“Flowers, Fantasies and Lovesick Fools,” a Valentine to Poetry and Passion in the American Art Song

On Saturday, February 17—Valentine’s Day Weekend--soprano Elisabeth Harrington will perform “Flowers, Fantasies and Lovesick Fools,” a program of art songs by 20th century American composers. “These songs are intimate and personal, filled with images of nature and metaphysical yearnings, as well as themes of life and death, and love--- and more love,” Harrington explains. “It’s the softer side of 20th century American music.”

Art songs are poems set to music, “so that in the end the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” The texts include poems by A.E. Housman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrettt Browning, e.e. cummings and the Bengali poet, Tagore. Some selections are fanciful (like John Duke’s “Shelling Peas’), and some are funny (Carrie Jacobs Bond’s “Half-Minute Songs”). Harrington concludes the program with what she calls “Poetic Pairs:” songs by two different composers who use the same poem, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?” with music by a male composer born in 1913, and a female composer born in 1956.

Elisabeth Harrington became an Assistant Professor of Voice at HSU last semester, so “Flowers, Fantasies and Lovesick Fools” is her Humboldt debut. For her first recital, “ I wanted to do songs in English, so everyone would understand the poetry,” she said, “and I wanted to do art songs, because they get overlooked so often. We hear tons of opera or musical theatre, but the art song is a much smaller genre.”