American composers have been obsessed with Emily Dickinson. Her poetry contains so much more than appears on its unassuming surfaces, so much impacted passion and fiercely penetrating observation that it seems to cry out for musical reinforcement, and it is hard to think of an equivalent English writer (Housman perhaps?) who has been so extensively explored by composers here.
That whole spectrum of Dickinson settings, spanning most of the 20th century, was the starting point for Voyager: "My business is to love", an evening of Dickinson settings interspersed with extracts from her poems and diaries, which had been put together by the soprano Renée Fleming, with the linking text compiled by William Luce. Fleming sang (17 songs altogether, accompanied by Helen Yorke) and Claire Bloom read, within a kind of semi-theatrical framework directed by Charles Nelson Reilly.
It was all done with the best of intentions. But the stagey little exchanges between singer and actress were sometimes cringingly twee, and though Dickinson is a great poet of almost iconic significance in the United States this didn't tell us anything that we didn't know about the music she has inspired, except that an awful lot of it is second rate. When the words themselves are so scarily unassuming, it's all too tempting for composers to try to unpack all that compressed intensity in grand gestures which only destroy the words they love. Settings by Ricky Lee Gordon, Robert Beaser, Lee Hoiby and Jake Heggie added nothing and took away quite a lot, while those by André Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas were more conscientious, though in the end no more revealing.
One tiny song by Ned Rorem did catch the spirit more faithfully, but there is one Dickinson masterpiece, Aaron Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, composed in the late 1940s, and Fleming included three of those songs in her sequence. They towered over everything else in the programme in their directness, their perfect meshing of poetic tension with the music, and their self-effacing willingness to put the words first. Fleming delivered them lustrously, as she did all her contributions, but had she just sung the whole cycle and nothing else, we could all have gone home an hour and a half earlier and learnt far more about Dickinson - and music as well.
