by Naomi Andre
Sally’s world was by necessity an indoor, protected, rather quiet one, and the spareness of Sandra’s language for Sally, just what I’d hoped for, is answered by a stylistic sobriety in my own music. I opted for a harmonically plain language with a somewhat French atmosphere (evoking Hemings’s Paris sojourn), with African American melodic references well to the background.49
Bolcom continues, referring to how he saw the character of Hemmings and shaped his presentation of her.
I did not want to fall into the expected cliché in so much work I’d seen on Sally. She was not a cardboard icon, standing for a group. In every way she was unique, an individual; otherwise, how could she have fascinated someone like Jefferson for thirty-eight years?50
Indeed, Bolcom was pleased with Seaton’s text and felt that she had given him
a Sally Hemings I could believe in, one that sings. I feel that Sandra has given us as much of a portrait of the real Sally as we’ll ever have. … [this Sally was] someone we sense is there, a living presence capable of great dignity and depth—articulate, restrained, and fearless.51
In the score to From the Diary of Sally Hemings, the description is “Eighteen Songs for Medium Voice and Piano.” Originally written for Florence Quivar, a noted mezzosoprano with a rich and warm sound, the compact disc recording is with Alyson Cambridge, a soprano with a higher and lighter voice; the music fit both voices well and indicates that the work may be performed by most mezzos and sopranos alike.
From the Diary of Sally Hemings is a work that spans musical genre. It can be called a song cycle, since it involves a solo singer and a pianist and is not staged. The dramatic elements across the songs form miniature scenes that feel operatic more often than part of a Lieder recital. There are eighteen songs of various lengths divided into four unequal parts. These song titles are the first line of the song, with the exception of the final song (#18), which has the three subsections noted in the table of contents in the piano-vocal score (see Chart 3.2).52
Chart 3.2. Organization of From the Diary of Sally Hemings in the Musical Score
Part 1
1. They say I was born old
2. Martha and Maria
3. White waves
4. Paris, c’est la ville vivante
5. The master brings music to his sitting room
6. I was carrying a tray when he called me
Part 2
7. They say I was born old
8. Come back to America
9. Back home at Monticello
10. Purple Hyacinth begins to bloom
11. My sister ghost
Part 3
12. Peonies, a perfume box
13. Mister, our child is frail
14. A dark winter blue-black evening
15. Old shoe! Old shoe!
Part 4
16. A wild man home from the woods
17. Papers!
18. Night watch till early morn
Note: Italics are quotations from Jefferson’s writings.
The text from the Michigan Quarterly Review contains fifteen sections. From here on, I will refer to the eighteen “songs” in the piano score as “sections,” since my focus is on how From the Diary of Sally Hemings functions as a collection of mini-scenes, part of a larger work that feels more operatic. Later, I discuss the work as a “monodrama,” a type of one-character opera or solo opera. This is not to dispute that the work can function as a song cycle; my analysis here focuses on the larger dramatic and generic scheme of the work.
As Chart 3.2 indicates, the eighteen sections are divided into four parts, from the largest number of sections to the fewest, from six in part 1 to three in part 4. However, most of the sections are around two minutes with the exception of #11, “My sister ghost” (4:12 minutes) and the finale to the cycle (#18) “Night watch till early morn,” at nearly nine minutes. Part 3 is the shortest, and though the first half (consisting of parts 1 and 2) is longer than the second half (parts 3 and 4), the “weight” of the cycle feels most intense in the second half, especially in the finale (#18), a consequence of its length and the reminiscent text and music from earlier in the work that is quoted in it. In terms of the dramatic effect, the final sections of part 2 (#11, “My sister ghost”) and part 4 (#18, “Night watch till early morn”) are the longest, and they give the work a feeling of the conclusion of a first half and the finale in a second half—almost like a larger sung drama that divides the pacing into two large groupings, parts 1–2 and parts 3–4. In performance, the work consumes a little under forty-five minutes, with parts 1–2 lasting about twenty-three minutes and parts 3–4 lasting around twenty-one minutes.53 Despite the layout of the score as a work in four parts, dramatically in performance, the experience is more like a larger work divided into two halves. Given this dramatic pacing, these two parts could also be experienced as two interconnected sections of a one-act opera.
