The Last Thing

This song cycle sets three poems of Paula Meehan (b.1955) – one of Ireland’s best-known contemporary poets and playwrights.
 The first song The Last Thing describes the demise of a father and the last thing he utters. The imagery here is palpable as he “slipped below the horizon of his morphine dream”. Then there is “the moon in the hospice rigging” and “wingéd creatures” that inspired in the composer images of Don Quixote. The music opens with a pseudo-heroic line in the piccolo and violins that fans out across the orchestra. After a dream-like delivery of the text featuring mallet percussion, harp and celesta, the song concludes with a return of the opening material. Only this time the music is chopped up into fragments as a failingly heroic fanfare. 

The second song Mother is a fierce and spiteful take on a poisoned relationship between child and deceased mother – “mother you devourer”, “you chewed me up, you spat me out”. The music races along in the violins supported by an unrelenting pulse in the percussion and bells. In the final verse of the poem the text climactically turns on its head with the line “mother I stand over your grave…and I weep”. The music too flips, becoming sweeping and despairing.

The third and final song is Child Burial – so rich in its language, imagery, and power with lines like: “No light can reach you and teach you…”. The song opens with a lament in solo cello before funereal music appears in the strings. The music slowly unravelling over the course of the song. 

Collaborator

Links

• Poet publisher
• Composer website
• Limelight review
• The West review