Dominick Argento - Sonnet LXIV

  
I was residing in Florence when terrorists attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A friend of mine and manager of St. Paul's Schubert Club, Bruce Carlson, emailed Sonnet No. LXIV to me saying he had wished to reprint the poem in their booklet for an upcoming recital but his office staff, finding it too bleak, talked him out of it. I agreed with his staff, but his email was pure serendipity: not having yet found a text for the short choral piece commissioned by the Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music, Shakespeare's poem so perfectly accorded with my own response to the events of 9/11 that this brief elegy virtually wrote itself.