Sunday 21 July 2019
Tune of the Day: Days of Absence
arranged for two flutes
This song was originally a love serenade in the 1752 one-act opera Le devin du village (“The Village Soothsayer”) by French philosopher, writer and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. You may recognize its tune as the ancestor to the popular American lullaby “Go Tell Aunt Rhody”.
Days of absence, sad and dreary,
Cloth'd in sorrow's dark array;
Days of absence, I am weary,
She I love is far away.
The present arrangement for two flutes appeared in Blake's Young Flutist's Magazine, published in Philadelphia in 1833.