Albert Glinsky

Soprano or Mezzo-Soprano and Piano

Composer's Note:

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922-1941) was an Anglo-American pilot flying for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II.  He’d enlisted as an airman for the War instead of attending Yale, to which he’d been accepted, and took part in aerial combat over Europe during the autumn of 1941.  Already an aspiring poet at 16, he had received his school’s coveted poetry award for a poem memorializing the World War I poet, Rupert Brooke, who’d died during that conflict, and whose work he particularly admired.  Magee’s sonnet, High Flight was inspired by his high altitude sallies during which he once brought his Spitfire to 33,000 feet.  Dated September 3, 1941, the lines were casually scrawled in a letter to his parents along with the comment, “I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day.  It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.  I thought it might interest you.” 

On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered America’s entry into the War, Pilot Officer Magee was killed when his plane accidentally collided with another aircraft during a training exercise over Lincolnshire, England.  He was just 19 years old.  Back in the U.S., his sonnet began circulating when it was included in a Library of Congress exhibit in February 1942. Poet Archibald MacLeish soon hailed Magee as the first poet of the Second World War.  Posthumously, Magee is universally lauded as the inspired author of High Flight, its words enshrined in the pantheon of classic poems and quoted perennially when humans are awestruck by taking to the air.  Its now familiar strains have fired the imaginations of pilots, astronauts, and creators across the arts and sciences. 

Since its penning, High Flight has never been copyrighted and remains in the public domain; the original manuscript resides at the Library of Congress.  The current setting was created with the blessings of John Gillespie Magee’s younger brother, Christopher W. Magee, along with his brothers David B. Magee and The Revd. F. Hugh Magee in a communication with the composer. 

The spirit of this setting is meant to convey the joy and abandon of flight, with its spontaneous aerial acrobatics, “tumbling mirth,” and “footless halls of air.”  The opening piano introduction depicts a takeoff, from the stillness of the aircraft’s stationary anticipation at the start of the runway, through its gathering momentum, and the thrill of a buoyant updraft thrust with its liftoff.  By the entrance of the voice in bar 31, we have just detached from the earth and are now fully airborne.