Michael Nyman: Six Celan Songs For Low Female Voice And Piano: Alto: Vocal Score

Sixteen songs and seven arias for high voice and Piano composed over a fifteen-year period from 1989 to 2004 with texts in English French German and translations from German Portuguese and Russian. Texts from theBible Shakespeare Mozart Rimbaud Fernando Pessoa and Paul Celan and by living writers Roger Pulvers Kevin Power Victoria Hardie and Michael Hastings. While the original text-free version of Life's Chaos appeared aspart of the musical accompaniment to Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera there are songs from three of his film scores: The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover Prospero's Books and The Diary OfAnne Frank and from four song cycles: L'Orgie Parisienne Six Celan Songs Cycle of Disquietude and Acts Of Beauty. There are arias from two stage operas Facing Goya and Man and Boy:Dada and a TV opera Letters Riddles and Writs.

This cycle of settings of poems by Paul Celan was written between May and July 1990 for Ute Lemper. The texts are taken from the following collections: 'Chanson einer Dame im Schatten' and 'Corona' from Mohn und Gedachtnis(1952) 'Nachtlich geschurzt' from Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955) 'Blume' from Sprachgitter (1959) and 'Es war Erde in ihnen' and 'Psalm' from Die Niemandsrose of 1963.The settings of 'Corona' and 'Blume' both introduce an eight-barchord sequence derived from Chopin's Mazurka in A minor Op.17 No.4 (the introduction to which was used by Gorecki in his Symphony No.3). Piano and voice version written in 1997 at the request of Hilary Summers.