In terms of genre, the piece feels more like a dramatic work, minus the stage direction and acting, than a song cycle. While the intimacy of a song cycle is achieved through the setting for a solo singer and pianist, the dimensions of that genre are expanded as the piano takes on varied roles beyond an accompaniment that provides harmonic support and an atmospheric mood. The piano comments on the action and speaks as an additional voice that quotes previous material in the same and altered forms. The piano provides a sonic environment that is sometimes a simple thematic accompaniment (such as the opening of the work) and sometimes a diegetic voice that responds to the singer’s text. When Jefferson asks for “a little music please,” the piano plays three measures adapted from Mozart’s song “Das Veilchen” K. 476 an octave higher, referencing an eighteenth-century harpsichord sound (#12, measures 21–24).54 At times the piano looks more like an orchestral reduction with chords that punctuate recitative (for example, portions of #12 and #15), or assumes an adaptive orchestral role as though accompanying a narrative scene, such as in #3, “White Waves,” in the story of Sally’s grandmother’s (Susannah Epps—though not named) abduction into slavery with her life in Africa (“Dahomey child” measures 13–64) and Sally’s juxtaposition of her own “voyage of a different sort” (measures 65–78) to Paris, a trip that could have provided her freedom. Vocally, the singer gets to perform in ways that encompass the style of the Lied as well as the wider expanse of the drama of opera. Though she is always “Sally,” her voice also takes on the roles of Jefferson, a narrator, her mother Elizabeth Hemings, and once in the opening number the voice of Mistress Jefferson (her half-sister Martha on her deathbed), who all pull the story together. There are numbers in this work that feel like small pieces; arguably, these could be experienced as diegetic moments (songs in the larger picture), and there are sections that are narratives and dramatic scenes. With all of these types of pieces, the whole feels like a larger work that falls in between and challenges traditional generic designations.
Thinking about Genre
From its early reception, From the Diary of Sally Hemings has hovered between genres. After hearing a performance by Florence Quivar (the singer who commissioned and premiered the work), music critic and scholar Paul Horsley noted, “Quivar’s velvet voice and experienced dramatic touch made this piece seem more like a miniature opera than a song cycle. Pianist J. J. Penna made the intricate accompaniment seem like a well-crafted narrative.”55 Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette reviewed a performance of From the Diary of Sally Hemings by Alyson Cambridge, in a recital from 2010, where she calls the work “an evocative and gripping text that creates less a song cycle than a monodrama.” Later on, Midgette continues,
Cambridge entered the fray geared far more to the idea of “monodrama” than “simplicity.” She clearly meant the whole evening to be Serious and approached it with an operatic sensibility, starting with a big fortissimo in the first section of the work, in a passage describing a memory from Hemings’s earliest childhood. She certainly sold the piece, singing it from memory and commitment.56
These references to genre, as a monodrama, and the way in which Cambridge performed the work are telling. Cambridge has become close to the work as she collaborated with Bolcom and Seaton during the recording of the piece in 2010 (on the White Pine Music label). As a regular singer at the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, and other opera houses, Midgette’s review cites how Cambridge performed it from memory with “an operatic sensibility.” Calling the work a “monodrama” feels right in terms of genre. Such a designation has a specific music lineage, described in modern times (after its use in the eighteenth century) as being “most often used as a synonym for a one-character opera, as in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Poulenc’s La voix humaine (1958).”57 In more casual conversations with Sandra Seaton and Bill Bolcom, I have heard them both refer to From the Diary of Sally Hemings as a “solo opera.”
