In May, a piece commissioned by The Golden Bridge, is written as a contrasting companion piece to Thomas Morley’s joyous madrigal Now is the Month of Maying.

This piece sets Paul Laurence Dunbar’s A Golden Day, a poem that captures the multilayered emotions associated with remembering a lost love. Dunbar’s text is then interrupted by Heinrich Heine’s Im wunderschönen Monat Mai (most famously set by Robert Schumann in his Dichterliebe song cycle), launching into the dream-like state of “remembering the good times.” We are then transported back to loss and grief, as Dunbar’s text is juxtaposed with a repeated Verlangen — “longing” or “desire” — indicating that one has not quite moved on from this state of lost love.