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Cleopatra
1990
soprano
piano
duration 18'
first performance
Dominique Labelle and Kathleen Supové
Emmanuel Library, Boston / September 27, 1990
SCORE
Winged by My Multi-feathered Flexed Knees
I Scatter Before You Like Pollen
The Lover's Total Death in Your Cool Limbs
The Moon Rises Over Your Left Shoulder
But Beware, Beloved, Ptolemy Women Engender Violence
O Friendly Enemy, We Have Loved
And So Love Passed Through a Nude Woman
RECORDING
available at www//andyvores.bandcamp.com
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PROGRAM NOTE
Cleopatra sets eight poems from Barbara Chase- Riboud's cycle Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra. These are intensely erotic poems in which Cleopatra and Mark Antony map out their passion for each other. The poems I have set are all spoken by Cleopatra and there is a palpable sense of danger in them; the danger of losing all control, of self- destruction. The poems are set in four groups of two, each set of two beginning with declamatory recitative-like music, and the first two groups of two beginning with fiery, thick-textured piano solos.
REVIEW
Labelle closed with honor by singing a work by a composer of her own generation, Andrew Vores. In 1989 Vores took seven steamy sonnets about Cleopatra by Barbara Chase-Riboud and created this cycle for Labelle. It a remarkable work, vigorous in gesture, imaginatively interconnected, exotic in color—there's many a long oriental melisma to characterize Cleopatra's spell, and there is humor in it too, when the Queen relates the murderous history of her family. The songs exploit everything Labelle's voice can do, maybe testing the high notes a few times too often (although who could blame Vores for that); the one flaw is the abrupt end—history is right in favoring either spangled glory or an indrawing hush at the close.
Richard Dyer • The Boston Globe
TEXTS
Winged by my multifeathered flexed knees,
Soft down'd in peacock colors,
My triangle pressed against your chest,
Connecting the three points of your flesh's compass,
A nude woman flies South towards Summer–
As the swallow flies,
By degree and nature
Crowned and earring'd by love,
My hair a ragged river flowing
Towards your sea–black tributaries
Raking your beaches, where in the
Turquoise-veined granite of Hammamet
I build my monument.
* *
I scatter before you like pollen
Opening like a boulevard of Lebanon cedars,
Leaflets of other loves fluttering in a cyclone of chariots
My eyes, no longer rimmed with kohl,
Stare blankly into hurricaned space.
The twin asps of desire and despair
Glisten in polished armor at each breast.
You are smeared with my ash,
Your forehead marked
With my sacrificial sign,
Its white imprint rising like hieroglyphics.
Ah, beloved Incense burner,
Trailing the burnt-out cinders
Of your Exits and Entrances.
* *
The lover's total death in your cool limbs
pale and doomed and it seems without life
Clutching my flanks like a drowned man,
Know that I love you,
That door after door will open for you,
That avenue after avenue will part for you,
That continent after continent will divide for you.
The equatorial heat of Africa is nothing compared to
The heat of my Ptoleminian blood, rich and prancing,
Made for passion's diadem,
Love's ardors dried, like a garland round my hips.
I dream myself back into the night and pull the hair
Out of your shaggy breast until you cry out
Knowing that I love you.
* *
The moon rises over your left shoulder
Ah, night beauty, did we love in other lives?
Haunted since Persepolis by this invention?
Your face hungry lives
A hundred incarnations under mine,
Hair frayed like a winter chrysanthemum,
Golden eagle! Blue steel under pale lashes,
Antonius! Three centuries since Alexander
Haven´t changed you–I know you! This is not
The first thunder but a thousand-year recognition!
I remember you from the young planet,
King of Macedon and godson of Caesar.
Like your soldiers, I would as soon die for you
As dine at Amimetobioi.
* *
But beware, beloved, Ptolemy women engender violence,
Command money, men, and manumission.
Cleopatra revels in infanticide, regicide, and patricide.
Ptolemy the builder of the museum fathered
Ptolemy II, who exiled his wife to marry his sister.
Ptolemy IV murdered his father, brother, and mother;
Married his sister but murdered her.
Ptolemy V married his sister but murdered her.
Ptolemy VI, who married his sister Cleopatra, who
Married both her two brothers, of which one brother,
Ptolemy VIII, murdered his child by Cleopatra out of
Vengeance on this wife and sister when she became queen.
He then married his wife Cleopatra's daughter by her
Second husband, his brother and she, his niece.
Ptolemy VII, murdered by his father and uncle, who had
Married his mother, who was also his sister, whom he
Murdered on her wedding night, was also brother to
Ptolemy IX, the other son murdered by his father,
Or his aunt, or his half-sister.
Ptolemy X married his sister Cleopatra, but
Ptolemy XI murdered his mother Cleopatra.
Ptolemy XII married his cousin Cleopatra but murdered
Her and was himself murdered by the people.
Ptolemy X, a son of Ptolemy XII, fathered a
Cleopatra whom he murdered to regain the throne,
Leaving this Cleopatra beside you and her two brothers,
Ptolemy XIV, who drowned fleeing a lost battle, and
Ptolemy XV, whom I, Cleopatra, married and murdered.
* *
O friendly enemy, we have loved,
Loin and haunch, limb and flank, truth and lies,
Tressed like a pair of ancient Armenian vines
Grown together root and branch in stunted
Commingling without End or Beginning.
If we part, you will leave with half of me,
Or I with half of you, and nothing will kill
The pain of dismembering.
That ache like some rare jewel
Will hang round our necks to touch,
In tender tremulance, an old wound of amputation
That burns and groans in limbs no longer existent
But splintered and crushed
In some long-forgotten and useless War.
* *
And so love passed through a Nude Woman.
My sun was in your moon, astrologically fixed forever
In the universe of your faithlessness,
My spirit distilled in your flame
To pure sapphire-veined gold.
The fanatic is gone,
The formula, acid-engraved on my soul,
My heart a glowing coal, fiances hotly with Galaxies,
Liver and spleen pure rock-crystal,
My body a transmitter of rare and charged
Energy from distant planets while
Our milky ways curse and rumble
On the edge of space, violent configurations
Of the End of Earth.
Barbara Chase-Riboud (b.1939)