Yesterday, To-day, To-morrow!

Lyricist. Irene Castle

Publisher. M. Witmark & Sons

Date. 1918

Key/Range. F Major (c' -- f")

COMMENTARY

As the title suggests, the lyric for this song is built around the poet’s description and anticipation of her various emotional states from before, during, and after her love affair takes place. These three states—the empty feeling of being alone before they met, the joy of finding love and being in love, and the anxiety that an uncertain future brings—were each explored at different points in the previous songs and thus provide a summary of the feelings expressed in the entire set. And yet, this song is the best depiction of Irene Castle’s frame of mind when she last saw her husband on a weekend visit before his tragic death. She gives a detailed description of the weekend in her book Castles in the Air, and though she does her best to conceal her knowledge of the horrible tragedy that was shortly to befall them, the anxiety that accompanied her precarious and temporary happiness with him was palpable, as it is in this song. Tours signals to the listener the destabilizing emotions that will animate this song in the opening chords, which introduce shifting foreign parallel sonorities that resolve, but cannot be cleared with the pedal until the next measure, since they occur over a fifth in the deep register of the piano that must be held. In a striking gesture that reveals his mastery of post-romantic harmony, Tours sets with equal effectiveness both the opening stanza about Castle’s sadness in the major and the following stanza about her happiness in the minor. His setting of the words “the world seems mad with joy for this/My heart before your feet I lay” with a chromatic rising vocal line, supported by fluctuating consonant and dissonant chords, then followed by the swooping melody that descends an octave-and-a-fourth before settling a half-note up on D♭, is a stunning example of text painting that rivals anything in the literature of art song. The successive dominant-nine sonorities (VI9-II9-V9) in the retransition to the A’-section are so harmonically disorienting that Tours cleverly cues the singer to the opening note of the melody (A) in the final chord of the interlude. And, the conclusion, which features a climax on the word “sorrow,” substitutes a jarring series of descending stepwise dominant chords for a typical cadence resolving through chords a fifth apart as if to demonstrate the crushing terror of not knowing whether you will ever see the one you love again.