Lydia Kakabadse: The Way Through The Woods – for mezzo soprano or alto and piano (NXP135)

This is a sheet music edition of The Way Through The Woods by the composer Lydia Kakabadse.

Sheet music for mezzo soprano or alto and piano

Music: Lydia Kakabadse
Words: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

Score: 7 pages

Audio sample

Preface and programme notes

This piece is set to Rudyard Kipling’s poem of the same name, which tells of strange happenings that cannot be explained and also nature’s power over mankind.

The poem focuses on a forest path which, having been shut down seventy years ago, disappeared among the forest undergrowth. Yet, the beat of a horse’s feet (depicted throughout in the piano part) can still be heard where the path once existed.

In keeping with the mysterious theme, the poem ends with the words but there is no road through the woods, sung sotto voce (in an undertone).

Lydia Kakabadse

Words

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods....
But there is no road through the woods.