About the creation

The Song of Songs, traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, is a collection of ancient Hebrew love verses and wedding songs. I am ever amazed by the vast emotional scope of these verses: from the simple love of Nature, through the playful, innocent, childlike love of boy and girl, up to the heights of passionate, tragic, sexual love.

For the present cycle I chose six groups of verses, all of them monologues expressing the female side of Love. After the first three movements, rather playful than passionate, comes the first climax in the fourth movement, with its outspoken passionate sexuality. The second climax comes in the last movement with the words "…for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave". The music here is a reminder of the first climax. Immediately follows the catharsis in the last verse, with the playful words "Make haste, my beloved, be thou like a roe…upon mountains of spices."      

In my setting, I tried to make the best out of the sonorities and the rhythms of the Hebrew text.

Yehezkel Braun