Lang: Let Me Come In

Description

Let me come in was written for the soprano Angel Blue, co-commissioned by LA Opera and the Fisher Center at Bard College. Let me come in is part of a series of pieces I have been writing over the past several years, in which I have applied different literary filters to the text of the biblical ‘Song of Songs.' The idea behind this series is that if we look at the text from many different angles it may eventually begin to reveal more of its emotional and spiritual powers. or at least that is the hope. for this song, I started with one verse in the King James version of the text, where the woman is awaiting the knock of her lover on her door. 5:2 I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night I love the sense of waiting for something beautiful to happen, the anticipation of the moment, and also I love that the narrator hasn't moved to open the door yet – the sensuousness of the waiting is more powerful for her, and for us, than the actual physicality of meeting. of course, these texts were originally in Hebrew, then translated and mistranslated into Greek and Latin and eventually English, and their various translations have changed the details of their various meanings. Many of these are intentional mistranslations; different Christian denominations, for example, have their own shaded versions of the text, in an attempt to lower the temperature of the original, to tone down its sensuality, or to make it seem more like a metaphor, or like a dream. I took 17 different versions of this verse, each slightly different, and then I alphabetized their phrases and got rid of all the duplicated lines, in order to make one single text, with all its interpretive angles shown. Let me come in is dedicated to Sophie Claudel, in memory of Frédéric Bonnemaison.