About the Work
“The Apple Orchard” features a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Der Apfelgarten,” first published in his 1908 collection Neue Gedichte: Anderer Teil. Rilke wrote the poem in 1904 while staying at Borgeby-Gård, the farm of Ernst Norlind and his fiancée, Hanna Larsson, in Skåne, Sweden. In one extended, stream-of-consciousness sentence, the four-stanza poem paints the picture of an orchard at sunset, inspiring introspection as nature’s bright green fades to shadow. In the midst of the orchard, the poet senses . . . something: a weight, a feeling, a memory, a new hope and half-forgotten joy from long ago. Within this twilight, scattered but present, lies a clarity like that found in a woodcut of the German Renaissance printmaker Albrecht Dürer: all black and white with no gray between. These apple trees spend all their days at one single task: bearing fruit, straining under the weight of their self-less labor.
We are the apple orchard—each of us an apple tree—growing and tending our own fruit. Let us hope that in our labors we emulate Rilke’s orchard, working diligently, silently, and without complaint.
“The Apple Orchard” was commissioned by Bernie and Annemarie Boehnlein and premiered by the Michael O’Neal Summer Singers under the direction of the composer on August 13, 2017, at Roswell United Methodist Church in Georgia.
