| Composer: Adrian Bell | Cello solo | Tempo: Adagio | Duration: 5 minutes |
| Key: C Major | Advanced | modal evocation | Year: 2024 |
Ah! Sun-flower Music for Solo Cello was originally a setting for voice and piano of the poem Ah! Sun-flower by English visionary poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827). In early 2024, I arranged the melody for unaccompanied cello, adding a middle section and dedicating the new work to Australian cellist Hyung Suk Bae, who premiered it in Brisbane, Qld to enthusiastic reviews.
Ah! Sun-flower has inspired many musical settings, notably by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. The origin of my own setting stems from when I took down a volume of Blake’s poetry on the shelf of a friend in Chicago. Like much of Blake’s work, the poem has a way of corroding the commonplace surface of things, similar to a Zen koan, or to the acid that Blake used to etch his copper plates.
Hearing Hyung Suk Bae’s marvellous interpretative ability playing Brahms, I realised that Ah! Sun-flower could be beautifully reconfigured to solo cello and thus convey the little poem’s strange, enigmatic power by new and unique means. The cello perfectly expresses the sunflower’s voice: gentle, plaintive, wistful, full-bodied, weighted by gravity but always yearning for the heights, a lamentation of life stuck in the same dull round. Ah! Sun-flower as a piece for cello, despite the absence of words, tries to elucidate Blake’s song through another medium. It is reciprocal to the poem, like the artist Paul Nash’s series of sunflower paintings.
Despite the poem’s many literary interpretations, the paradox at its heart remains undeniably simple. A flower, drooping and heavy, finds herself deeply bound to the earth, part of the soil, yet tormented by yearnings and the firm conviction that there is another, better life, rightly hers, but forever denied to her. Few poets—perhaps only Rilke—have confronted so unflinchingly the tragedy of life seen in these terms, the tragedy of life doomed to miss its chance to live.
An updraught leap of an octave opens the piece. But its gesture of hope quickly loses impetus and decays to a lower level, where the chord on the minor sixth taints it with sadness and makes way for the voice of the poet, or whoever we may feel is the singer of the song, to enter. The lyric begins with a fall, a sigh. Another octave rise to the ninth of the flattened seventh chord provides a feeling of the flower’s weariness. We plod along a narrow ledge, counting mathematically our steps. The tonic C now becomes richly coloured, suddenly turning into the third of Ab, where it seeks a sweet golden clime whose otherworldliness is suggested by a golden brightening, ironically produced by a plunge into flats. The end of the travellers journey actually takes us nowhere but back into C major.
Beginning the second stanza, the cello mutters in a muted tremolo, representing the pinings of lost youth, whose smouldering but unrealised potency manifests in an unexpected modulation to A major. Tremolo also evokes the coldness of the snow shrouding the virgin and white bones lying in sad peace in innocent graves. In a moment of perhaps only fantasised resurrection, we mount the sky, arising from graves through the cello’s most resonant key, C, and aspiring into realms of bright sharps where ‘my sun-flower wishes to go.’
The cello score incorporates an additional middle section to the original melody. Here the ideas are developed, and the player guides us into some very high-register regions, full of sweetness and poignancy. Up here the cello expresses at its most vulnerable. The thin air makes its mellow song difficult to achieve. Especially when playing unaccompanied, the cellist must help the audience imagine the beauty of what harmonies might colour the solo line. As with the sunflower, the cello’s roots lie in the earth, far below. And much as the sunflower longs to dwell forever in this ethereal landscape, something must be sacrificed. Slowly, perhaps reluctantly, the cello climbs back down to recapitulate its song, rising up the octave again at the second stanza tremolos, before a short coda, a flattened lapse into regret and a reiteration of the opening lament.
Ah! Sun-flowerMusic for Solo Cello is a difficult piece to play, recommended for advanced players.
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