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Recorded by Patrick Kearney on noVae.
Recording runtime: 12:09.
Scores & Performance Materials
Program note
As with us mortal men, the laden heart
Is persecuted more, and fever'd more,
When it is nighing to the mournful house
Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise;
—Hyperion, Book II, Verses 101–104, John Keats (1795–1821)
John Keats’s poem "Hyperion" was his attempt to visit the Miltonic world of epic verse. Set in three ‘books’, Hyperion deals with the Ancient Greek myth of the Titanomachia – the fall of the Titan race of gods to the Olympians – and particularly with the sun god Hyperion, the last powerful Titan who was to be superseded by Apollo (god of sun, music, and poetry).
The piece is divided into three sections that depict Keats’s atmospheric handling of each book. The first is an elegiac and static piece based on alternating tonic-subdominant pedals, depicting Saturn’s despair. In book 2, the original theme becomes the basis of a guitaristic riff evocative of contemporary metal music. Book 3 is based on the passacaglia form, wherein an ever-repeating theme serves as the foundation for the music's development.
Keats never completed the poem, and it was published cut off in mid-verse. My piece, likewise, ends unresolved.