Some Favored Nook

for Soprano, Baritone and Piano

Composed by Eric Nathan
Dramaturgy by Mark Campbell
Texts by Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
adapted by Mark Campbell and Eric Nathan

DURATION 

50 minutes

ABOUT THE WORK

My song cycle, “Some Favored Nook” (45 minutes), with texts adapted by librettist Mark Campbell, takes place in Civil War-era America and is inspired by the significant correspondence between an unlikely pair: Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. My work places Dickinson and Higginson's writings in the context of the Civil War and the patriarchal society of the time, and uses the texts as a lens to view the social, political and cultural issues of this early chapter in American history – abolition, civil rights, women's rights, the effects of war, as well as many of the themes that fill Dickinson's poetry, such as love and death – all issues that are as relevant today as they were in Dickinson’s time.

Dickinson’s and Higginson’s correspondence spanned twenty-four years and offers an intimate look into Dickinson’s private world as well as to Higginson’s involvement in major social and political issues of the day, as the commanding officer of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first black regiment in the Civil War. Higginson was also a noted supporter of women poets, and published the first collection of Dickinson’s poetry after her death. I set both excerpts from Dickinson’s letters and poems she sent to Higginson. As many of Higginson’s letters to her are lost, texts are set from Higginson’s own essays and diaries from his “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” giving an important historical context to Dickinson’s work.

– Eric Nathan