Extended Program Note and Text: Abrahamsen’s let me tell you

Following is an extended version of the program note on Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you that appears in January 2026 Showcase, along with the English text by Paul Griffiths sung by soprano Lauren Snouffer that will be projected as surtitles during the Minnesota Orchestra’s performances on January 16 and 17, 2026.

Hans Abrahamsen
Born: December 23, 1952, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

let me tell you (text by Paul Griffiths)
Premiered: December 20, 2013

Artistic spinoffs of Shakespeare’s plays seem to come in waves, and one currently cresting in pop culture is Hamlet. Director Chloé Zhao’s acclaimed new film Hamnet explores the play’s origin and initial premiere, while the playlists of Taylor Swift fans likely include The Fate of Ophelia, last year’s chart-topping riff on the tragic Hamlet character who drowns after succumbing to madness and grief when Prince Hamlet kills her father and rejects her romantically.

Ophelia is also the focus of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s 2013 orchestral song cycle let me tell you, which flips Hamlet’s script to Ophelia’s vantage point—using a vocabulary limited to only the different words (between 480 and 483, depending on the counting method) that she speaks in Shakespeare’s play. The three-part, seven-movement libretto is adapted from the 2008 novel of the same title by British writer Paul Griffiths that shares identical text constraints. Soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Berlin Philharmonic, led by Andris Nelsons, delivered the premiere on December 20, 2013. In 2016 let me tell you won Abrahamsen the coveted Grawemeyer Award, while a 2019 poll of critics by the U.K.’s The Guardian listed it as the 21st century’s greatest classical composition.

Through the course of 30 captivating minutes, we hear Ophelia’s musings on music, memory, time, light and nature, as the text’s focus progresses from past to present to future. In the third and final part, snow imagery is abundant while the close suggests, but doesn’t outright state, Ophelia’s death.

A NOTE FROM THE LIBRETTIST

A program note by Griffiths—also a noted music critic and librettist for operas by Tan Dun and Elliott Carter—is included with the program note for an October 2025 performance of let me tell you by the London Philharmonic Orchestra; following is the entirety of Griffith's comments.

“let me tell you is a half-hour dramatic monologue, voiced by a character who requires us to hear her. That character is not quite the Ophelia of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She has the same words, her entire text being made up from words Ophelia speaks in the play, but she uses these words in different ways, and certainly to express herself differently.

“She tells us of things to which there is little or no reference in the play, such as the nature of memory, ‘a time … when we had no music,’ or an explosive experience of love. And where Shakespeare’s Ophelia descends into madness and watery death, the protagonist of let me tell you comes to a different conclusion.

“The words with which she has to recount her story–Ophelia’s words–are barely adequate to her, but she has to make them serve, and she does. Her utterance is at once constrained and resolute, fragile and decisive, and its nature is realized at the opening by an adaptation of a technique used by Monteverdi, of rebounding on one note. What was an ornament four hundred years ago becomes for her the means by which she can be at once hesitant and assertive.

“Her entry into the piece comes early, but only after she has been summoned into a magical soundscape of piccolos, violin harmonics and celeste. The music–and this is true of the whole work–is at once familiar and strange, for the language of traditional tonality is present but fractured into new configurations. A high degree of consonance is coupled with harmonic states and progressions we have not heard before; the sense of a recognizable key comes only fleetingly; and melody here casts back to an ancient time of folk song–rather as Ophelia does in her derangement, or as Gertrude does in speaking of Ophelia’s drowning, when, drifting down the stream, she ‘chanted snatched of old tunes.’

“There is familiarity and strangeness, too, in the rhythm. Generally the pulse is clear–it is picked out at the start in oscillating octaves from the celeste, passing later to other instruments–but the position of the strong beat is ambiguous. Time here simultaneously ticks and floats.

“Such music, beginning right away, not only prepares the protagonist’s world but also foreshadows a crucial melodic element, to be associated with her words ‘Let me tell you.’ These words come three times in the piece, defining its three parts, the first recollective, the second set in the present, the third carrying a promise of what will happen in the future. 

“Having stated the inadequacy of words, the protagonist goes on, in two further songs, to wonder about the reliability of memory before she comes to a specific recollection–‘in limping time,’ as the score has it–of that time without music. This makes her ponder on how music shifts and changes time, and we recognize that this music is doing so. It achieves that at the opening of the second part by replaying and altering the opening of the first, to make a short introduction to the climactic fifth song, which plunges into the delirium of love.

“The last part has an even shorter introduction, again going back to the beginning and taking it further, before arriving at the slow finale, marked adagissimo. Now microtonal tunings fold into the texture and, being derived from natural harmonics, begin to re-root the music in a glistening new world of resonance. We are in the snow, in a white landscape where the erasure of detail and contour is the renewal of possibility.

“Ophelia is one of those imaginary figures whose existence goes on beyond the work that gave them birth. She has appeared in paintings and in novels, including the one, also called let me tell you, that was the source for this piece. Now she speaks again through a performer on stage, in a mode that is intimate and demands attention. Her words come back to her transformed, and she has gained, as she herself might say, ‘the powers of music.’“

Instrumentation: solo soprano with orchestra comprising 3 flutes (all doubling piccolo, with 1 also doubling alto flute), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet (doubling E-flat clarinet), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, bass drum, Japanese wood blocks, paper, 2 Reibestöcke, tam-tam, whip, xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, chimes, harp, celesta and strings

Program note by Carl Schroeder, with musical description by Paul Griffiths.

The Soprano's Text

Part I:

1.
Let me tell you how it was,
I know I can do this,
I have the powers:
I take them there. I have the right.
My words may be poor
but they will have to do.
There was a time when I could not do this:
I remember that time.

2.
O but memory is not one but many–
a long music we have made
and will make again,
over and over,
with some things we know and some we do not,
some that are true and some we have made up,
some that have stayed from long before,
and some that have come this morning,
some that will go tomorrow
and some that have long been there
but that we will never find,
for to memory there is no end.

3.
There was a time, I remember, when we had no music,
a time when there was no time for music,
and what is music if not time–
time of now and then tumbled into one another,
time turned and loosed,
time bended,
time blown up here and there,
time sweet and harsh,
time still and long?

Part II:
4.
Let me tell you how it is,
for you are the one who made me more than I was,
you are the one who loosed out this music.
Your face is my music lesson
and I sing.

5.
Now I do not mind if it is day, if it is night.
If it is night,
an owl will call out.
If it is morning,
a robin will tune his bells.
Night, day: there is no difference for me.
What will make the difference is if you are with me.
For you are my sun.
You have sun-blasted me,
and turned me to light.
You have made me like glass –
like glass in an ecstasy from your light,
like glass in which light rained
and rained and rained and goes on,
like glass in which there are showers of light,
light that cannot end.

Part III:

6.
I know you are there,
I know I will find you.
Let me tell you how it will be.

7.
I will go out now.
I will let go the door
and not look to see my hand as I take it away.
Snow falls.
So: I will go on in the snow.
I will have my hope with me.
I look up,
as if I could see the snow as it falls,
as if I could keep my eye on a little of it
and see it come down
all the way to the ground.
I cannot.
The snow flowers are all like each other
and I cannot keep my eyes on one.
I will give up this and go on.
I will go on.

Text by Paul Griffiths.
(after the novel let me tell you, 2008)