I first discovered Lili Boulanger’s “Clairières dans le ciel” sitting in my freshman dorm room on one of my art song deep dives (a.k.a. going on YouTube, starting at one video and clicking through the recommendations). It was love at first listen. I didn’t know the texts, but it touched me like no other music I had ever heard.

I had a similar experience with Handel’s “Tu del ciel ministro eletto” from Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. I distinctly remember stopping my homework after Sabine Devielhe’s first heavenly phrase to watch the piece unfold. She, Bellezza, sang, clothes tattered, mascara running down her face, and in the depths of my depression, I found hope. I knew that this was the music I wanted to sing for the rest of my life, and I knew that this was the way I wanted to affect people when I sang.

I decided to pair these two pieces not just because they are both about sky, but because they represent to me an endless cycle of healing and heartbreak. We are born pure, fall in love, experience heartbreak, and must heal in order to love again, a rebirth of sorts. I am beginning from that rebirth with Bellezza’s final aria. She has experienced intense joy and then fallen, and is now asking for forgiveness, promising to devote her life to good for the rest of her life. We then move on to “Clairières dans le ciel,” Lili Boulanger’s masterpiece in song, tracing how we came to relinquish all worldly things. It traces from the very first time the singer sees his beloved to the comfort that he finds when they are together, to losing her. This lowest of lows is what leads the singer to seek spiritual rebirth, to ask for a new heart. And the cycle continues.

How is it that we continually pursue love when we know that it may very well lead to heartbreak? Is the world’s greatest joy worth the world’s worst pain?

I leave you with a poem, which I feel encapsulates this recital:

New Heart

by Federico García Lorca

Like a snake, my heart has shed its skin. I hold it there in my hand, full of honey and wounds. The thoughts that nested in your folds, where are they now? Where the roses that perfumed both Jesus Christ and Satan Poor wrapper that damped my fantastical star, parchment gray and mournful of what I loved once but love no more! I see fetal sciences in you, mummified poems and bones of my romantic secrets and old innocence. Shall I hang you on the wall of my emotional museum, beside my dark, chill, sleeping irises of my evil? Or shall I spread you over the pines –suffering book of my love– so you can learn about the song the nightingale offers the dawn?