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Work


Love Sonnets of Michelangelo

for soprano, mezzo-soprano, spoken voice and a dancer

Year:  1982   ·  Duration:  13m

Year:  1982
Duration:  13m

Jack Body
Composer

Composer:   Jack Body

Films, Audio & Samples

Jack Body: V from Love Sonn...

Embedded video
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Sample Score

Sample: Page 1 (handwritten version)

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Sample Score

Sample: page 1 of score (typeset version)

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Sample Video

Sample: Excerpt: Michael Parmenter, Jack Body and Linden Loader

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Borrow/Hire:

To borrow items or hire parts please email SOUNZ directly at info@sounz.org.nz.

About

The Love Sonnets of Michelangelo I wrote for Michael Parmenter, with whom I worked on a programme entitled Between Two Fires (also included was a dance-theatre work I created collaboratively with Michael, using his voice as well as his body, with imagery extracted from the diaries of Franz Kafka.) At the time I was focused on different styles of melody, having just completed my Five Melodies for Piano. Inspired by the lovely voices of some of the then current students in our School of Music, I felt that women's voices gave the expressive quality I wanted, as well as providing a useful 'cover' for the overtly homo-erotic tenor of the texts. The original production used film, shot by my good friend Bayley Watson, showed the dancer's prostrate figure, swathed in bandages. As the performance unfolded the cloth was gradually cut and peeled back by hands belonging to an old man whose face we never saw, the intended metaphor being of the sculptor cutting away marble to reveal the male form that he sensed already existed within the stone.

The work has since had other performances that have discarded the theatrical elements, most successfully when each setting is prefaced by a reading of the poem in translation.

These settings of some of Michelangelo Buonarroti's most personal sonnets articulate the anguish of love and desire, as well as the despair of old age. The musical style combines the theatricality of Italian bel canto with the direct expressivity of folksong.


Contents note

Seven songs


Text note

Texts by Michelangelo


Performance history

09 May 2015: Performed by Baroque Voices, director Pepe Becker, at St Joseph's Church, Wellington.

24 May 2015: Jack Body Memorial Concert

Performed by Linden Loader (mezzo-soprano) and Karen Heathcote (soprano)

Performed by Baroque Voices in July 2001

I: Love Sonnets of Michelangelo; Parmenter, Body, Loader, Heathcote

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