The Wishing Tree —1999
The evening’s major musical work was the world premiere of Robert Maggio’s The Wishing Tree, set to a poem of the same name by Seamus Heaney. It’s a touching text that deals with the death of the poet’s mother, and the young composer, who teaches at West Chester University, has responded to it with one of the loveliest new works of choral music that I’ve heard in many a season.
– Michael Caruso, Chestnut Hill Local
Text
I thought of her as the wishing tree that died
And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven,
Trailing a shower of all that had been driven
Need by need by need into its hale
Sap-wood and bark: coin and pin and nail
Came streaming from it like a comet-tail
New-minted and dissolved. I had a vision
Of an airy branch-head rising through damp cloud,
Of turned-up faces where the tree had stood.
Seamus Heaney
Reviews
Besides singing the premiere of a commissioned work by Robert Maggio, the Choral Arts Society reminded its audience Friday at the Trinity Center of the wealth and vigor of American music for choruses. Maggio’s The Wishing Tree introduced half a program of music by Irving Fine, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Charles Ives.
Maggio, the 36-year-old composer who studied at the University of Pennsylvania, used a 15-line poem that Seamus Heaney wrote on the death of his mother. The poet’s imagery of a dead tree rising through the heavens gave the composer a structure that began in the plainness of a single tone, broadened to dense clouds of sound, and vanished in a sigh as singers intoned ‘Amen.’
The writing is movingly succinct. The men sing the opening in unison, then add notes above and below as the emotion intensifies. The simplicity of the line gave the work its strength, and Maggio’s introduction of a soprano (Astrid Caruso) singing high above a dense chord made his change of voice in the Latin text, “Lux Aeterna,” which closes the poem, seem inevitable. The work’s clear movement, panoply of shaded sound, and bonding of text and note raised its communicative power.
Daniel Webster, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 2000
The evening’s major musical work was the world premiere of Robert Maggio’s The Wishing Tree, set to a poem of the same name by Seamus Heaney. It’s a touching text that deals with the death of the poet’s mother, and the young composer, who teaches at West Chester University, has responded to it with one of the loveliest new works of choral music that I’ve heard in many a season. The music begins on one note and then expands into a broadly chromatic sea of shifting tonality that never fails to clearly project the words while enhancing their inner meaning. Maggio’s rhythmic setting of the words is incredibly supple, especially at the score’s finale when he adds on to the poem the traditional Latin text: ‘Lux aeterna luceat eis’ (Let eternal light shine on them). It was an effect both stunning and soothing.
Donald Nally led the Choral Arts Society in a performance of The Wishing Tree typical of what has become the hallmark of his style—immaculately conceived and controlled textures, exquisitely clear diction, the broadest palette of dynamics, precisely elegant phrasing and a spirituality that goes far beyond the mere superficial meaning of the text to communicate the inspiration that brought about both the poem and its music in the first place.
Michael Caruso, Chestnut Hill Local, May 25, 2000
It was a parade of 20th century American music featuring great names—Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and Charles Ives—and a new work by the promising Robert Maggio. ‘The Wishing Tree,’ set to a poem by Seamus Heaney, is about death as a release. The music is more haunting and mysterious than reassuring. But that fits Heaney—an agnostic with no confidence in an afterlife.
Dick Saunders, Main Line Times, June 1, 2000
