I Bring You Heartsease - Trio by Gena Branscombe

This product includes 4 copies, one for each voice and one for a pianist.

Gena Branscombe's choral setting (SSA) of I Bring You Heartsease was first published in 1915. The text, written by the composer, refers to a variety of flowers shared by lovers in springtime. Heartsease, the progenitor of the cultivated pansy, was most likely the flower that yielded a powerful love potion in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Branscombe's musical setting is smoothly harmonized for women's voices with the tune in the top voice. The climax of the first verse comes with the first sopranos singing a high G in the most widely spaced chord of the piece, "But Ah! My dearest, our love will live when the springtime flowers are gone." A middle section refers to the "flowers of mem'ry," and Branscombe introduces her most chromatic progression, a G-minor chord to an E- major chord, at the mention of "sadness and tears." The opening music returns at "For life cannot hold all our loving." The climactic chord occurs again, this time in the phrase "And the love that is best is the love that has lived when the springtime of youth has gone."