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English Song and the German Lied 1904–34

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Barbara Docherty
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Extract

If it is Indeed the case that there is a landscape of the soul which song inhabits, few would dissent from the view that in England in 1900 it was a dead land. The ‘aesthetic tension’ between poetry and music which had stimulated Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf seemed entirely absent, and there was no English Eichendorff or Mörike. Stephen Banfield has asserted that English composers at this time aspired only to produce a ‘frictionless entity’ by providing a ‘pianistic’ accompaniment to Rupert Brooke's or Mathew Arnold's words.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 161-162 , September 1987 , pp. 75 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 Banfield, S., Sensitivity and English Song: Critical Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (CUP, 1985)Google Scholar.

2 In Des Knaben Wunderhorn(1892–9).

3 The short title, a condensation of Housman's first line, used to cross-reference the poems in this study.

4 T. Hardy, ‘Life Laughs Onward’, Moments of Vision.

5 Above all his cycle The Land of Lost Content (1921), discussed below.

6 Op. cit., p. 5.

7 Did some unconscious response to centuries of English country Sundays lead Peel to set ‘good people come and pray’ to a tune that brings ‘Mount Ephraim’ (and Britten's use of it in his Hardy cycle Winter Words, op.52) to the mind's ear?

8 P. 152.

9 Kennedy, M., The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (OUP, 1964, p. 371)Google Scholar

10 But Butterworth's, Love Blows as the Wind Blows (composed in 1911–12 to poems by Henley, W. E. and published in 1921Google Scholar, a cycle of elusive beauty and rare passion) and Gerald Finzi's cycle, Hardy By Footpath and Stile (composed in 1920–1 and published in 1925Google Scholar, but withdrawn in 1934 and later revised, a work where Finzi came very close to expressing the heart of Hardy's poetic conceits) both use a string quartet accompaniment, Butterworth as a substitute for the piano but Finzi (like Gurney) as an independent commentator on life and the pain of living.

11 Banfield, , op. cit., p. 181Google Scholar (quoting Finzi).

12 Even the poet himself, who was rarely charitable towards those who set his work, remarked that We'll to the Woods no More (Ireland's 1928 cycle, see below); expressed the ‘essential Housman’: Bush, G., Foreword to the 1981Google Scholar O.U.P. score.

13 An emotion expressed in even fewer notes in Ireland's setting of the first couplet ('When vain desire at last and vain regret/Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain') of D. G. Rossetti's The One Hope five years later.

14 It received a public performance, but was revised before publication in Along the Field in 1954.

15 This study makes no attempt to address the paradox that those composers (such as Arnold Bax, Rutland Boughton, and Peter Warlock) who deliberately sought an ‘English’ (or Celtic) style in their songs achieved less than those who aspired merely to find an appropriate musical form to express the emotion evoked by a poem; it also ignores Percy Grainger's ‘dished–up’ folksong settings, which had an impact on art song more profound than their status as an arrangement of already existing melodies would lead one to expect.