AT 3 MINUTES 24 SECONDS

Setting Poetry Aflame

Matthew Aucoin’s opera “Crossing,” which has its New York premiere next week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, tells the complicated story of Walt Whitman’s time as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. I spoke with Mr. Aucoin and he mentioned that, were it not for “Crossing,” he likely never would have set Whitman’s words to music. In general, he said, poetry lends itself to music only when it has “something latent in it, like firewood that needs to be fully set on fire.” Whitman’s poetry, in his view, is already so musical that it tends to drown out any composer’s voice. How clever, then, that the final chorus in “Crossing” takes only small phrases from “Leaves of Grass,” instead quoting two sentences from a Wallace Stevens poem about Whitman: “Nothing is final/No man shall see the end.” JOSHUA BARONE