My Fleeting Angel
“My fleeting angel” is based on a short story called “The Wishing Box” by Sylvia Plath (from “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”) about Agnes, a wife who feels increasingly excluded from her marriage by the richly-hued and endlessly inventive dreams that her husband Harold experiences, both in his sleeping and waking hours. In the first months of their marriage, the morning ritual of hearing Harold lovingly recount the night’s dreams in rich detail as if they were “significant, actual events” amuses Agnes but, as time goes by, her husband’s “peculiar habit of accepting his dreams as if they were really an integral part of his waking experience” begins to infuriate her. Unbeknownst to Harold, Agnes’s dreams, (which occur very infrequently) are full of “dark, glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures”, and she begins to feel exiled from her marriage and increasingly trapped in a world of nothingness. It is the contrast between Harold’s blissfully vivid imaginings and Agnes’s descent into an empty, sleepless, sherry-fuelled existence (and her eventual fatal overdose) that inspires the three movements of the trio.
The first movement (c.1½ minutes) is essentially a musical translation of a dream that Harold describes at the beginning of the story: “I saw a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light”. The harmony of this movement is, for me, clearly based on the colours Harold sees: chords based on the note G always “look” red (and “ruby-like”) when I hear/see them, while purples and the deep blue of sapphires are strongly suggested by E flat tonalities. These chords, along with chords built upon the note A (a leopard with “gold” spots also features in the dream, clearly suggesting A major-like harmonies to me) form the basis of the first movement. The melody in this movement was freely composed, but was then used as the motivic/melodic basis for the entire work.
The second movement (c.4½ minutes) whilst gradually becoming more ominous (depicting Agnes’s altering mood), recounts the dreams that Agnes experienced in her “fertile childhood days when she believed in fairies”. When she was seven years old, she had dreamed of a “wishing box land above the clouds”, where wishing boxes “grew on trees”: you “picked a box, turned the handle round nine times while whispering your wish in this little hole in the side” and your wish would come true. After the scurrying introduction, the tremolo-like figures in the piano (about thirty seconds into the movement) are intended to literally describe this dream: the time signature is 9/16, each bar containing nine semiquavers which alternate between right-hand (higher) and left-hand (lower) chords, depicting the turning of the wishing box’s handle. The entire movement is intended to recall the innocent delight of Agnes’s youthful dreams, whilst at a deeper level portraying the unsettled and almost mechanical nature of her later life.
The last movement (c. 2 minutes) is inspired by the very end of Plath’s narrative, where Harold, after counterfeiting sleep on the train journey back from work (but in reality “voyaging on a cerise-sailed dhow up a luminous river…”) comes back to find Agnes lying on the sofa in the living-room, in her favourite dress, “pale and lovely as a blown lily”, with an empty pill box by her side. “Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.” It is this last sentence upon which the whole movement (in waltz time) is based; the time signature only occasionally deviates from the reassuringly regular triple-time metre, and represents the confusion of emotions, both beautiful and unsettling, that one feels after coming to the close of Plath’s story.