ALEX LUBET featuring Victoria Vargas, Amy Levy: Songs of Love and Loss

A masterwork artfully weaving emotionally compelling, sparsely arranged subtlety and epic, empowering expression, Amy Levy: Songs of Love is a contemporary song cycle that brings together the diverse talents of three unique, creatively expressive personalities across three centuries – acclaimed composer and mountain dulcimer (among a myriad of traditional folk instruments) Alex Lubet, veteran Minnesota based mezzo soprano Victoria Vargas and 19th Century poet Amy Levy (1861-1889). With eight classic works set to Lubet’s resonant and soulful melodies (after an instrumental prelude) and featuring the full range of Vargas’ subtle and dramatic vocals, it is the long overdue first major musical setting of Levy’s poetry.

It’s likely that other 19^th Century poets like Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are more well known to the casual fan of that century’s literature, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Levy over the past few decades among scholars, academics and the general public. The publication of critical editions of her work, such as Melvyn New's 1993 volume The Complete Novels and Selected Writings, and several biographies (including Linda Hunt Beckman's Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters) provided a foundation for modern scholarship. More recently, in November 2025 – ironically coinciding with the release of Amy Levy’s Songs of Love – the University of the University of Cambridge acquired and unsealed her personal archives, including letters and draft manuscripts, which is expected to inform a wealth of new scholarship and further public interest.

Here's why we should find Amy Levy endlessly interesting, and likely why Lubet – also a renowned writer, scholar and professor – felt her worthy of this groundbreaking recording project. The third Jewish woman to attend Cambridge University and the second Jewish student at Newnham College, the poet was a pioneering Jewish feminist writer in Victorian England who defied norms by exploring female independence, Jewish identity and same sex desire in works that had deep insights into gender, society and the human psyche and are now considered ahead of their time.

Levy explored still relevant themes like the complexities and prejudices faced by Jews in London, often controversially and critiqued society’s beauty standards while exploring the inner lives and struggles of women. After battling clinical depression, she committed suicide at only 27, adding a poignant coda story while leaving us to contemplate what might have been had she lived out a full life.

For those whose curiosity is sparked by this thumbnail summary of Levy’s life and output, Amy Levy: Songs of Love is a fascinating, truly hypnotic and sometimes surreally beautiful, way to tap into her poetic soul and its intricacies. Just scratching the surface of the full canon of nearly 75 poems, the eight Lubet set to music range from the brief two stanza “At a Dinner Party” (about wine, laughter and an intimate secret) to the 68-line pro-feminist dramatic monologue “Magdalen,” which reveals the internal thoughts of a dying “fallen woman” (prostitute) that blames her male seducer who has “wrought this evil onto me.” Lubet turns this poem into a stark, slow building piece showcasing his edgy plucked strings over Varga’s heartbreaking operatic narrative that captures the highs and lows of the sad tale as it unfolds over 17 minutes!

Other highlights (and there are many!) include “The Prayer,” a lovely, longing five minute meditation on loneliness, suffering and a yearning for love and elusive divine connection; the heartfelt, sweetly nostalgic “To Vernon Lee,” a reflection of a (possibly romantic) time in Florence, Italy with fellow writer Violet Paget; and the fitting coda “A Farewell,” a melancholy, lament (performed with intense heartbreak by Vargas) fusing Levy’s reflections on leaving Cambridge (where she regretfully gained neither “friend nor honor”) with Lubet- cultivated fragments of Wagner’s Liebestod and Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance. Classical aficionados may also detect subtle elements of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which is a vision of heaven from a child’s perspective. After an interlude of graceful dulcimer strumming, the piece concludes with a brief spoken word incantation of a Jewish funeral chant.