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“Frosty in Desire,” by William Shakespeare, adapted by Rodrigo Ruiz.

Frosty in Desire
William Shakespeare (adapted by Rodrigo Ruiz)

POET

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,
and trembling in her passion, calls it balm,
Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.

Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret,
which bred more beauty in his angry eyes.

So fastened in her arms Adonis lies;
still is he sullen, still he lours and frets,
'twixt crimson shame and anger ashy pale.

Still she entreats, and prettily entreats;
she red as coals of glowing fire,
he frosty in desire.

The first thing I should say is that the eleven lines of text that you just heard do not actually appear as you heard them in Venus and Adonis, the narrative poem by Shakespeare about a goddess who loves a mortal man, Adonis.

Now, don’t get me wrong: each one of these eleven lines appears in Shakespeare’s poem. Each one of those lines is written by Shakespeare. But what Rodrigo Ruiz, the composer of this song, has done is essentially compress fifty lines of Shakespeare’s poem into eleven lines.

And in fact, in his cycle of seventeen songs based on Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, he has taken this massive 1,194-line poem—which, if you said it in its entirety, would probably last like three hours—and distilled it to its essence, creating a dramatic arc that tells a story distributed evenly between three characters: Venus, Adonis, and what he calls the Poet.

The text to this song, which is number two of seventeen, contains only lines from the Poet. In other words, it contains no words spoken by Venus or Adonis.

And in fact, if you sit with the text to Rodrigo Ruiz’s song on one side and Shakespeare’s text on the other—which is what I did when I was trying to piece all this together—you discover that what Ruiz has done is remove the words spoken by the characters.

At one point, for example, Venus says to Adonis, “If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.” But we don’t need these words in this song because there are other songs that are full of her words, that speak with her voice.

He also removes some lengthy passages that describe things that she does. For example, she pushes him off his horse, and we hear nothing about this in his text. Here are some lines from Shakespeare’s poem that he removed:

Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust,
And governed him in strength, though not in lust.

He also removes lines about how she strokes his cheek and how she kisses him. He also removes some lines that describe Adonis himself—for example, how he blushed and pouted in dull disdain.

So the result of all of these excisions, I think, is that his text focuses on her: her feelings of desire for him, and also her two crucial actions that encapsulate this scene, grabbing his hand and taking him in her arms.

Now, mind you, Adonis doesn’t disappear. We learn about how he is sullen, how he lours and frets, and also, of course, how he is “frosty in desire.” That’s the title that Rodrigo Ruiz gives to this song.

But one of my main epiphanies in comparing the distilled eleven-line version of Shakespeare’s scene with the fifty-line version is that Ruiz puts the spotlight on Venus. And as we’ll hear in a moment, his music does too.

One other thing that his distilled version does is draw special attention to some of the wonderful musical aspects of Shakespeare’s language. And these aspects are already in the full version of the poem. Reading it aloud is kind of like singing a song itself. It’s so full of musicality.

But some of those elements stand out even more in Ruiz’s version. I’m thinking, for example, of certain rhymes in his poem that don’t appear in Shakespeare’s because Ruiz has moved lines around.

The first two lines, for example—

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,
and trembling in her passion, calls it balm—

emphasize the rhyme “palm / balm.” But those two lines have a line between them in Shakespeare’s version.

Later, we hear two more rhyming lines that don’t appear back to back in Shakespeare’s poem, and in fact appear in reversed order with a line between them. And these lines in Ruiz’s text are:

which bred more beauty in his angry eyes.

And then:

So fastened in her arms Adonis lies.

These added rhymes make me even more aware of other sonic repetitions that happen not at the ends of lines, but within lines.

In line one, for example, the word “on” in the middle of the line, with its open vowel, resonates with the vowel of “palm”: “on his sweating palm.” The same is true of “calls it balm” at the end of the next line, and words like “shame,” “anger,” and “pale” later in the poem:

'twixt crimson shame and anger ashy pale.

And that’s to say nothing of the consonants, which are just as musical. And here I’ll just mention the opening line again. As I read it, notice all of the S sounds at the beginning of the line, and then the slightly percussive P of “palm” at the end of the line:

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm.