The connections between Arnold Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung, Poulenc’s La voix Humaine and From the Diary of Sally Hemings can be seen to go a little deeper. Though the three are quite different, each is performed by a central female protagonist who is caught in midst of memories and thoughts about a relationship we know very little about. We see Poulenc’s Elle (“She” in French) in a one-sided phone conversation with her former lover and learn of her depression and attempted suicide the night before. After suspecting him of infidelity, Elle, at the end of the work, is in bed with the phone and its cord wrapped around her neck, murmuring “Je t’aime” (“I love you”) into the mouthpiece. It is unclear if this is another attempted suicide or if the protagonist finds some momentary comfort in her uncertain situation. As in Erwartung and From the Diary of Sally Hemings, La voix humaine ends with ambiguity. After witnessing the precarious mental state of Elle for nearly forty minutes, the audience is left with a sense of unknowing about the details of exactly what happened before our view into her experience and what her future will bring. Schoenberg’s speaker was written during the height of his Expressionist period, a time in the beginning of the twentieth century when ideas around dreams, the unconscious, and Freudian psychoanalysis were gaining attention. Marie Pappenheim’s text and Schoenberg’s music come together to present the psychological state of a woman (the singer) in a hysterical moment of disturbance. Though I do not argue that Sally Hemings fits this characterization, Oliver Neighbor writes about Schoenberg’s protagonist in a way that is also prescient of Sally Hemings; in using Neighbor’s words about the singer in Erwartung, I agree that Hemings also portrays “a means of expressing the multiplicity of contradictory feelings that can arise simultaneously from the unconscious.”58
Seaton asserts, “From the Diary is an attempt to allow an imagined Sally Hemings to speak for herself.” In giving a voice to Sally Hemings through the creation of a fictitious diary, Seaton has given us a Sally Hemings with an unconscious. The text of the libretto spans the time from when Sally Hemings was a nine-year-old child before she went to Paris, her time abroad, her time back at Monticello, through the birth of her children, their respective childhoods, and up through Jefferson’s death. In her narration we are given glimpses into her character and the creation of an unconscious—one that is shaped by memories of childhood, the experience of being in Paris, and her role as a mother and consort to Jefferson.
Listening to the Music
Musically, the sonic world accompanying Hemings is filled with tunes and musical reminiscences through the repetition of early themes quoted later in the work. This creates an internal world for the central character where she has musical motives and text phrases that were introduced in the beginning of the work and then come back, sometimes the same and sometimes transformed. Through the music and the text, it is as though the listener is brought into a private world of references that had personal meaning for Hemings and Jefferson. In the audience we get to know them and witness these wellcrafted, plausible (albeit fictitious) experiences in a collective imagined and emotional recreation.
There are two musical markers that appear several times in strategic places within the larger work across the multiple sections. Both cases of these recurrences unify the work and help the listener make long-range connections. The first case involves three occurrences with a step-wise eighth-note pattern that creates a sense of movement and traversing time. The second case appears twice and contrasts to the first case by providing a slower chordal texture that grounds the listener with a sense of stasis and arrival.
The first aural marker appears in the opening of the work, the first thing we hear. From the Diary of Sally Hemings opens in a moderate tempo with an ascending eighth-note pattern and a harmonic centering around D tonic; the sonic world evoked touches on a mixture between major, minor, and a Dorian hexachord modality. The ear hears a rooted connection to a D tonic but cannot settle into one harmonic modality. The opening line of text, appearing in measure 3 and keeping the same ascending eighth-note rhythm in the bass-line of the accompaniment, presents the speaker as one who inhabits the present and past together: “They say I was born old, so so old before my time.” This text returns two other times, near the middle of the work as the opening line of #7 (similar melodic shape, different accompaniment) in the beginning of part 2, and at the end of work (#18), this time with the text and almost the same music as the opening. In the final appearance, this opening line provides a feeling of return and nostalgia, as though we were going back to the beginning. Punctuating the work, this opening theme marks the opening and ending as well as near the midpoint to highlight the trope of a journey that ties the past and present together in a dynamic relationship.
