Andre Solomon-Glover sang Wolfgang Rihm's setting of Michelangelo's beautiful poetry during last season's concert devoted to Rihm's music.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born near Florence in 1475 and died in 1564. His accomplishments as a poet are overshadowed by his status as the supreme visual artist in European history.

In his youth, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Savonarola. At 21 he moved to Rome, where he carved the Pieta; five years later he returned to Florence and carved the statue of David. His best-known work remains the sequence of frescoes decorating the pope's Sistine Chapel, portraying the Creation and the Last Judgment, accompanied by portraits of prophets and sybils. Other important works include the sets of statues for the tombs of the de Medici and of Pope Julius II, and his final project, the dome of St. Peter’s basilica.

Michelangelo was a serious student of poetry, and in many ways poetry complemented his other activities as a reserve for particularly intimate or pessimistic material; he frequently turned to poetry during times of emotional crisis, and the more than three hundred sonnets he left behind form a spiritual autobiography. His reputation as an important sixteenth century lyric poet has grown in the English-speaking world largely as a result of the poet John Frederick Nims’ effort to translate the entire collection, an effort failed by numerous other writers, including Rilke and Wordworth. The strong erotic and homoerotic content of the poetry, suppressed until 1893 with Symonds’ restoration of the original pronoun genders, has further increased interest in the work on the part of many twentieth-century readers.

Joshua Cody