Robert Carl

Soprano and Piano

Composer's Note:
Our Heart and Home Is With Infinitude is a song cycle which explores the idea of the sublime in nature, as expressed by artists of the early nineteenth century. The title comes from a line in Book VI of William Wordsworth's epic autobiographical poem, "The Prelude". Each of these writers takes a very different approach to what we might call the "transcendental". Wordsworth declaims a heroic and noble vision; Baudelaire, as a high esthete, revels in the voluptuous imagery of the sunset; Friedrich (as a painter who is writing a brief verse) muses on the power of morbid imagery; Whitman projects a typically American optimism and naive love of his surroundings; and Leopardi seems to reconcile all these tendencies in his poem, one of the greatest texts of Romanticism. The music uses a wide range of techniques and voices to interpret the texts. In all cases, I have written a sort of "dreamed" version of nineteenth century music, filtered through my own contemporary experience and sensibility. Each poem's setting also partakes of some aspect of the national musical tradition of its respective poet.