Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight for SATB Soloists, Chorus and Piano

Florence B. Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight is her largest choral work and one of her most overtly political compositions – a cantata outspoken in its anti-war stance and its decrials of socioeconomic inequality. Yet it is also surrounded by questions, including when it was written and whether it was performed in her lifetime. Those previously unanswered questions have in turn obscured its compositional history. As a result, the composer’s final word on the magnum opus of her choral output has never been published and only rarely performed.

This edition answers those questions and many more. It shows that Price originally conceived the work with orchestral accompaniment but later rejected that version and composed the cantata anew with piano accompaniment – in the process expanding it and making its harmonic language bolder, its musical interpretation of the text more forceful and direct. In this final version, we see Florence B. Price using her formidable harmonic and melodic technique to augment the poet’s message – offering a vivid musical portrait of Lincoln as a nineteenth-century Elijah who returned the people of his suffering country to the true path, a peacemaker possessed of a humility that stood in paradoxical relationship to his towering vision and historical stature. We see her, in this cantata written as her own world teetered on the precipice of the cataclysm of World War II, using her music to call out for a latter-day peacemaker who would ensure that Lincoln’s travails would not be in vain. And we see her using her command of form and her stylistic ingenuity to ensure that the poetic vision originally created by racist white poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) would now be seen through a different lens – so that if and when true peace ever finally came, it would include rather than exclude the descendants of the African Americans whom Lincoln had emancipated some seventy-five years earlier.

This source-critical edition is the first publication of Florence Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight in what the composer considered its definitive guise. The score is preceded by a detailed introductory essay and three facsimiles of pages from Price’s autograph scores.