England 1900-1930: A Musical Renaissance

The Land of Lost Content for Voice and Piano

John Ireland

Born August 13, 1879 in Bowdon, Cheshire, England.

Died June 12, 1962 in Rock Mill, Washington, Sussex.

Composed 1921.

Duration: 11 minutes

A.E. Housman, one of England’s most widely read poets, addressed some of the country’s pressing concerns at the dawn of the modern age in his 1896 collection titled A Shropshire Lad (bucolic Shropshire borders Wales in west-central England), as English musicologist and composer Wilfred Mellers explained: “Housman, a crusty academic and Latin disputant ‘masochistically practicing heroics in the last ditch’ (as W.H. Auden put it), created pseudo-folk ballads set in a mythical Shropshire countryside, making a highly artificial deployment of simple ballad forms to deal with universal themes of death, mutability and a world lost. The verses brought home to thousands of British people not only the loss of the old rural England, but also the tie-up between that loss and a bleak awareness of impermanence in a godless and faithless world.” John Ireland set fourteen of Housman’s poems, six of them in the song cycle The Land of Lost Content of 1921. The late English tenor Peter Pears, one of the leading exponents of his nation’s art songs, judged that “of all the Housman settings, and there are many, Ireland’s are the best; his edgy pessimistic nature matched the poet’s perfectly.”

The Lent Lily, wistful and delicate, touches on the transient nature of life itself, of “the daffodil that dies on Easter day.” Ladslove, which references the ancient myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, warns of holding earthly beauty too dear. Goal and Wicket finds a life lesson in the pursuit of sport. The Vain Desire is a heartbreaking message from the grave to a loved one. The Encounter with a soldier takes place to the accompaniment of a relentless marching rhythm. The tender Epilogue recalls a fleeting moment of passion requited.

Quartet for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello

William Walton

Born March 29, 1902 in Oldham, Lancashire, England.

Died March 7, 1983 on Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

Composed in 1918-1919; revised in 1921 and 1975.

Premiered on September 19, 1924 in Liverpool by members of the McCullagh String Quartet and pianist J.E. Wallace.

Duration: 30 minutes

Sir William Walton (he was knighted in 1951) was the son of two musicians: his mother was a singing teacher and his father, the local church choirmaster. Reports have it (though, unfortunately, without corroborating details) that he was singing Handel anthems before he could speak. Piano and violin lessons followed. He was packed off to the Choir School at Christ Church, Oxford, when he was ten because his father knew the educational opportunities to be better there than in provincial Oldham, the family’s hometown. At age sixteen, Walton, already showing musical promise, was admitted to Christ Church College by the Right Rev. Thomas Banks Strong, Dean of the College, who also tapped the institution’s funds to be sure that the young student could meet his needs. Perhaps challenged by the Rev. Strong’s faith in him, or perhaps to fulfill an ambitious assignment from Hugh Allen, the noted organist and teacher who had just joined the Oxford faculty (he was knighted in 1920), sometime in 1918 Walton began a quartet for piano and strings, his first large-scale undertaking.

At just that time, the offspring of the wealthy, cultured, and well-placed Sitwell family — Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell — were trolling England’s campuses in search of youthful artistic genius (a sort of social compensation for their mother having recently been clapped into Holloway Prison for three months when her husband refused to honor her debts). The Rev. Strong pointed the Sitwells toward young Walton, who invited them to his rooms in February 1919. Osbert later recounted the meeting: “Our host, not quite seventeen years of age, we found to be a rather tall, slight figure, with pale skin and straight, fair hair…. Sensitiveness rather than toughness was the quality at first most apparent in him…. The atmosphere was not, however, easy; music showed a way out of the constraint, and after tea we pressed him to play some of his compositions to us. Accordingly, he sat down at the piano to play the slow movement from his Piano Quartet…. As he began to play, he revealed a lack of mastery of the instrument so that it was difficult to form an opinion of the music at first hearing. It was as impossible that afternoon to estimate his character or talents as it was to foresee that for the next seventeen years he would become an inseparable companion and friend.” Despite Walton’s poor showing at the keyboard, the Sitwells sensed that they have discovered an exceptional talent. Within a year, so absorbed in his musical studies that he failed all his other subjects, Walton left Oxford and moved in with his new family in London. Two years later he wrote Façade to Edith’s delightfully eccentric poems, and became a sensation at age twenty. The Piano Quartet also won him a certain notoriety when it was chosen by Hugh Allen, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Henry Hadow for a Carnegie Trust Publication Award. In gratitude for his experiences at Oxford, Walton dedicated the score to Rev. Strong. The Quartet was premiered in Liverpool in September 1924 and first heard in London five years later, and at its occasional performances since has continued to excite admiration that it was the creation of a seventeen-year-old composer with almost no formal training.

