Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
The cantata
The cantata, Pale Fire, was conceived, composed and recorded in 2006. It was not my first composition using Nabokov’s texts; a few years earlier, I had written music to eight of Nabokov’s poems and recorded them as a collection. The idea to write music to Pale Fire was simple – since the poem consisted of four cantos, which basically means four long songs, I expanded my traditional song format into a longer composition, which logically would be a cantata. Also, because the book Pale Fire was the subject of part of my dissertation on comparative literature and was quite carefully studied, “the sound” of the first canto presented some vague melodic lines in my mind that I wanted to express more clearly in a musical format. I attempted to convey Nabokov’s stylistic intonations in the first canto by preserving the text as the leading informative force, while keeping the music in a “shadowy” form as purely illustrative of what is going on in the poem. Whether my attempt was successful or not, listeners are the better judges. – V.M.
The cantata, Pale Fire, was conceived, composed and recorded in 2006. It was not my first composition using Nabokov’s texts; a few years earlier, I had written music to eight of Nabokov’s poems and recorded them as a collection. The idea to write music to Pale Fire was simple – since the poem consisted of four cantos, which basically means four long songs, I expanded my traditional song format into a longer composition, which logically would be a cantata. Also, because the book Pale Fire was the subject of part of my dissertation on comparative literature and was quite carefully studied, “the sound” of the first canto presented some vague melodic lines in my mind that I wanted to express more clearly in a musical format. I attempted to convey Nabokov’s stylistic intonations in the first canto by preserving the text as the leading informative force, while keeping the music in a “shadowy” form as purely illustrative of what is going on in the poem. Whether my attempt was successful or not, listeners are the better judges. – V.M.
