The Apple Orchard

$2.00

Digital score. 12 pages.

Duration: approx. 4:00.

**Ensembles must purchase a score for each member of the choir. It is illegal to photocopy this score beyond the amount purchased.**

SKU: PB0005 Category: Tags: , , ,

About the Work

“The Apple Orchard” features a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Der Apfelgarten,” first published in his 1908 collection Neue Gedichte: Anderer Teil. Rilke wrote the poem in 1904 while staying at Borgeby-Gård, the farm of Ernst Norlind and his fiancée, Hanna Larsson, in Skåne, Sweden. In one extended, stream-of-consciousness sentence, the four-stanza poem paints the picture of an orchard at sunset, inspiring introspection as nature’s bright green fades to shadow. In the midst of the orchard, the poet senses . . . something: a weight, a feeling, a memory, a new hope and half-forgotten joy from long ago. Within this twilight, scattered but present, lies a clarity like that found in a woodcut of the German Renaissance printmaker Albrecht Dürer: all black and white with no gray between. These apple trees spend all their days at one single task: bearing fruit, straining under the weight of their self-less labor.

We are the apple orchard—each of us an apple tree—growing and tending our own fruit. Let us hope that in our labors we emulate Rilke’s orchard, working diligently, silently, and without complaint.

“The Apple Orchard” was commissioned by Bernie and Annemarie Boehnlein and premiered by the Michael O’Neal Summer Singers under the direction of the composer on August 13, 2017, at Roswell United Methodist Church in Georgia.

Text

Come just after the sun goes down,
let us watch the evening deepen the green;
does it not seem as if we had long gathered
and harbored something within us,

sensing it now in the weight of feeling and memory,
new hope and half-forgotten joy,
still mingled with darkness from within,
scattered, wild and ripe, in thoughts before us

under these trees, silhouetted like Dürer woodcuts,
thick with fruit, patiently bent
under the weight of a hundred days’ labor,
serving, straining, uncomplaining,

exceeding mark or measure,
yet still to be borne and given
in a long life of faithfully tending,
wanting one thing, and growing silently.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), trans. © 2017 Philip Biedenbender

About the Writer

The Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague on December 4, 1875. His childhood was a troubled and unhappy one. After a brief stint in military school at the behest of his parents, he enrolled in a German preparatory school, fostering a love for literature that he formalized in studies at Charles University in Prague. He was a life-long traveler, spending notable periods in Russia—where he first turned toward more serious subjects—and Paris—where he was friend and secretary to French sculptor Auguste Rodin—before his death from leukemia on December 29, 1926. His reputation has only grown through the years as new readers embrace his works—mystic, dark, and steeped in religious imagery—including The Book of Hours, the Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and the classic Letters to a Young Poet.

Recording

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The Apple Orchard
$2.00
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