ABSTRACT
How can music convey the idea of “mature love”? In selecting texts for Sonnets from the Portuguese, Libby Larsen and her collaborator, soprano Arleen Auger, sought a grouping of six from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous poems that emphasized this concept. In Larsen’s quest for a song cycle that represents “growth in mature love,” repetitions play a crucial role in the musical depiction of a “mature love” rooted in memories and nostalgia. This growth follows a trajectory in which we are introduced to the protagonist’s past in the first movement, we confront her powerful love in the second and third movements, we wrestle with her creeping doubt in the fourth movement, and we overcome that doubt in the fifth movement before confirming the immeasurable immensity of the protagonist’s love in the sixth movement—a love that can only be counted by the dimensions of her own bygone joys and sorrows. At every step of the way, the narrator is confronted by her own past, and she ultimately realizes in the last movement that the trials of that past are the path that leads her to find love in the present.
