Three Choral Pieces

The Miracle Tree (2022)
To Wed Again (2025)
This Going Hence (2024)

I first met Fiona Sampson on a train near Reading. We got on rather well, and she gave me a volume of her poetry. One poem, The Miracle Tree, made a particularly deep impression, and immediately the opening of a choral setting came to me. A decade later, in the middle of the Covid crisis, I suddenly knew how to finish it. Fiona’s verse is wonderfully suggestive when it comes to music, and I also deeply appreciate the way she uses imagery from religion and nature. The agony of Christ’s Passion fuses with the struggle of a fruit tree to fight its way from the soil, to emerge finally as a symbol of softly radiant hope.

Our garden in Herefordshire used to be an orchard. For my wife, Kate, and me it has become a sanctuary – a place where we work side by side and discover the quiet joy of being in tune with nature. Meeting, and then marrying Kate, has felt like a miracle. Like all miracles, it can be a little scary at times, but the sense that she has changed my life irrevocably for the good is as strong as ever, after more than thirty years. To Wed Again is a birthday present (Kate’s birthday is 21^st March), and I hope she will hear in it something of my gratitude for all she has done for me, and of how our garden embodies that.

Five years ago, I lost a much-valued friend, Karl Dannenbaum. We hadn’t known each other for very long, yet in that time we’d become close. We shared a love of music, poetry and philosophy, and I loved Karl’s gruff scepticism about some of the values that prevail in the business and political worlds. I was very touched indeed when the family asked me to speak at his funeral. During the service, I remembered Rilke’s poem about mortality and loss, Todes-Erfahrung (‘Experience of Death’) and decided to make my own translation. As I was working on it, music began to suggest itself and, before long, it had shaped itself into a substantial choral setting. I called it This Going Hence (from the first line of my translation), and on its journey it traverses a range of emotions that grief can stir in us. Ultimately though, I think the lasting feeling is one of gratitude.

Stephen Johnson