The Raven is a setting for unaccompanied choir of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name. Poe’s poem is sombre in mood, describing the visit of a mysterious raven, who repeats the famous refrain ‘Nevermore’, while exploring the narrator’s sorrow at lost love. The music, however, deliberately undercuts this atmosphere, and is consistently light-hearted and sprightly. Indeed, the text is delivered extremely quickly, in the manner of a patter song, so the eighteen stanzas of Poe’s narrative poem are delivered in their entirety in around five minutes. It is the tensions and contradictions between the text and the music that animate the piece.