Nico
Muhly,

Commissioned by Britten Sinfonia, Muziekcentrum Frits Philips and Tapiola Sinfonietta.
Britten Sinfonia is grateful to Arts Council England for making this commission possible.

PART I THE HEREAFTER (1892)
I believe in the Hereafter. Material appetites or love for the real don’t beguile me. It’s not habit but instinct. The heavenly word will be added
to life’s imperfect sentence, otherwise inane. Respite and reward will follow upon action. When sight is forevermore closed to Creation,
the eye will be opened in the presence of the Creator. An immortal wave of life will flow from each and every Gospel of Christ—wave of life uninterrupted.

NEAR AN OPEN WINDOW
In the stillness of an autumn night, I sit near an open window, for entire hours, in a perfect, voluptuous tranquility.
The gentle rainfall of the leaves descends.
The keening of the perishable world resounds within my perishable nature,
but is a dulcet keening, rising like a prayer. My window opens up an unknown world. A fount of fragrant memories, unutterable, appears before me.
Against my window wings are beating—chill autumnal exhalations
approach me and encircle me and in their holy tongue they speak to me.
I feel vague and wide-embracing hopes; and in the hallowed silence of creation, my ears hear melodies,
hear the crystalline, the mystic music of the chorus of the stars.

PART II SEPTEMBER OF 1903 (1904)
At least let me be deceived by delusions, now, so that I might not feel my empty life. And I was so close so many times. And how I froze, and how I was afraid;
why should I remain with lips shut tight; while within me weeps my empty life, and my longings wear their mourning black. To be, so many times, so close
to the eyes, and to the sensual lips, to the dreamed of, beloved body. To be, so many times, so close.

JANUARY OF 1904 (1904)
Ah this January, this January’s nights,
when I sit and refashion in my thoughts those moments and I come upon you, and I hear our final words, and hear the first.
This January’s despairing nights, when the vision goes and leaves me all alone. How swiftly it departs and melts away— the trees go, the streets go, the houses go, the lights go: it fades and disappears, your erotic shape.
PART III 27 JUNE 1906, 2 P. M. (1908)
When the Christians brought him to be hanged, the innocent boy of seventeen, his mother, who there beside the scaffold had dragged herself and lay beaten on the ground beneath the midday sun, the savage sun,
now would moan, and howl like a wolf, a beast, and then the martyr, overcome, would keen “Seventeen years only you lived with me, my child.” And when they took him up the scaffold’s steps and passed the rope around him and strangled him, the innocent boy, seventeen years old,
and piteously it hung inside the void, with the spasms of black agony— the youthful body, beautifully wrought— his mother, martyr, wallowed on the ground and now she keened no more about his years: “Seventeen days only,” she keened, “seventeen days only I had joy of you, my child.”

IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (1897)
There is one joy alone, but one that’s blessed, one consolation only in this pain. How many thronging tawdry days were missed because of this ending; how much ennui.
A poet has said: “The loveliest music is the one that cannot be played.” And I, I daresay that by far the best life is the one that cannot be lived.
—C.P. CAVAFY
translated by Daniel Mendelsohn