Emily Dickinson’s poetry becomes sound

The composer Kevin Puts has written a work for the prodigious string trio Time for Three and the outstanding singer Joyce DiDonato.

The sheer energy of this amazing ensemble jumps out at you right from the very first second. Nick Kendall draws his bow across the strings of his violin at a frenetic pace, as if he were trying to saw right through them; Charles Yang joins in on the second violin with powerful accents; and Ranaan Meyer provides the foundation on the double bass. Together they form the amazing ensemble Time for Three, and for the amazing project Emily – No Prisoner Be – which is making its German premiere as part of the Ruhrtriennale programme – they have joined forces with one of the greatest opera singers of our time, Joyce DiDonato, to honour one of the most important poets in literary history: Emily Dickinson. In short, an evening of superlatives.

The energy that radiates from their concert with poetry set to music can already be sensed in excerpts from the performance which are available online. As soon as you see them, it is immediately clear that this evening is best experienced live – because so many remarkable elements come together here and enhance one another.

On the one hand, of course, there is the unbroken enthusiasm for Emily Dickinson, who is now also being rediscovered as a queer icon, because her correspondence suggests that she was queer. Yet this is only one piece of the fascinating puzzle that makes up her life: during her lifetime, she received little recognition as a poet. She hardly ever left the area around Amherst, a small town in the US state of Massachusetts. There she was born in 1830 – and there she died a good 55 years later. At just under thirty, she withdrew to her childhood bedroom – supposedly for her own protection, and also to satisfy her deep need to write undisturbed.

Although she considered herself a poet, only seven of the approximately 1,800 poems she wrote were published during her lifetime. Her father, a lawyer and politician, provided his daughter with a comfortable and carefree family life. However, he stood in the way of the publication of her verses, which are socially critical, sometimes dark or so complex that they defy easy interpretation – as all great literature does. 

The composer and Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts is also a fan of Dickinson’s poetry. He wrote a series of settings of her poems for Time for Three and the soprano Joyce DiDonato, which were commissioned by the Bregenzer Festspiele. Puts himself stresses that he is by no means the first to do so. To his knowledge, there are more than 3,000 musical adaptations of her texts. But why not try a fresh approach? “Her work is literally begging to be sung. There is music in every line, in every word and in the spaces in between. It inspires rhythm, harmony, melody and musical atmosphere – it literally leaps off the page, making it impossible for composers to resist.”

“I didn’t hesitate for a second to sing the song cycle,” Joyce DiDonato said in an interview about the project. “My very first solo CD, which I recorded over 20 years ago, featured Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. When I discovered Dickinson back then, a whole new world opened up for me! The project with Kevin gave me the chance to rediscover them.” 

The cycle contains 24 poems, just like Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. Each one describes a “universe of its own”, says DiDonato. At times, the music has an impulsive quality, as in the opening track described above: They shut me up in Prose. At times it seems fragile or melancholic, as in “I was the slightest in the house”. The trio Time for Three can also play rock or country – and, above all, they can sing. They are a fantastic backing choir for the singer. Another special element in a special evening.

This article was published in the Ruhrtriennale Special edition of kultur.west.