First Tragedy for soprano, clarinet, and piano, was written in 1982 and revised ten years later. It is a sets a poem of the Vietnamese poet Trieu Vu, expressing the anguish a woman on the death of her husband in what is called in Vietnam the American war. Her anguish is expressed in harsh sounds, with sudden alternations of speech and song. A soft clarinet solo leads a quiet lullaby in E major, the first tonal music I had written in a long time. Atonality returns when, in the final song, the woman discovers that she is pregnant with the dead man’s child. Her torture yields to tenderness, and tonality returns as she expresses her hope that the unborn child will “try to “grow up like your father”, unaware of the tragic irony of her words.
This work was written in 1982, at a time and place where tonality was inconceivable; I was very anxious when I showed it to my teacher, Roger Sessions, himself a 12-tone composer. I pointed to the key signature of E major; and then he simply said in his very deep voice, “who cares about that at this late date?” He was a wonderful teacher and composer.
First Tragedy was composed for Christine Schadeberg and the Voices of Change Ensemble of Dallas.