By Andra Moss

There’s no need to wait for summer to enjoy live chamber music in Norfolk. Five fellows from the 2025 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival are returning on Saturday, April 25 with a unique program entitled “Narrative Resonance” that pairs a work of classical chamber music with literature.

The 2 p.m. performance at the Norfolk Library honors Earth Day and will invite listeners to explore one of Haydn’s most inventive string quartets, in conversation with the essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. An essayist, lecturer, poet and philosopher, Emerson was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of his era, a leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. In his 1836 essay, “Nature,” Emerson laid out many of the tenets of the transcendentalist philosophy. He suggested that God could be found in nature and that nature provided the primary source of moral and spiritual wisdom. Emerson’s poems invite the reader to slow down and ponder the wonders of the natural world: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty…” In an undated journal entry made around 1845, his good friend Henry David Thoreau described the Emerson he knew and admired: “Love and Friendship, Religion, Poetry, the Holy are familiar to him…. There is no such general critic of men and things, no such trustworthy and faithful man.… In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”

How might Emerson’s conception of the divine through nature illuminate the radiant faith of the slow movement of Haydn’s Op. 76 No. 5, composed nearly four decades before “Nature” was written? Can similarities be found in the relationship between poetic form and phrase structures, rhyme and rhythm?

“The Poetic Earth: Haydn and Emerson,” begins at 2 p.m. and is intended to be accessible to those new to classical music and Emerson. The one-hour program is free; reservations are encouraged via the library’s website at norfolklibrary.org/events.

The concert will open with a short contemplation on the intersection of the two works and culminate in a full performance of Haydn’s string quartet by Vibha Janakiraman, Nate Strothkamp, Lourdes Pinney and Emil Olejnik. On April 25 (or any day), should the path to the library take one through the Village Green, perhaps like Emerson, a walker will feel that “Crossing a bare common … I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.”