The Moon’s Funeral (2024)

For Tenor and Piano
Duration: 10 minutes
Composed for Justin Vickers
First performed by Justin Vickers and Geoffrey Duce, March 25, 2025

Note: This work is in two parts. Part I can also be performed independently as a 5′ composition with a revised ending. Please contact Alex for more information.

I composed The Moon’s Funeral on a request from my colleague Justin Vickers, who asked if I would set for him a dark, brooding poem of the same name by Hilaire Belloc. Justin had drawn my attention to a sketch for an apparently orchestral setting started, but quickly abandoned, by a young Benjamin Britten. I was attracted to a few aspects of Britten’s sound world and, in a loose sense, drew inspiration from them in the early stages of my writing. Ultimately, however, my setting is an original composition – there are no quotations from Britten here, and I haven’t in any way attempted a “completion” of his fragment.

Like Belloc’s poem, my composition is in two parts. In the first part, the singer announces the moon’s death, at first solemnly, then later in a pained cry. The contrasting second part is a march, grotesque and threatening: here, the singer’s mourning has been supplanted by a much more bitter, resentful manifestation of loss.

Text by Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc (“The Moon’s Funeral”):

The Moon is dead. I saw her die.
She in a drifting cloud was drest,
She lay along the uncertain west,
A dream to see.
And very low she spake to me:
“I go where none may understand,
I fade into the nameless land,
And there must lie perpetually.” 
And therefore I,
And therefore loudly, loudly I
And high
And very piteously make cry:
“The Moon is dead. I saw her die.”

And will she never rise again?
The Holy Moon? Oh, never more!
Perhaps along the inhuman shore
Where pale ghosts are
Beyond the low lethean fen
She and some wide infernal star…
To us who loved her never more,
The Moon will never rise again.
Oh! never more in nightly sky
Her eye so high shall peep and pry
To see the great world rolling by.
For why?
The Moon is dead. I saw her die.