ABSTRACT
The early poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay notoriously embodies the “New Woman” persona of the 1920s Jazz Age: independent, empowered, brazenly promiscuous, and unburdened by the past. But in his 1990 song cycle Wasting the Night, the American composer Scott Wheeler filtered five of Millay’s poems through a more sentimental, wistful, and nostalgic lens informed by his conception of mid-Twentieth-century cabaret songs by Mabel Mercer, Blossom Dearie, and André Previn. In this chapter, I analyze Wheeler’s cycle to show how the composer unifies the disparate voices and critical perspectives of Millay’s poetry into a single narrative centered on an idealized memory of a lovers’ night on the town. After examining Millay’s poems in their original context, I show how Wheeler’s music transforms them partly by means of musical cross-references that recall the Romantic song cycle and its treatment of the psychology of memory, particularly Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. My analysis demonstrates how Wheeler’s cycle thus reveals a similarity between the heroine of Frauenliebe, the traditional nineteenth-century figure of the Poetess (vs. the modern New Woman), and the mid-Twentieth-century cabaret diva. His cycle serves as an uncanny reminder of an antiquated form of sentimentality whose power lingers on even today.
