I wrote this art song for tenor and piano in 2018 as a commission for Walter Dixon, who sought a recital piece and supplied its epigraph, “For those who risk loving.” The text is a meditation on love and loss, and is built on paradoxes, expressing hope with loss, love with death, and pain with joy, held together in the same breath.

Marked Adagio and set in D minor, the work requires a sustained vocal line, whatever the piano is doing beneath it. The melody carries its sorrow in prominent tritones, but the piano regularly broadcasts the singer’s next pitches, so there is no note-hunting at entrances, even at the most exposed turns. The range is a comfortable D3 to G4.

Two textures recur in the accompaniment and play against each other: tall arpeggiated chords in both hands, blurred with sevenths and ninths, and a lighter tripping figure in eighth notes, touched here and there with dotted rhythms and triplets.

The first stanza lays out its paradoxes almost matter-of-factly, drawing back at the repeated “a fearful thing,” swelling to “to dream,” then falling away at “to lose.” A short but pensive interlude leads to the second stanza, which rises to the work’s single high G at “a holy thing.”

The piano then turns toward the major for the central section, where the tenor offers a forte warmth at “your life has lived in me” before softening again. The stanza’s closing line, marked espressivo in the voice and teneramente in the piano, lingers over the “painful joy” of remembrance, laden with fermatas.

A somewhat longer piano interlude lets that feeling settle before the final stanza returns to call love a “human thing.” On the word “death,” the voice sinks to a sustained low note, and finishes quietly. Finally, a brief piano coda recalls the opening music, then rises through a diminuendo, landing on a tiny arpeggio high in the right hand, faint as the last wisp of smoke from a candle just gone out.

For an additional fee and on request, I can transpose this song to suit any voice. The audio sample is from the opening of the work. Here is the full text: