Year: 2011/12

Orchestration: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet in B flat, bassoon, trumpet in B flat, tenor trombone, snare drum, tenor drum, piano, bass-baritone, violin and double bass.

Duration: ca. 17 minutes

Program Note:

These are settings of poetry selected from the Oxford Book of Comic Verse (1995), the New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1996) and other sources.

There are eleven settings of poems which together could almost be described as the libretto for a mini-opera in which a Prologue about Time leads in to the protagonist (or a third party) singing of infancy, youth, fighting in the Napoleonic (and other) Wars and ultimate closeness to death. A concluding Epilogue has the protagonist’s ghost wanting no part of any of it!