Daniel Kallman's "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," for soprano and piano, was written in 1983 and later donated to the AIDS Quilt Songbook. This project was begun by baritone and AIDS sufferer William Parker as a means to gather a literature of compositional responses to AIDS and as a fundraising tool. Kallman's text is a poem by nineteenth-century poet Christina Rosetti. Rosetti's poem is metrical and rhymes, and Kallman sets it with very free stanzaic music. The accompaniment, on the piano, is allowed to range all over the place, but the soprano follows the same basic melodic contours from stanza to stanza. Kallman's chromatic melodic lines and dissonant harmonies interact weirdly with Rosetti's sentimental, old-fashioned verse; the result seems at times both a parody of and an elevation of the original poem, a kind of sincere Gothic burlesque. The song ends with a lovely dropping-off on the line "And haply may forget," as the last note by the soprano jumps unexpectedly and floats off. Kallman's musical reinterpretation of his materials is striking, yet this work does pack some emotional power.

© Andrew Lindemann Malone, All Music Guide