The final section of the work (#18) is quite long, acts as a type of microcosm of the whole, and contains the densest references to previous themes. With the return of the opening lines, structurally we are given closure as we are reminded of how this narrative began. The cryptic nature of being “born old” and “so so old before my time” sets up a constancy where something that had started earlier continues after the expected longevity. Appearing in the opening, near the middle, and again at the end aurally marks this theme as having structural importance. Harmonically and textually, we feel a rootedness in something familiar (the tonic pitch D, the familiarity of the text and melodic phrase), but we are not fully grounded in one harmonic or temporal mode; instead, there is a blending of things that are not always brought together (major, minor, modal, and the present and past).
The other striking musical aural marker is a slow chordal texture that appears twice, the first time to the text “Safe in his arms” (#7, start of part 2) and then again at the end of the work (end of #18). In the work as a whole, the piano part overall is a busy and active agent that both acts as a commentator and provides an atmospheric soundscape. Usually, the piano moves steadily in a role that either keeps the action flowing or accompanies in a more jagged way that punctuates the text. At the end of the first number of part 2 (#7) and at the conclusion of the work’s finale (part 4, #18), the music suddenly slows down and shifts to broad chords that move homo-rhythmically, almost like a hymn or chorale. The expression marking for both occurrences is the same: “Stately,” in a 3/4 meter with a key signature that signals B major, but it is not afraid of chromatic dissonance. There is no other section like it, and its use twice, especially as both times it follows an agitated section of perpetual sixteenth or eighth notes, gives the effect of pulling back on the tempo to make sure you have the chance to breathe and see things differently. Though the text is different for each presentation, in both cases there is a sense of an almost-resolved tension. Through the centering on a B tonic and the slower “stately” tempo of quarter and half notes (with just a few eighth notes added in), the tempo transports us steadily to a calmer state. Each time, however, the text and harmony act at cross-purposes. In #7 the text reassures us with “Safe in his arms” until the very end, with the performance direction “almost whispered” over the sung text: “but still my voice frightens him,” as though the singer is sharing a secret that contradicts the outwardly p
eaceful atmosphere.
In these final moments at the end of the work (part 4, #18), the text lines up with the message of finally being free from the strain of this earth and reunited in heaven: “Mister, we’re free to go. Leave our old clothes behind. This time walk with me to the Lord. We’ll dress in our new finery, silk robes to meet our Lord.” However, in the key signature of B major with the voice ending on the B tonic note with a widely spaced B major chord, the last notes are the lowest octave C-naturals in bass clef, marked pianississimo with a fermata and “lunga” marking. It is as though, almost out of hearing range, the simultaneity of the half-step B-C-natural evokes a ghostly dissonance that haunts the soundscape; one in the foreground in the voice with the B tonic and the other C octaves below in the piano, exceedingly soft, yet resonating in a way that is more felt than heard. This quasi-inaudible last chord of the work is a fitting clash of two chromatic notes, two realities, representing that friction between the evidence of what we know and the gaps for what is missing (along with the friction of living in two worlds, as Hemings and Jefferson did). These two cases of musical reminiscences emphasize bringing together things that do not neatly fit—the past and present, being born already old, safety and danger, harmony and dissonance.
Ghosts: The Legacies of the Past Haunting the Present
The metaphor of the ghost is one that permeates the full work. In this diary, Sally Hemings writes several times of her “sister ghost,” the spectral presence of her half-sister Martha Wayles (the deceased wife of Jefferson). “Mistress Jefferson” (Martha) dies in the opening number in an intimate setting with Sally and her mother (Elizabeth Hemings). The presence of the deceased Martha Wayles is felt in nearly every song, beginning right away in #2, when little Martha and Maria (children of Martha Wayles and Jefferson) and Sally play together right alongside the text Jefferson wrote for his dead wife’s grave (italicized).