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Try Me, Good King is a group of five songs drawn from the final letters and gallows speeches of Katherine Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Katherine Howard. Henry's sixth wife, Katherine Parr, outlived him and brought some domestic and spiritual peace into Henry's immethate family. Although her written devotions are numerous, her role in the story of . . . Henry's wives is that of a peaceful catalyst. In these songs I chose to focus on the intimate crises of the heart that affected Henry's first five wives. In a sense, this group of songs is a monodrama of anguish and power.1
IN THIS INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT COMPOSER LIBBY LARSEN explains her musical explorations of the final words uttered by the first five queens of Henry VIII. Larsen's self-selected libretto places the listener's focus on the transition from queen to queen, compressing each moment of high drama into song and assuring an operatic-like sense of action in each queen's "exit aria." Many song cycles follow a single character (most notably the Wanderer in Schubert's Winterreise) through a journey that is an outward manifestation of an inward transformative process. Departing from this convention, Try Me, Good King instead provides five songs, each an intensely drawn character sketch of a different woman. If there is a single character's journey that can be traced from these musical portraits, it is the one voice that we never hear in the cycle: that of King Henry VIII himself. Although these women's lives are for the most part defined for posterity by their marriage to the royal consort, it is deliciously ironic that the King Henry presented here is defined only by the women he married.
Larsen meets the challenge of musically conveying a sense of these five individual women by utilizing an array of musical devices with which she draws distinct, multileveled representations. Most prominent is Larsen's weaving of selected Elizabethan lute songs into the musical texture of each song, thus creating a foil between the sung and unsung words, a layer that serves both as musical connective tissue as well as offering thought provoking intertextuality. Each queen is given her own song, a musical embodiment of an individual heroine speaking directly to the audience,...