Concerning The Inevitable

Scoring: Baritone & Piano
(or chamber ensemble: Bb clarinet, french horn, harp, violin, viola, 'cello)
Written: Manchester, UK (2005); revised: Tonbridge, UK (2024)
Duration: 10'15
Publisher: unpublished
Cost: N/A

This song cycle sets six poems by W.H. Auden, all of which can be interpreted as taking death for the subject matter, and was written for fellow undergraduate, baritone Marcus Farnsworth, when Jim was in his final year at university.

Poems by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

1. Prologue
Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
Short in the leg and broad in the rump,
An endomorph with gentle hands
Who'll never make absurd demands
That I abandon all my vices,
Nor pull a long face in a crisis,
But, with a twinkle in his eye,
Will tell me that I have to die.

2. Epitaph
To save your world you asked this man to die:
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

3. Commemoration
Let us honour, if we can,
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

4. Interlude

5. Lost
Lost on a fog-bound spit of sand
In shoes that pinched me, close at hand
I heard the 'plash of Charon's oar
Who ferries no-one to a happy shore.

6. Interlude

7. Limerick
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well-hung.

8. Epilogue
What is Death? A life
Disintegrating into
Smaller, simpler ones.