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GEORGE ZERVOS
Grodek for Sopranο and Orchestra
EPN 1389
ISMN 979-0-69151-819-9
Size: 235 x 320 mm
Pages: 60
Nature is ubiquitous in Georg Trakl’s poetry. However, it is not the nature of romanticism that he is interested in, nor the nature that traditional lyric poetry celebrates. As the poet Andreas Aggelakis rightly points out in his introduction to the translation of poems by Trakl and Hermann Hesse, nature here «takes on a metaphysical, almost demonic dimension». This dimension is also embossed in “Grodek”, the last poem that Trakl wrote before committing suicide in 1914 in a hospital in Krakow. The poem reflects on the horrors of World War I, which the poet closely experienced while serving in the Army Sanitary Corps.
In this specific poem, nature is transformed into a vast landscape of death (as a result of the war), lined with the dark and threatening shadows of the poet’s expressionist writing. It is these two elements -nature and death- that I try to combine in the setting of the poem, which, although seemingly opposite, coexist in Trakl’s work. Both nature and death are constant motifs in almost all of Trakl’s poems; more precisely, natural phenomena constitute images and metaphors of an inner experience of real death. Thus, from a purely compositional point of view, in this work the separate «innocent» elements of nature and the corresponding «dark» elements of death (in the form of melodic-rhythmic motifs) are intertwined, and together they gradually lead to a climax announcing the last sentence of the last verse of the poem, «…those who have not yet been born.»
The work is dedicated to the soprano Lenia Zafeiropoulou and to the composer and conductor Theodoros Antoniou, who commissioned the work.
George Zervos
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