Musica Poetica was the title of the course Wilfrid Mellers taught when he became a Reader in the Department of English at York University in 1964. When the university was founded, there were no plans to establish a Music Department. Instead it included music as a linked study with English, and it appointed Mellers, who, in the thirties, had read English and Music at Cambridge University. He was both a composer and a distinguished musicologist, whose writings had covered an unparalleled range of musical topics, including, in 1964, the first major study of American music: Music in a New Found Land.1 When Mellers accepted his appointment he decided the emphasis of the course would be on theatre. This reflected the fact that earlier that year he had composed a piece for a concert to celebrate Shakespeare’s quatercentenary at the 1964 Cheltenham Festival: Rose of May: A Threnody for Ophelia for speaker, soprano, flute, clarinet and string quartet. The commission had been for a work that would include actors from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and musicians. Mellers chose to set the three songs Ophelia sings in Hamlet, framed by an actress reciting the lines given to the Queen when she reports on Ophelia’s death: ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook …’ Those taking part were the actress Diana Rigg, April Cantelo (soprano) and the Wigmore Ensemble.

To give emphasis to the theatrical context of the Queen’s speech, Mellers asks the actress to ‘begin very lazily and slowly’ before adopting a normal narrative style, and to reverse this procedure for the lines which end the speech: ‘Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death’. And to emphasise the purely musical aspect of the score, he concludes the three ballads in which Ophelia sings her songs with cadenzas for respectively clarinet, flute and voice. Thus poetry is both spoken and sung, and music also has the opportunity to come into its own.

Six year later Mellers composed The Ancient Wound, another work that deals with the death of an innocent victim, and which also has its poetry both spoken and sung.