Hagen: Valse Blanche

"How Love Comes," Tangiers, October 1958

"Valse Blanche: How Love Comes, Tangiers, October 1958, is a reworking of music from my opera A Woman in Morocco. By turns lubricious, chaste, tormented, and torchy, the set of variations works through the two major themes in the opera, limning the doomed relationship between two lovers in a Tangiers pensione in October 1958. The violin takes the role of Lizzy, a young American journalist; the piano portrays Ahmed, the Moroccan major domo of the hotel. It may, of course, be the other way around." - Daron Hagen