T.E. Fisk's Wuthering Heights Lied Cycle

“Wuthering Heights” is certainly going to be a presence this year. The libretto for an epic song cycle version utilizing music settings of 52 Emily Bronte poems has just been posted on Google blogspot: http://tefisk.blogspot.com.

The blog is an upgrade of a libretto published on The Lied and Art Song Text web page in 2002. The creator, T E Fisk, says work on recording the cycle is progressing slowly because of the sensitive approach to composition and arrangement he felt Brontes powerful words required. This included the discovering of new ways to extract the music from a poem without reverting to over used formats like "the musical" or "the opera”. The project is also controversial because poems are assigned to different personalities and events from the novels story line and some verses have been edited but only when it was felt necessary to do so to keep relatively true to characters and situations. The edits, all of which are listed on the blog, usually focused on obviously first draft material or Gondal references. Fisk hopes to have a demo of the complete cycle online, probably in an mp3 format, before the end of 2008.

Categories: Music, Wuthering Heights