The Second Coming for Soprano and Orchestra Op.149 (2025) c.12’00”

2+1.3d1.3d1.2+1/4.3.0.0/Timp/Perc(4)/Hp/Celesta/soprano solo/Strings

poem by William Butler Yeats

For Andreas Delfs

Commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra

First performance on January 8th, 2026 by Jasmine Habersham, soprano, with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andreas Delfs at the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, New York

TEXT

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

ABOUT

When Maestro Delfs first contacted me about writing a work for soprano and orchestra, he told me that he planned to program it with Mahler’s 4th Symphony, and asked for a work that would be somehow complementary to it: either by providing a similar outlook or a contrary one to the poem Mahler set to music from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Following that prompt, I immersed myself in poetry, looking for weeks for the right text to use. Yeats has always been one of my favorite poets: I had set six of his poems for an earlier work, A Poet To His Beloved. I suppose I had finally gotten to the letter “Y” in my library of poetry books, when I came across The Second Coming. It seemed to me to be the perfect counterpoint to the text of the Mahler: its ominous, dark, and ambiguous  message, that mirrored some of the universal upheavals of our own time, contrasting with the sunny, Utopian vision that the Wunderhorn text of the Mahler provides. What I did not quite realize until later when I did more research on the poem and Yeats, was that in recent times it has apparently become one of the most quoted poems by people from all walks of life to encapsulate the anxieties of a society in turmoil. In fact, one writer pointed out that in the first six months of 2016, The Second Coming was quoted in print more than it had been in the previous 30 years combined.

Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919, when the world was still reeling from the aftermath of the First World War and of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Yeats’s beloved Ireland was headed towards revolution and there were widespread anxieties at what seemed to be  a new world order taking shape. Yeats’s outlook, rooted in his mysticism, was complex in some respects and perhaps naïve in others. It has been suggested that the lion-bodied monster “slouching towards Bethlehem” was not the Anti-Christ that it is often assumed to be, but rather Yeats’s fear of a spreading secularism that threatened the old-world order and his ideals of an aristocratic and spiritually rooted society.

Whatever the reality of Yeats’s beliefs, his poem stands as a masterful encapsulation of societal upheaval that has been quoted, adapted and repurposed many times by many different artists in many different contexts.

I made the conscious decision to end my setting with a restatement of the opening lines of the poem, in this way hinting at the cyclical nature of history. Yeats’s poem has been seen as  a prophesy of World War II, is seen by many as a presagement of our own times, and will likely be quoted time and time again in years to come as history goes through its endless cycle of conflict and resolution.

The Second Coming is scored for a similar orchestral complement as Mahler’s Fouth Symphony, in that it dispenses with the trombones and tuba that an orchestra of this size would usually have.