This is an excerpt of the world premiere performance of Geoffrey Gordon's Peter Quince at the Clavier, for baritone and piano - a setting of the Wallace Stevens poem - from the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna - 16 March 2018. Baritone Tobias Greenhalgh and pianist Marcin Koziel perform.
PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER
Wallace Stevens
I.
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
