![]() ![]() The former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and the Grammy Award–winning pianist Laurence Hobgood triumphantly found their own path and avoided the pitfalls, in performing a program entitled POEMJAZZ in the Sala Musica at the Villa Aurelia on Sunday evening, November 4. Richard Strauss, for example, composed music to go under, around, and over a reading aloud of Tennyson’s poem “Enoch Arden.” But no one listens to Strauss’s Enoch Arden these days, and the word “melodrama” now makes us think of soap operas and bad fiction. In the nineteenth century, musical melodrama meant something quite specific, and it was a popular form. On the other hand, the reading of poetry aloud with a musical accompaniment constantly risks falling into that genre that was first called melodrama. And such a music can be an actual obstacle to a composer looking for texts to set. ![]() It is, of course, easy to say that poetry is “musical,” or that music is “poetic,” but the actual setting of poetry to music-that is, by using a poem as the text of a song-is a delicate business, one made more complicated by the fact that good poetry has its own, often intense, verbal music. The relations between music and poetry are never easy.
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