Adrian Pop - March Amulets and Weeds

Eight songs set to poems by Tudor Arghezi

The verse of Tudor Arghezi, the one who dared to give Baudelaire's French symbolism a bold and vigorous response through the raw Balkan inflorescences of his Flowers of Mildew, is magical. From the tenderness of the domestic microcosm surrounding his family home he called „Mărțișor” (March Amulet) to the most vitriolic invectives couched in the foul language of the curses, from the deep existential turmoil of the psalms to the small things unfolding on an apiary farm through a child's candid eyes, an unusually rich tapestry of imagery is woven along with an extremely wide range of expressions, to which the poet's genius gives substance and brilliance.

It is from this universe of perspectives that this cycle sets out in search of the intimate resonances of the little March amulets, with their naive, genuine and gentle symbolism, intersected with the polysemous references of the weeds – not only vegetal nature, but also encoded meanings with at times threatening or even tragic undertones. In terms of expressiveness, the selected texts give the cycle a polarized structure, achieved through various ways of exploiting contrast. While the starting points are Arghezi’s poetic cycles Mărțișoare [March Amulets] and Buruieni [Weeds] (included in his comprehensive volume of Versuri [Verses], 1966), the perspective broadens with poems or fragments from other chronologically neighbouring cycles, which blend with and complement the range of poetic expression given by the two tutelary categories.

The eight songs have structures and extensions typical of the stand-alone lieder (and can thus be detached and performed separately); however, with its dramaturgy of succession, musical relations, contrasts and mutual complementarity, the optimal form of presentation of the work is that of the whole cycle.

Adrian Pop

Nr. of pages: 40

ISMN 979-0-707664-05-6
ISBN 978-606-645-165-9