In the summer 2010, I found two interesting books of poetry in English in a library. In those books, I found two poems that were strongly ”talking” to me, ”Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” by Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774) and ”The Clever Cat” by Mary Hannay Foott (née Black) (1846–1918). I decided to compose them.

I wrote a two-part work of music titled, not surprisingly, ”Mad Dog and Clever Cat” for female choir and piano. The duration of this 58-page composition is 27 minutes. The final sheet music product, which will be soon published and available for everyone, includes also a CD-ROM disc with the same sheet music as on paper as multi-page PDF files (several paper sizes) for viewing, printing, and copying, and WAVE and MP3 format files for listening. These instrumental files are useful for getting acquainted with and rehearsing the music, which belongs to ”serious” classical choir music genre and is somewhat, but not very, demanding for the performers.

The Beauty

The beauty of this project is how art connects people living today with these two great poets who passed away a long time ago making their fantastic poems, their words, their thoughts, and in a way themselves, alive again. When I was writing this music, I almost felt their presence. I imagined how they were writing their lines, perhaps in darkness with a candle on their tables. I am very glad, actually HONOURED, to have made them again remembered. They deserve it. The poems of Oliver Goldsmith and Mary Hannay Foott will be sung by many fine female choirs and played by their fine pianists around the world.

The Poems

Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog in a nutshell: In a town there was a man considered to be kind and gentle. A stray dog went mad and bit him. People swore the man would die. But the man recovered of the bite, and the dog died! (What an allegory.)

Clever Cat in a nutshell: There was a hungry cat, the poorest ever seen, who did not go a-mousing, but only played the tambourine. One day he found a female cat, a real princess, who fell in love with him and his tambourine. They started dancing and from then on, she gave him as much food as he wanted. They lived happily ever after. Now there is a cat, the fattest ever seen, who need not go a-mousing, but who only plays the tambourine.