The Quartet’s opening sonata-form movement takes as its main theme a modal tune seeded by the English pastoral tradition; the viola is entrusted with the complimentary subject, a quiet, arching, leisurely melody. The main theme passes through some agitated transformations in the development section before being returned in its original form to begin the recapitulation. The scherzo is built from three thematic ideas: a sharply rhythmic strain opposing strings and piano, a fugato for the strings based on the main theme of the opening movement, and a grand tune of Elgarian breadth announced by the unison strings above full chords in the piano. These elements are subjected to some development and then returned in order in the movement’s second half. The outer sections of the Andante are given over to a soft, muted theme, subtly harmonized, while the movement’s spacious central episode develops from a sweet, naive tune first sounded in the viola and includes reminiscences of the first movement’s main theme. The finale is a sonata-rondo, with a stamping dance melody as its returning theme and intervening episodes encompassing an expressive cello strain and an imitative passage based on a muscular subject for the strings.

Selections from Songs of Travel for Voice and Piano

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Born October 12, 1872 in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire.

Died August 26, 1958 in London.

Composed in 1901 and 1904.

Premiered on December 2, 1904 in London by baritone Walter Creighton and pianist Hamilton Harty.

Duration: 14 minutes

“The human voice,” Ralph Vaughan Williams asserted in his 1934 treatise on National Music, “is the oldest musical instrument and through the ages it remains what it was, unchanged: the most primitive and at the same time the most modern, because it is the most intimate form of human expression.” Though Vaughan Williams is best-known for his nine symphonies, the Tallis Fantasia, the Folk Song Suite and other instrumental works, the bulk of his catalog is occupied by compositions for voice. His earliest piece to reach publication is a song from 1901 to words by Robert Louis Stevenson, Whither Must I Wander?, which he included in his 1904 cycle, Songs of Travel. He went on to compose some 100 songs to poems by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rossetti, Whitman, Bunyan, Blake, Housman and other fine writers, and made arrangements for solo voice of a like number of folk songs and carols. There are also more than two dozen large-scale works for chorus with and without instruments (including the Mass in G minor, the rapturous Serenade to Music and the Christmas cantata, Hodie), seventy choral parts songs and arrangements, 23 sacred and ceremonial anthems, numerous hymn tunes, six operas, Flos Campi for Solo Viola, Orchestra and Wordless Chorus, the choral Sea Symphony (usually known as Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 1, though he never numbered it), and the Pastoral Symphony with Soprano Obbligato. It is a magnificent and unjustifiably neglected bounty for the lover of singing.

