Welcome to May! It’s been a long, hard winter—especially emotionally—but warm breezes, daffodils, and birdsong can help us feel invigorated, inspired, and even hopeful. Our music for today is hopeful, while it also reflects the poignancy and perhaps bittersweet longing that spring can stir in us. The prelude, “Einsame Blumen”—or “Solitary Flowers”—by Robert Schumann, projects a wistfulness and vulnerability we may identify with, as we each can feel like a solitary flower, trying to be beautiful, to reach for the sun and bring life to the earth, but feeling alone.

Our anthem, “O Lovely May” by Johannes Brahms, will be sung by the adult choir and is a heartfelt plea to May itself to release us from our bonds of despondency. The text is set to music in a major key with chromatically nuanced harmonization, with four sections that all start with energy and then fall gradually into lower and darker places, both emotionally and musically. All, that is, except the last section, which finally escapes its fetters and rises into the air at the end of the song: “O Lovely May, free me today, free as the song winds the darkling hedges along.”

The offertory is a wonderful setting by Ryan LaRue of the poem “A Prayer in Spring” by Robert Frost. Although newly composed, it harkens back to the style of Renaissance madrigals and incorporates a violin obligato along with piano accompaniment. As in the Brahms song, the narrator is expressing a wish that we might all find joy in the flowers of spring and banish thoughts of the far-off “uncertain harvest.” We hear the choir sing of the white orchard, the happy bees, perfect trees, and darting hummingbird. The poet reminds us that “this is love, and nothing else is love, to which it is reserved for God above” to sanctify the ends, “which it only needs that we fulfill.”

—Shaylor