Program Note:   

Composed in 1987-1988 at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, San Francisco, and in New York City, the cycle limns the full course of a brief liaison. Addonizio's characteristically frank, sensually compelling poetry is paired with sophisticated, heartfelt music ranging from the expressionistic to the neo-romantic.

The cycle, dedicated to Kim Addonizio, was completed in 1988, then revised in 1989 and orchestrated for soprano and orchestra. After submitting it to several conductors, Hagen withdrew the cycle for further revisions. Hagen then folded the voice part into the orchestra and turned the cycle into a suite for orchestra (now withdrawn) called Beauty and Desire. At that point, in fall 1989, the sketches of the voice and piano version were thought lost along with a number of other manuscripts, during a move from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side. All that survived was a single print of the orchestral score.

Hagen's assistant discovered the original sketches, along with the original letter of permission from the poet to to set the poems to music, in fall 2015 when E.C. Schirmer returned to Hagen a number of Hagen's manuscripts that had been found in storage at their facility in Boston when the company was sold to the Canticle Publishing Group. After singing and playing through the cycle, Hagen lightly revised the manuscript, engraved it, and presented it to University of Nevada Las Vegas faculty artists Stephanie Weiss and Christina Wright-Ivanova.