Pale Fire

Date of Composition: 2023

Duration: 100'

Category: Solo

Instrumentation: Piano

Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The book is in four parts:

A Foreword by one Charles Kinbote, who may or may not be the exiled king of Zembla, in which he describes his friendship with John Shade, a distinguished American poet, and the circumstances by which Kinbote has come into possession of the manuscript of Shade’s poem, Pale Fire.
The 999 line poem, Pale Fire, by John Shade.
Kinbote’s commentary on the poem.
An Index.

The labyrinthian structure of the novel defies a concise summary but a few central points should be made. The poem, in four cantos, is a meditation on Shade’s family life, his happy marriage to childhood sweetheart, Sybil, shadowed by the suicide of his only child, and his quest for an understanding of life after death. Kinbote, Shade’s neighbor and fellow faculty member at Wordsworth College believes, however, that the poem is a reflection of Kinbote’s former life as Charles The Beloved, exiled king of Zembla, which Kinbote has been describing to Shade during his encounters and walks with the poet. The commentary is therefore an interpretation of the poem through Kinbote’s twisted imagination.

My piece is a response only to the poem, each line of which is “set.” In this sense the piece could be thought of as an “opera without words,” the two primary characters being John and Sybil Shade. Like the poem, the piece is in four parts. Here follows a brief summary, preceded by a few lines of each Canto’s opening, of what can be described as the “events” of each Canto and section of the piece.

Canto One

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

Shade recalls his youth, the death of his parents when an infant, and his upbringing by eccentric Aunt Maud. An early experience of blacking out instills in him a sense of the possibility of altered consciousness.

Canto Two

There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.

An evocation of the domestic life of John, Sybil, and Hazel Shade, the adored but unhappy daughter, who drowns herself one night after being jilted by a blind date.

Canto Three

L’if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe, Rabelais:
The grand potato.

This opening of the Canto is indicative of Nabokov’s wordplay and breadth of association. A brief aside to untangle the two lines:

L’if – French for yew tree.

lifeless tree – the yew in Celtic culture symbolizes death and resurrection. Its needles are also toxic.

Your great Maybe, Rabelais – Rabelais’s last words are reported to have been “I go to seek a Great Perhaps (French: “grande peut-être”) which Shade translates as “the grand potato.”

Shade’s search for the “white fountain,” a vision of the afterlife sensed during a heart attack. The Canto concludes with a visit to an elderly woman who is reported to have had the same vision though Shade discovers she saw a “white mountain.”

Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!

Canto Four

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

A series of dramatic assertions – followed by quotidian observations of no special import. Shade veers away from cosmic speculation towards a view of life made tolerable by ordinary pleasures, such as shaving in a bath tub, a ritual given thirty lines in the canto. The poem concludes:

And through the flowing shade and ebbing light
A man, unheedful of the butterfly–
Some neighbor’s gardener, I guess–goes by
Trundling an empty barrow up the lane.

Of course, without access to or knowledge of most of the text, the relationship of poetry to music in my piece is tenuous. What I hope can emerge is the strange expressive balance in the poem between the ecstatic and mundane, not unlike Kinbote’s commentary, both particular and absurd.

Nils Vigeland

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