Discography

Haddock’s Eyes was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which presented the premiere on May 2, 1986 in New York’s Allice Tully Hall. It is set to a portionof Chapter VIII of Through the Looking Glass, in which the White Knight rescues Alice from the Red Knight, who had made her his prisoner. In true Victorian fashion - a bow to the Savoy Operas?- Del Tredici has called the “White Knight’s Song (1)” a ‘patter’ song, the words splling out with increasing frenzy as the blissfully confused Knight careens from one hilariously cracked image to another.”

The musical setting is “funny, brusque and breathless- a kind of infernal perpetual mobile machine ever in danger of flying apart,” Del Tredici continues. “Only at the penultimate line, ‘That summer evening long ago’, does the music mellow. Indeed...this line becomes a crucial motif, bearing the listener again and again to the rapturous, bittersweet depths of Carrollian sentiment for child friends now grown, gone....”

However, the centerpiece of the work is not by Carroll but by one of his contemporaries, the poet Thomas Moore - a yearning, idyllic setting of “My Heart and Lute”, which Del Tredici designates as an aria. It is followed, in turn by a furious instrumental interlude; a return to the “White Knight’s Song”; and a final “Farewell” which makes effective, intertwining use of both the knight’s song and the aria.

Del Tredici has said that a composer’s primary objective in composing is to translate his personality into music. “I’ve been told that there is something childlike in my character. If that is true, then perhaps the compositions here [Steps and Haddock’s Eyes] can be said to represent two distinct sides of that child - something charming, something monstrous.”

Tim Page