The soft S sounds tell us something about how she grabs his hand. She does it gently, not forcefully.

Another line that’s full of beautiful consonants is the third line of the text:

Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.

Notice here again we have S sounds at the beginning leading to more percussive, plosive sounds at the end:

Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.

You can see why Ruiz chose these lines to musicalize in song, because they are already full of so much music.

“Frosty in Desire,” by William Shakespeare, adapted by Rodrigo Ruiz.

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,
and trembling in her passion, calls it balm,
Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good.

Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret,
which bred more beauty in his angry eyes.

So fastened in her arms Adonis lies;
still is he sullen, still he lours and frets,
'twixt crimson shame and anger ashy pale.

Still she entreats, and prettily entreats;
she red as coals of glowing fire,
he frosty in desire.

And now here is Rodrigo Ruiz’s song “Frosty in Desire,” from his cycle based on Venus and Adonis. The recording features soprano Grace Davidson and pianist George Herbert, and it appears on an album of the entire cycle, which will be released by Signum Records on September 27.

[Music excerpt]

So this is the second podcast episode I’ve done on a song by Rodrigo Ruiz. Some time ago I did an episode on a song that he wrote that’s a setting of a text by Heinrich Heine. And the fact that I’ve done two episodes on his music indicates how much I love it.

I first got to know his music when I discovered a CD of chamber music called Behold the Stars. And I wasn’t the only one to discover it. It became so popular that it made it onto the Billboard charts and has been streamed over a million times.

What struck me about that music, and continues to strike me about Ruiz’s music, is its effortless beauty and its consummate craftsmanship. I know I love a piece when I can listen to it over and over and over again and discover something new every time, and that’s very true of his music.

His musical language, as you can tell from this song, is very tonal. But Rodrigo Ruiz is not merely mimicking the styles of earlier composers.

He’s not doing the kind of thing you might do in a music theory classroom, which we would call model composition, where you write something that sounds like Haydn or Mozart or Felix Mendelssohn. No, he’s just writing what comes naturally to him.

He was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and told me that he grew up listening to his father’s records of classical music by composers like Schubert, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven. And then he started playing the piano and improvising at the piano.

And what happened is that he began improvising music that sounded like the music of those composers, the music that he knew best.

So although his music does sound like these composers—and the song we just heard reminds me, for example, of Franz Schubert; there’s a bit of the sweetness of Felix Mendelssohn; there’s some Robert Schumann in there in the inventive use of the piano—it’s probably more accurate to say that this music sounds like Rodrigo Ruiz.

And having listened to much of his music, I can say that this song does things that are characteristic of his music. And one of those things is a great sense of flow. Nothing is ever awkwardly abrupt, where we’re moving from one section to another and the seam feels somehow too harsh or too poorly constructed. The ideas move naturally from one to the next.

The other thing that really stands out to me is his ability to paint the tiniest fluctuations of emotion.

We use the word text painting often to refer to music that paints something visual or something aural. So imagine music that depicts a sunrise or a storm, or mimics the sound of a twittering bird or a flowing stream.

Ruiz’s music does that as well. And in fact, in this cycle, Venus and Adonis, you’ll hear passages that mimic the sound of a horn call, and the horn, in this case, is evocative of Adonis’s love of hunting.

But even more than that, we might say that Ruiz paints emotional states. And the beginning of this song is a perfect example.

I know of no other settings of this particular text, and in fact I looked at a database online and confirmed that no one, to my knowledge, has set these words before.

But if I were setting them—

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm—

I might set it in a way that suggests that there’s some aggressiveness or overeagerness to her entreaty to Adonis.

But Ruiz’s opening is all tenderness.

Remember I described the S sounds at the beginning of this line that suggested Venus is reaching for his hand gently? Well, the music kind of does the same.

The song begins with a single repeated pitch, a C, middle C on the piano, and that pitch then becomes two—a C and a B-flat—and then three, as a melody emerges in the piano, and then four, and then more. So it gradually expands in texture.

[Music excerpt]

It gradually reveals the tonic, or the main key of the song. The piece is in F major, but an F-major chord doesn’t appear until a few measures in, and even then it’s not an F-major chord with an F as the bottom note, in what we would call root position.

