Love Quintet

Love Quintet explores love and relationships, and the relationships between loves...different types of loves. Author, scholar, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis explores different facets of love in his book The Four Loves. He looks at four different manifestations of love and assigns each a different Greek word. Στοργή (storge) is affection; φιλία (philia) is friendship; ἔρως (eros) is romance; and ἀγάπη (agape) is unconditional, sacrificial love. While the first three, Lewis argues, are feelings, the last is a choice. When the others fade, agape love has the power to rekindle broken, human relationships, but it takes work. In this piece, each of the four loves is represented by a musical spelling of the Greek word. The four loves are spelled with each Greek letter corresponding to a note in a two-octave range as there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. Storge grows into philia, and philia into eros. What ties the three together is the agape theme, which begins the piece and acts as a bass line throughout. Partway through the piece, the relationship is in tune, but slowly, the three feelings peel away and, in their inverted forms, attack the agape theme. When all seems lost, agape chooses to keep going, eventually healing the broken relationship and restoring the other manifestations of love.