The work Puluseni for soprano and 14-string theorbo is made to be performed together with a song set to te same text – Bist du bei mir from Heinrich Göttfried Stölzel’s lost opera Diomedes, which was made known by J.S. Bach and published in the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. This was the idea behind the commission by Detritus – they commissioned multiple contemporary composers to reinterpret well-kown texts from songs traditionally performed with lute accompaniment.
Whenever possible, the pieces Puluseni and the original Bist du bei mir should always be performed in succession so that Bist du bei mir is performed first and Puluseni second. Bist du bei mir should be performed in the key of C major to avoid the nœeed for retuning between the two songs.
Performed together, the two songs last for ~10 minutes.
Programme note
Baroque-fusion ensemble Detritus's ”Greatest hits” -song series combines two musical genres at the margin of the marginal genre: early Baroque and contemporary art music. The new works commissioned by them, together with their early Baroque counterparts, form a series that combines some of the most beloved songs of the past for soprano and theorbo continuo, and completely new songs, upcoming hits that use the same text.
My own addition to the series is called Puluseni, which is a gritty and nihilistic interpretation of the original text that I chose. You see, the text “Bist du bei mir” from Heinrich Gottfried Stölzel's lost opera Diomedes, is the ultimate declaration of love, a pathoxic ballad whose narrator gloats even death if only his loved one was the one to close their eyes.
Listening to such a story from todays perspective, that relationship might be deemed quite unhealthy. At its extremes, emotions are a double-edged sword and this is exactly what my interpretation of the story that preceded me more than 300 years is all about. Puluseni glides around the fading tree branches of the love-blinded human mind: in the distance, you can hear the cooing of the crow of infatuation, you see the linnet of love circling the hawfinch of hatred and above it all wanders the malevolent pigeon of obsession.