocal) Ensemble, conducted by Ian Belton.
Julian’s text for The Angel in the Forest is taken from Philip Kuhn’s & Ruth von Zimmermann’s translation of Welten published by Shearsman Books. Used here with permission and with deep gratitude.