Terry Winter Owens

piano solo with narration

The narration below is an integral part of the work and should be printed in the programme as well as read aloud by the pianist or by a narrator. The narration can be translated into the language of the country in which it is performed. The Rilke poem can be recited in my English translation shown below and/or in the original German and/or in the language of the country in which the work is performed. The footnote need not be read aloud but can be used as a footnote in the printed program notes.

NARRATOR:
Throughout the universe, the galaxies are distancing themselves from one another, rushing apart at phenomenal speeds, signaling their departure by a shift in the red end of their light spectra. Edwin Hubble measured the red shift in 1929 and thus rendered impossible the idea of a static universe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, having died in 1926 of leukemia in a sanatorium near Montreax, did not know about the red shift or about Hubble’s discovery. Yet in his Eighth Elegy, Rilke personalized a phenomenon of universal significance, intuiting something of extraordinary magnitude. He concludes his Elegy with the following lines:

Who has twisted us around this way so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Like someone upon
the farthest hill who is shown his whole valley,
one more time, he turns, stop, lingers –,
so we live and forever take our leave.