“For my part,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, that most peripatetic of British authors, in his 1879 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.” For reasons of adolescent rebellion, health, adventure and love, Stevenson wandered across much of the globe during his 44 years — he died in 1894 in Samoa, half a world away from his native Edinburgh — recording his journeys of place and imagination in a wide range of novels, essays, poems and stories which include such classics of English literature as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses. In 1896, there appeared a collection of Stevenson’s writings titled Songs of Travel and Other Verses, and in 1901, Ralph Vaughan Williams, recently graduated from Cambridge with a degree in music, took up the poem titled Whither Must I Wander? and gave it a splendid open-air setting. The following year Whither Must I Wander? appeared in an issue of The Vocalist, a new journal devoted to revitalizing the long-dormant tradition of the English art song through the discussion and publication of recent compositions; a performance by Campbell McInnes and pianist C.A. Lidgey followed before the end of the year at St. James’s Hall, London. Vaughan Williams returned to Stevenson’s Songs of Travel in 1904, and made settings of eight additional poems that give a picture of a lover wandering across the world seeking solace for a broken heart, a sort of English counterpart to Schubert’s Die Winterreise. Baritone Walter Creighton and pianist Hamilton Harty gave the cycle’s premiere on December 2, 1904 in London. Three of the Songs (Vagabond, The Roadside Fire, and Bright Is the Ring of Words) were published in 1905; all the others except for the last were issued two years later. I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope was retrieved from among the composer’s effects after his death, in 1958, and published in 1960, when the Songs of Travel finally received its first complete edition.

Quintet in A minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 84

Edward Elgar

Born June 2, 1857 in Broadheath, England.

Died February 23, 1934 in Worcester.

Composed in 1918-1919.

Premiered on May 21, 1919 in London.

Duration: 37 minutes

Elgar began the Piano Quintet in the summer of 1918 at Brinkwells, near the West Sussex village of Fittleworth, where he had settled to recover from the rigors of the war years. He worked on the Quintet throughout the rest of year simultaneously with the String Quartet and the Violin Sonata, and completed it early the following year. It was given a private performance in London on April 26, 1919, and received its public premiere at Wigmore Hall on May 21st. Billy Reed, second violinist in the Quintet’s early performances and a close associate of Elgar at that time, noted in his later writings about the composer the profound effect that the woody surroundings of Brinkwells had on the chamber works written there in 1918. Reed visited West Sussex frequently, trying out Elgar’s new music, offering advice on points of string technique, and joining the composer in his walks through the countryside. Standing in stark contrast to the largely halcyon environs of Brinkwells was a blasted plateau at Flexham Park, near Bedham, capped by an eerie copse of gnarled and twisted trees, struck by lightning, Reed judged, which produced “a ghastly sight in the evening.” Elgar, enthralled with misty legends and supernatural tales, saw some mystical significance in the strange trees, which his wife, Alice, described as “sad” and “dispossessed.” In his 1933 biography of Elgar, Basil Maine expounded a legend that he said was connected with the trees: “The withered trees near Elgar’s cottage in Sussex have inspired a legend in those parts. Upon the plateau, it is said, was once a settlement of Spanish monks, who, while carrying out some impious rite, were struck dead; and the trees are their dead forms.” Research has not revealed the existence of any ancient Spanish community in the area, though there was a nearby priory of Augustine monks in Medieval times. Not a scrap of evidence supports any factual basis for the old Sussex legend, but its haunted, romantic mood played strongly upon Elgar’s mind during the writing of the Quintet, and provided the emotional foundation upon which much of the music is based — the work is signed “Brinkwells” at the end, but “Bedham” following the first movement. “It is strange music I think & I like it — but — it’s ghostly stuff,” Elgar wrote in 1919 to the critic and writer Ernest Newman, to whom the composition was dedicated.

Alice Elgar commented to her diary about the “wonderful weird beginning [of the Piano Quintet] ... evidently reminiscence of sinister trees & impression of Flexham Park.” The movement follows a fully developed sonata form framed at beginning and end by a ghostly strain superimposing a slow-moving chant melody in the piano upon a spectral processional of thematic fragments in the strings. The main theme, given in a newly vitalized tempo by the full ensemble, is marked by troubled sentiments and implied tragedy. The second theme appears in an unsettled major tonality after a tiny but distinctive passage of saccharine harmonies in the strings. The development section, launched by the recall of the chant–introduction, incorporates all the principal thematic materials. The priestly procession hovers once again above the music to bring this strange and haunting movement to a mysterious close. The Adagio is tranquil and lyrical in its outer sections, and more animated and rhythmically intense in its central episode. The finale returns the woodland mood (and some thematic material) of the first movement, though it is more stridingly confident in nature and optimistic in outlook than the earlier music.

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda