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Music Text

Dylan Thomas (E)

Abbreviations (PDF)

Publisher

Boosey & Hawkes

Territory
This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes for the world.

Availability
Digital Score
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Repertoire Note

Stravinsky met the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas just the once, on 22 May 1953 in Boston. He was hoping they could collaborate on an opera. Stravinsky had invited Thomas to his Hollywood home to discuss the project, but he never arrived. Thomas died in New York on 9 November 1953. ‘All I could do was cry’, recalled Stravinsky. His response was this poignant, melancholic setting for tenor and string quartet of the villanelle ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, a memorial text for Thomas’s own father, with its powerful refrain, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’. It is framed by two ‘dirge-canons’ for string quartet and a quartet of trombones. Though it is Stravinsky’s first genuinely serial work, the music’s lamenting character reaches back deep into Stravinsky’s musical past.

Repertoire note by Jonathan Cross

Subjects
Recommended Recording
cd_cover

Robert Tear/Ensemble Intercontemporain/
Pierre Boulez
Deutsche Grammophon 4317512

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