Poem by Charles Darley (Music of the Fairies) edited by Frank DiGiacomo. Photography by Rick Powers.

This song is written to a nineteenth-century lyric expressing sentiments close to the composer’s heart and sources of inpiration, the atmosphere created being very similiar to those of his operas Undine and Beauty and the Beast. Mr. DiGiacomo had in mind Ms. Klemperer’s talents while composing this song, and experimented with several vocal ideas to be used in roles he was creating specifically for her, including Cassandra in The Trojan Women and the Nightingale in Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. Happily, the role of Cassandra in The Trojan Women was fully realized, but sadly he was not able to develop The Nightingale and the Rose before his untimely passing.

The live recording was first performed by Christine Klemperer, accompanied by Frank DiGiacomo, at An Evening of Song by Frank DiGiacomo, May 18, 1979 at the Carrier Theater of the Mulroy Civic Center, Syracuse, New York.

LYRICS
Have you not oft in the still wind,
heard sylvan notes of a strange kind,
that rose one moment, and then fell,
swooning away like a far knell?
Listen! - that wave of perfume broke
into sea-music, as I spoke,
fainter than that which seems to roar
on the moon’s silver-sanded shore,
when through the silence of the night
is heard the ebb and flow of the light.
Oh, shut the eye, oh, shut the eye and ope the ear!
Do you not hear, or think you hear,
a wide hush o’er the woodland pass?
Oh, shut the eye and ope the ear!
Do you not hear, or think you hear,
a wide hush o’er the woodland pass
like distant waving fields of grass? -
Voices! - ho! ho! ho! ho!- a band is coming,
loud as ten thousand bees a-humming,
or ranks of little merry men
tromboning deeply from the glen,
and now as if they changed, and rung
their citterns small, and ribbon-slung,
over their gallant shoulders hung!
A chant! A chant! That swoons and swells
like soft winds jangling meadow-bells;
now brave, as when in Flora’s bow’r
gay Zephyr blows a trumpet flow’r;
now thrilling fine, and sharp, and clear,
like Dian’s moonbeam dulcimer;
but mixed with whoops, and infant laughter,
shouts following one another after,
as on a hearty holiday
when youth is flush and full of May; -
small shouts, indeed, as wild bees knew
both how to hum and halloo too!
Listen! Listen! Listen!

from Beautiful Gems of Thought and Sentiment, compiled by Henry Davenport Northrop,
American Publishing Co., Cleveland Ohio, 1890.