Blessed Be the Flower That Triumphs
A rich meditation on tenacity, resilience, and rebirth
Music: Elizabeth Alexander
Words: Michael DeVernon Boblett
A warm, richly contrapuntal meditation on resilience, tenacity, and rebirth. Both majestic and intimate, Blessed Be the Flower That Triumphs celebrates the boundless spirit of life that endures despite all adversity, oppression, and even death.
Notes for concert programmers: There are two choral versions of this piece, an a cappella version and an orchestal version (0000,0400,harp,strings). While the orchestral version includes several purely instrumental sections, the choral parts themselves are the same in both versions. Choirs wanting the flexibility of performing either version of this song should simply purchase the choral parts for the orchestral version.
Instrumental Parts are available through Seafarer Press. (See below)
“Blessed Be the Flower That Triumphs is an intelligent, creative, beautifully powerful piece of choral writing that deserves to be heard and performed by many. The choir had a wonderful time preparing it and enjoyed it even more as time went on. You already know my thoughts about this stunning work of art. As I hope you could tell, the audience had an immediate positive reaction to it. They LOVED it!” Maria Bucka, Artistic Chair, Bethlehem Music Series
Details and Ordering Information
Composer Notes
Requiems are essentially about what it means for beauty and meaning to triumph over anyone and anything that might destroy faith, hope or life itself So it’s no wonder that when Minneapolis’ Bethlehem Lutheran Church commissioned a choral work to follow and compliment Gabriel Fauré’s celebrated Requiem, I did not focus my thinking on death. Instead, I found myself contemplating the true nature of resurrection.
I found a gracious expression to my questions in Michael de Vernon Boblett’s gracious poem, “Blessed Be the Flower That Triumphs.” Is Bobletts’s tenacious flower a man or a Messiah, a scientific idea or a religious belief, a tiny flower or the voice of truth?
Blessed Be the Flower That Triumphs
Blessed be the flower that triumphs
Over snows, over thorns, over withered stems,
Over windswept mountains, over deserts cruel and dry.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs
Over wars, over change, over centuries,
Over barbed wire fences, over soldiers’ heavy feet.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs
Over well-meaning hands bent on gathering.
Over small closed rooms, with their vases hard and cold.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs
Over vain words of priests and of poets’ pens
And attempts to domesticate its wild, wild Truth.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs
Over past, over death, over silences,
Enduring beyond iron and tears and severed roots,
And restoring to all things a joyful smallness.
Blessed be the flower that triumphs at last.
Poem by Michael deVernon Boblett
Adapted by Elizabeth Alexander
© 2007 by Michael DeVernon Boblett
Performers
SATB a cappella
Premiere: Murray State University Concert Choir / Bradley Almquist. Athena Music Festival (Murray, KY)
Choir of Arlington Street Church / Mark Buckles (Boston, MA)
Choir of First Unitarian Society of Madison / Dan Broner (Madison, WI)
Choir of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston / Jason Oby (Houston, TX)
SATB, orchestra
Premiere: Bethlehem Lutheran Choir and Orchestra / David Mennicke (Minneapolis, MN)
Concordia University Choir / David Mennicke (St. Paul, MN)
New Hampshire Master Chorale / Dan Perkins (Concord, NH)