In fact—and this is kind of amazing to say—there is not a single root-position F-major chord in this entire piece. In fact, it ends with an F-major chord in first inversion.

Here’s the very ending.

[Music excerpt]

All of this tiptoeing within the key of F major, without giving us that F-major chord firmly, makes the entire song sound like it’s treading lightly.

There’s one other aspect of the opening of the song that I want to draw your attention to, and that’s Ruiz’s use of the piano. Listen again and try to follow the right hand of the piano.

What you’ll notice is that it is singing with the vocal melody in a kind of duet. And what a perfect way to begin.

This is a love song about two characters, and you can hear them interacting with one another.

[Music excerpt]

Earlier I mentioned Ruiz’s ability to paint feelings and emotions, and he does that in the next section of the song, where the emotional landscape shifts slightly.

This is where we’re learning more about how Adonis is feeling, about his shame and resistance. And the music shifts accordingly. We move into a minor key, into a lower register.

Listen especially for a left-hand melody that previews the melody in the vocal part, a kind of representation of Adonis’s voice.

And then notice also that this passage cadences very strongly in a key. It happens to be a different key, B-flat minor to be exact, but it suggests the kind of firmness and solidity of his resolve.

[Music excerpt]

Yet no sooner have we cadenced in this minor key than the music opens outward to major yet again.

You’ll hear a lovely melody in the right hand of the piano, a return to a single repeated pitch, rather like the beginning of the song, and a return to the opening tenderness.

The score actually says tenero, which means “tenderly.” Venus’s voice dominates once more. The spotlight returns to her.

[Music excerpt]

The next part of the song, Ruiz’s setting of the last six lines of the poem, traces a similar journey. We move toward Adonis’s world and his feelings. He’s sullen, he’s feeling anger, and then we return to Venus’s emotional world.

Still is he sullen, still he lours and frets,
'twixt crimson shame and anger ashy pale.

[Music excerpt]

Remember how I said that in his condensation of Shakespeare’s text, Ruiz drew even more attention to Venus?

Well, I think that his song does the same thing, and we can hear it in this passage. Yes, we do get glimpses of Adonis’s feelings, moves into minor keys, but those passages come and go, and they are bound together musically by a single thread: a slow, repetitive sixteenth-note pulse.

It’s the same pulse we hear at the very beginning of the song in those repeated Cs. I hear this as kind of her repeated heartbeat, her steady presence, her constant gentle entreaties to Adonis.

All the more so because in the final section of the song, those repeated Cs appear on the word “entreats,” not once, but twice.

The opening melody of the song returns, but it’s in the piano alone, and above it, the vocalist sings:

Still she entreats, and prettily entreats.

[Music excerpt]

This is not the end of the song. It could have been, by the way, if Ruiz had ended with this chord progression.

[Music demonstration]

With this deceptive cadence, he keeps things open and allows for an extended piano postlude.

I know from talking to Rodrigo that he loves Robert Schumann’s songs, and one thing Schumann did beautifully is write piano postludes that comment on everything that came before.

And this song ends with just such a postlude. It feels a little like a camera zooming out on the scene, but it’s a camera that remains focused on Venus.

We hear touches of Adonis’s music in here. Notice, for example, a single low B-flat in the piano, which references his key, B-flat minor, from earlier in the song.

There’s even a B-flat minor triad just before the end. But what governs this postlude are the telltale signs of Venus’s voice and Venus’s perspective: the tender right-hand melody, the repeated sixteenth notes, the thin piano texture, and, as I suggested earlier, the F-major key that isn’t so much grasped firmly as it is cradled gently, as gently as she reaches for his hand.

[Music excerpt]

Here, once more, is the entire song, Rodrigo Ruiz’s “Frosty in Desire.”

[Music excerpt]

Special thanks to Signum Records for giving me permission to use this recording, and above all to Rodrigo Ruiz for sharing insights about his music with me.

And if you love this piece as much as I do, please be on the lookout for the entire album, which will be released on September 27.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.com. And if you like what you’ve heard, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, or even sharing this episode with someone who you think will also enjoy this music.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Steve Rodgers. Thank you for listening.