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‘Why did you melt your waxen man,
Sister Helen?
To-day is the third since you began.’
‘The time was long, yet the time ran,
Little brother.’
O Mother, Mary Mother,
Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!
The opening Largo sostenuto depicts her brooding jealousy and, in the woodwind, the flame of the waxen image of her betrayer. Recollection of her former love, expressed with great feeling, only wells up to the dotted rhythm of the first fortissimo, cruelly anticipating her ultimate triumph.
The Vivace, Scottish in idiom, describes with lilting innocence the little brother whom she has sent to the window to see if a horseman approaches. And soon, indeed, we hear the approach, leading to a climax at her refusal, meno allegro:
‘But he calls for ever on your name
Sister Helen,
And says that he melts before a flame.’
‘My heart for his pleasure fared the same,
Little brother.’
O Mother, Mary Mother,
Fire at the heart, between Hell and Heaven!
The Andante describes the tokens and pleas of her former lover, forming a kind of slow movement, musically isolated, as it should be, from the perverse emotions of Sister Helen which break out again at the Con fuoco. Others ride to her to beg her to break the spell, but to no avail. The extreme melodrama of the subject might have tempted a lesser composer into a work of unremitting gloom, but Sister Helen’s own memories of true love return in varied form, and it is typical of Wallace’s rounded view of his characters that he allows her a true memory of beauty—something not granted her in the poem.
But the end is indeed inevitable, and the final stanza is brought to its awful fruition with intense power as her dead lover’s ghost is doomed to wander as hers will be until the Last Judgement:
‘Ah! what white thing at the door has cross’d
Ah! what it this that sighs in the frost?’
‘A soul that’s lost as mine is lost,
Little brother!’
O Mother, Mary Mother,
Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven!
from notes by John Purser © 1996
L’Andante dépeint les souvenirs et les appels de son amour passé, formant une sorte de mouvement lent, musicalement isolé, comme il se doit, des émotions perverses de sœur Helen, qui ressurgissent au Con fuoco. Mais la fin est véritablement inévitable et la stance finale est amenée à son effroyable concrétisation avec une puissance intense, qui voit le fantôme de son amour défunt condamné à errer, comme le sien le sera, jusqu’au jugement dernier.
extrait des notes rédigées par John Purser © 1996
Français: Hypérion
Das Andante beschreibt die Gesten und das Flehen ihres vormaligen Geliebten und bildet eine Art langsamen Satz, der, ganz wie es sein sollte, von den perversen Emotionen der Sister Helen, die beim Con fuoco wieder ausbrechen, musikalisch isoliert ist. Doch das Ende ist in der Tat unabwendbar, und die letzte Strophe erreicht wirksam das furchtbare Ziel, als der Geist ihres toten Geliebten dazu verdammt wird, wie ihr Geist bis zum letzten Gericht zu wandern.
aus dem Begleittext von John Purser © 1996
Deutsch: Anke Vogelhuber