Mamlok, Ursula: Daybreak

for (mezzo-) soprano and piano

Text by H. W. Longfellow

To mark the 100th birthday of Ursula Mamlok (1923 - 2016), Boosey & Hawkes Bote & Bock, in collaboration with the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation, is publishing a series of works from the composer's estate that were not published during her lifetime. Mamlok wrote Daybreak in New York in 1944, based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from his 1858 collection Birds Of Passage. By setting the work of this US-American national poet to music, the young immigrant embraced her new homeland, as it were. As in most of her song compositions, Mamlok chose verses about nature and our existence in relation to it - here an invocation of the wind in its various varieties, whose power only fades away at the end in a gentle sigh in the cemetery.