 |
The Meditation on a Ruin has a special relevance to the events of 2001 (although it was written two years previously). It is a setting of the Anglo-Saxon text The Ruin which is thought, perhaps, to be a depiction of what was left of the Roman city of Bath as seen through the eyes of the poet. What the Anglo-Saxons made of the many Roman ruins that lay around them can only be wondered at. And, surely, this is the fascination of any ruin (and hence the title Meditation): that the imagination is immediately invoked to provide a picture of what life was like when those buildings flourished? A Ruin becomes an interaction between the beholder and the decayed fabric which he contemplates. The text cleverly oscillates between a description of the stones and a reconstruction of a past life and so this musical setting aims not at pictorial description of a lost city but rather at the emotions which images of the past evoke in us, whether those images be actual and archaeological or our own imaginings derived from them. To emphasise all this, the text - which has itself survived only incomplete - is set in the original Old English (using a transliteration that is easy for singers to use). |
|
Text
(if this looks wrong, can anyone help?) |
in the original (Anglo-Saxon) language using the composer's transliteration
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a very beautiful language, and singing it is not difficult - particularly in view of the transliteration that I present here. It has echoes of modern English to be sure, but more usually of modern German, and possesses in particular many of the values of vowels and consonants that are to be found on the Continent. |