The University of Wisconsin at Platteville has for a decade been home to a summertime Shakespeare Festival, known as the "Heartland Festival." The annual event now features a variety of theatrical performances; in 2002 the festival also chose to commission a new choral composition from the by-then well-known American composer Eric Whitacre. The festival made the commission in conjunction with one to the poet Anthony Silvestri, already a frequent collaborator with Whitacre in both original works and translations. The pair instantly made one decision: Silvestri's text should follow the forms and conventions of the English sonnet, a verse form so beloved of Shakespeare himself. Whitacre further suggested a second poetic tie to Shakespeare's time: a textual refrain of "Long live fair Oriana!" This line featured in a famous 1601 collection of English madrigals, being a gesture of poetic and musical homage by composers such as Weelkes, Byrd, and Wilbye to the "Virgin Queen" herself, Elizabeth I by whose name the entire Elizabethan era is called. Silvestri did his musical friend even one better. The poet not only composed an English sonnet, with the Elizabethan refrain full of glory to the Queen, references to music and the Saint of music and the generations of musicians who have praised the Queen in music; he also crafted the poem as an acrostic, such that the first letter of each line embeds the extra phrase, "HAIL FAIR ORIANA."

Whitacre's musical setting, likewise, adopts several novel approaches to a deep artistic tradition. He selects a double-choir texture for the piece, beloved of later Elizabethan composers and even more by their successors. He also tries to allow small elements of the poetic text to empower the musical substance—driving it with "madrigalisms." The opening verses are relentlessly stepwise in their melodic motion, as if to trace the very steps that "Her sacred spirit soars;" the Queen's spirit also "breathes into creative fires a force," which is embodied by a melody within a kind of musical primordial ooze. Poets from "age to age" are heard with a deep bass foundation, and the "sweet words" of the few and best poets are set to a suddenly consonant choral texture (which dissolves into clusters again on the word "profound"). The "quickening fire" is sung to a redoubling of rhythmic pace (a literal madrigalian choice), and the final line of praise achieves a stunning climax, at the top of the vocal registers in both choirs.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi