Feuertrunken (Fire-Drunk)

Feuertrunken is a loud meditation (if one can meditate loudly) on joy. During the months in the spring of 2017 that I spent composing the piece, I found much urgency in the subject of joy amidst the many goings-on both in my personal life as well as the wider world.

During this time I also found myself absorbed in the Divine Comedy, especially the Purgatorio. Dante’s vision of purgatory is a giant mountain partitioned into seven terraces, each devoted to purification from one of the deadly sins. Dante ascends the mountain terrace by terrace, until at last he finds a great wall of fire between himself and paradise. An angel of God encourages him to make the plunge into his final trial. Though my piece as a whole is not programmatic (meaning musical events generally do not correspond to anything in Dante’s story), there is a brief interlude in which I imagine Dante in devoted silence before he submits to the fire.

The title, meaning “fire-drunk” or “drunk with fire,” comes from Friedrich Schiller’s famous “Ode to Joy:” “We enter, drunk with fire, Heavenly One, your sanctuary.” I thought some reference to Beethoven was the obvious route; instead I chose Mahler, whose music I think conveys joy so adeptly. Feuertrunken briefly quotes the opening of Mahler's first Symphony before veering off into various intertwined episodes of supplication, blasphemy, and finally, praise.

Feuertrunken was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for Leonard Slatkin and completed in New York City in 2017.