music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Three Baudelaire Songs 2015 soprano piano duration 14'  SCORE The Stranger intoxication The Gifts of the Moon TEXTS The Stranger Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best?  Your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother? "I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother."  Your friends, then?  "You use a word that has no meaning for me."  Your country?  "I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situated."  Beauty?  "Her I would love willingly"  Gold?  "I hate it as you hate God."  What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?  "I love the clouds—the clouds that pass—the marvellous clouds." Intoxication  One must be for ever drunk: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not  feel the horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth,  you must be drunk without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with  what you please. But be drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green  grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should wake up, your  ntoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the  bird, of the timepiece, of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings,  ll that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece  will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunk! Lest you be the martyred slave of Time,  intoxicate yourself, be drunk without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue,  or with what you will."  The Gifts of the Moon  The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the window as you slept in your cradle,  and said to herself: "I am well pleased with this child."  And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and passed through the window-pane  without noise. She bent over you with the supple tenderness of a mother and laid her  colors upon your face. So your eyes have remained green and your cheeks pale. From  contemplation of your visitor your eyes are so strangely wide; and she so tenderly wounded  you upon the breast that you have ever kept a certain readiness to tears.  In her joy, the Moon filled your chamber with a phosphorescent air, a luminous poison;  and this living radiance thought, "You shall be for ever under the influence of my kiss.  You shall love all that loves me and that I love: clouds, and silence, and night; the vast  green sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where you are not; the lover  you will never know; monstrous flowers, and perfumes that bring madness; cats that  stretch themselves swooning upon the piano and lament with sweet, hoarse voices.  "And you shall be loved of my lovers, courted of my courtesans. You shall be the Queen  of men with green eyes, whose breasts also have I wounded in my nocturnal caress:  men that love the sea, the immense green ungovernable sea; the unformed and  multitudinous waters; the place where they are not; the woman they will never know;  sinister flowers that seem to bear the incense of some unknown religion; perfumes that  trouble the will; and all savage and voluptuous animals, images of their own folly."  And that is why I am couched at your feet, O spoiled child, beloved,  accursed, seeking in you the reflection of that august divinity, that  prophetic godmother, that poisonous nurse of all lunatics. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) adapted translations by James Huneker (1919)