Ode to a Nightingale
for SATB chorus and violoncello
The text for Ode to a Nightingale is taken from a poem of the same name by John Keats. Writing in the spring of 1819, the twenty-three-year-old Keats had watched his brother die of tuberculosis only a few months earlier and was now ill himself. The poem expresses a love of nature but also a revulsion to the natural world and a desire to escape from it.
View a score sample here.