Home - Rudi Tas - Waelrant Camerata

Waelrant Camerata o.l.v. Marleen De Boo
Uit het concert: "Time is moving"
24-10-2024 @ Kerk Heilige Familie - Edegem - Belgium

'Home' for mixed choir with divisi
Music by Rudi Tas
Words by Francis Ledwidge

'Home' is one of the last poems of Francis Ledwidge. He writes about the homesickness he feels when he finds a robin singing near the battlefield and how it reminded him of his home in County Meath. In the final stanza Ledwidge depicts the bird in the broken Belgian landscape:

This is a song a robin sang
This morning on a broken tree,
It was about the little fields
That call across the world to me.

The ‘little fields’ are those of his beloved Meath which he misses. By ascribing such a specific, personal meaning to the robin’s song, Ledwidge makes clear how homesickness haunts him. This is underlined in a letter he wrote to a friend on 20 July, 1917:

I want to see again my wonderful mother, and to walk by the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the brown and grey rocks of Crocknaharna. You have no idea of how I suffer with this longing for the swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to hear coming over the low hills of Currabwee...

Ledwidge describes missing not only the people he had to leave behind but also the natural landscape of his home. He mentions being entitled to a period of leave while knowing that many others are waiting ahead of him. “Say a prayer,” he begs, ‘that I may get this leave.” However, the request was not granted. Eleven days later the Battle of Passchendaele began.

The end of this choral work contains the first notes from the opening theme of the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. Ledwidge died, along with 135, 000 other men, on the first day of the battle. He was working behind the trenches, building a road, and was killed when a shell exploded beside him while he was on a break.

[davidbasden]

Lovely singing and writing! 🎶 Tragic backstory, which seems to have been playing on repeat for the past 100+ years ... or probably since the year dot.