Text: Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love,
which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever fix-ed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken,
It is the star to ev’ry wand’ring barque,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come,
Love alters not, with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, and no man ever loved.
PDF: Sonnet_116_Let_Me_Not-sample.pdf
As is the case with Rise Up, My Love and Beyond the Mirror, Let Me Not is a family affair. It was a special wedding gift for my son Adam and his bride, Ewa Tomaszewska, who were married August 12, 2017. I began the piece late in 2016 and completed it on February 28, 2017. Conveniently, my wife Carol, my other children Rebecca and Josh, and I could manage the SATB ranges respectively, though I was careful not to impose really high notes on any part.
We rehearsed the afternoon of the wedding and sang the piece the next afternoon at the “after-party.”
Though the basic structure is that of a Renaissance madrigal, I followed the flow of the text where its stresses varied from the strictures of iambic pentameter. The first three bars are in three different meters, and the meter doesn’t settle down for good to 4/4 until the final five bars.
Likewise, the harmony begins in Renaissance fashion but veers into dissonance as the obstacles to love appear; after a cadence to B major, it’s back to the Renaissance and the initial A major tonality.