Commissioned by Anthology for their program, Songs of Light and Dark.

The recording features
Vicky Reichert, soprano
Anney Gillotte, soprano
Allegra Martin, mezzo-soprano
Michelle Vachon, mezzo-soprano

Program Note:

Lovers parting at daybreak can be found throughout literature.  In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s lovers are disdained to part from one another, so they question if the morning has really come.  Is it a lark or a nightingale that sings outside the window?  Juliet pronounces, “Yon light is not day-light, I know it, I: It is some meteor that the sun exhales.”  Similarly, in the first scene of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, the impetuous Octavian runs to draw the curtains closed in the Marschallin’s bed-chamber, exclaiming, “Why must there be day?  I want no day!  What good is day?  Then you belong to them all!  Let it be dark!”  Their rapturous affair is cut short by morning, which brings a visiting baron, noble orphans, a notary and an Italian singer.

I had these scenes in mind while setting Break of Day, which is a dramatic narrative of sorts.  John Donne employs a female speaker whose first stanza muses on the light and dark.  She asks why the light must tear her away from her lover.  The speaker then personifies light in the second stanza, explaining that if light could speak it would say they should stay together.  In the bitterly ironic final stanza, the woman reflects on the way light and daytime are associated with busied work.  Light and dark are typically stock metaphors for good and evil, or happiness and sadness.  Here, however, light is the enemy, while lovers can remain together blissfully in the veiled darkness of night.

Text:

'Tis true, 'tis day ; what though it be?
O, wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because 'tis light?
Did we lie down because 'twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye ;
If it could speak as well as spy,
This were the worst that it could say,
That being well I fain would stay,
And that I loved my heart and honour so
That I would not from him, that had them, go.

Must business thee from hence remove?
O ! that's the worst disease of love,
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.