Hayes Biggs

Piano

Composer's Note:

The first three of these preludes were commissioned by Thomas Stumpf, who has performed those three, including the premieres of the first and third. I am grateful to him for requesting these pieces, and encouraging me to return to writing solo piano music.

“The secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal” takes its title from a poem called “The Afterlife,” by Billy Collins, which I found helpful in my own struggles with the concept of an afterlife.

“While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth, or riffling through a magazine in bed,” Collins writes, “the dead of the day are setting out on their journey. They’re moving off in all imaginable directions, each according to his own private belief…”

Lazarus’s secret, the poet reveals, is that “you go to the place you always thought you would go, The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.” He gives examples that run the gamut from “standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other” to “approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.”

Despite, or perhaps because of my hellfire-and-damnation-filled Southern Baptist upbringing, I found this whimsical poem oddly reassuring. In this short piece I imagine a kind of jazzy march of the motley parade participants, tinged with hints of blues and gospel.

“The presence of still water” was inspired by Wendell Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things.” Here are its first lines:

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”

These lines resonate even more deeply with me in these uncertain times, and the title of this prelude comes from Berry’s recalling of the still waters of the 23rd Psalm, a text that I still find comforting. The piece begins by evoking anxiety, and only gradually achieves a calmer, more placid state, as the rhythmic and harmonic structure becomes progressively simpler, just as meditative breathing eventually becomes deeper and slower.

The third prelude, „du aber bist der Baum” (“but you are tree”) in memory of my mother-in-law, Lois J. Orzel, takes its title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Annunciation: The Words of the Angel,” from Das Marien-Leben (The Life of the Virgin Mary, 1912)

 When asked her thoughts about a fitting poem to use as the basis of a memorial work for
her mother, my wife Susan suggested something about the Virgin Mary might be
appropriate. Lois was a faithful Roman Catholic, and thus Mary was an integral part of
her devotional life. I immediately thought of Rilke’s poems on this subject, which speak
not only to the grace and compassion of the Virgin Mother, but also to her strength. The
two annunciation poems in particular show the awe in which she is held by the mighty
angel Gabriel. In Annemarie S. Kidder’s translation, Gabriel presents variations on a
refrain: “I am the day, I am the dew, but you are tree”; “I am just breath in woods, but
you are tree.” In the prelude I attempt to suggest Gabriel’s overpowering presence as he
enters Mary’s dwelling, only to be met — and astonished — by her quiet and serene
fortitude.

Prelude No. 4, Quicksilver,  has no specific connection to poetry.