ABSTRACT
Published in the first year of the twenty-first century, William Bolcom’s From the Diary of Sally Hemings is fraught with underlying and unremitting incongruities that, paradoxically, serve to unify the song cycle. In the absence of any actual diary, Sandra Seaton’s libretto depicts a fictional first-person account of Hemings’s 38-year relationship with Thomas Jefferson following the early death of his wife—and her half-sister—Martha. Hemings was inherited by the Jeffersons upon the death of her and Martha’s father, and she was a teenager and 30 years Jefferson’s junior when, in Paris, an intimate relationship began that would last the rest of his lifetime. Seaton’s vignettes are animated by the conflict between deep human emotions, such as love and maternal purpose, and her protest against the societal realities that prevent parity between herself and Martha, and between Jefferson’s children with each of them. This incongruously dual self-identity persists and intensifies throughout the cycle, animated by musical manifestations of contradiction, especially harshly dissonant major sevenths and minor ninths, which are often marked as near-misses of octave doublings.
This chapter includes discussion of selected songs from the cycle’s first three parts, highlighting how musical and dramatic contradictions amplify one another. Part Four is the focus of the chapter’s last part, which draws synoptic, cyclic meaning from its many musical reprises. Adopting as a lens the idea of contradiction, this chapter offers performers a way of revealing interpretive meaning in the dense emotional layers of the protagonist’s hypothetical inner experience.
