Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Newman may have been right, for although Last Poems inspired many fine songs, composers continued to turn first to A Shropshire Lad. Housman’s poems became among the most frequently set of all English verse during the twentieth century: a catalogue of Musical Settings of Late Victorian and Modern British Literature compiled in 1976 listed nearly 400 published settings: only Walter de la Mare had more. Contemporary classical composers continue to set Housman’s poems, but the most active period was between 1904 and 1940, for which the catalogue listed 176 individual vocal settings by forty-seven composers. Further research carried out by Kevin Robert Whittingham for a 2008 thesis on ‘A Shropshire Lad in British Music Since 1940’ showed that there were in fact 236 settings by fifty-eight composers during this period, though some 24 percent of them had remained unpublished. The best known, the ones that have stayed in the concert repertoire and have been frequently recorded, date from the two decades immediately before and after the First World War.

  While Housman regularly gave composers permission to set his words – and by charging no fee inadvertently encouraged them – he carefully avoided listening to the results. His apparent lack of interest in classical music is well documented. ‘He cared little for paintings, nothing for music,’ Percy Withers observed at the outset of a well-known anecdote:

  Since he had so often and so unaccountably allowed his verses to be set to music, and had never as I knew experienced the results, it occurred to me that he might like to hear gramophone records of Vaughan Williams’ settings sung by Gervase Elwes. I was oblivious of the effect until two of them had been played, and then turning in my chair I beheld a face wrought and flushed with torment, a figure tense and bolt upright as though in an extremity of controlling pain or anger, or both. To invite comment or question was too like bearding the lion in its den, so I ignored the subject and asked mildly if there was anything else he would like. A pause. There was a visible struggle for self-possession, a slow relaxation of posture, and then a naïve admission that people talked a good deal about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: had we got a record? I turned it on, and watched. The Sphinx-like countenance suggested anything and everything but pleasure, though there was an expression of contentment during the slow movement, and faintest praise of it, and it alone, at the close.

  An explanation of this indifference or hostility to music was provided by Housman’s young friend Joan Thomson. ‘Good critical taste was so essential to Housman that it was difficult to persuade him to say whether he liked a piece of music he had just heard if he had not known it before,’ she recalled. ‘He would declare that he did not know enough of music to be sure of his judgement, and he could not bear the idea of admiring anything unworthy.’ This allowed Housman to avoid passing comment on any settings sent to him: ‘I am sorry that my knowledge of music does not permit me to express or form a competent judgement of it,’ he told one composer.

  In fact, Housman knew a great deal more about classical music than he pretended. When William White, in a detailed article on ‘A.E. Housman and Music’ in Music and Letters in 1943, asserted that ‘Housman had little interest in music, rarely (if ever) attended concerts, even disliked listening to music’, Kate Symons responded:

  Considering the evidence that exists of A.E.H.’s marked indifference to music in after life, it is no wonder that Professor White wished to know whether it had been inherent from his earliest years. It had not. Writing as a sister, one of the few living persons who can know anything about my brother’s boyhood, I should like to tell Professor White, and anyone else interested in the question, that in boyhood music attracted my brother in so marked a degree that it came as a surprise on survivors of his family to read, after his death, reminiscences from later-day friends which appeared to show in A.E.H. ignorance of music, or even antipathy. To us the incidents of these reminiscences suggest either a pose, concealing a hidden attachment, or that the early attachment had really died away. Either is possible through the suppressions that my brother practised – to his lasting loss.

  (Whether or not it was conscious or merely coincidental, it is worth noting parenthetically that the language used here – ‘hidden attachment’, ‘suppressions’ – would seem to relate Housman’s feelings about music to his feelings about Moses Jackson.) Kate went on to recall that the Housmans were a musical family: their stepmother played the piano and both she and their father belonged to the Bromsgrove Philharmonic Society, ‘bringing oratorio and other music better than our glees into our drawing-room practisings’. Housman had studied the piano in his youth, buying sheet music and attempting to master ‘pieces that pleased him most’, but he gave up when he recognised he had no particular aptitude for it. He nevertheless attended concerts and ‘enjoyed Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn at home’. He also ‘had a pleasant singing-voice – baritone – and it took his fancy to learn to accompany and sing, solo, an absurd comic song of the Bab Ballad type. He was in request to sing this song at little parties in other houses than ours, and I have heard that he sang it sometimes in London in the days of his sad pilgrimage. This was looked on as a great joke, for it was incongruous with his usual reserved bearing.’

  A taste for the ‘Bab Ballads’ of W.S. Gilbert would fit with Housman’s love of nonsense rhymes, and in later life his musical tastes were largely limited to the songs of the music halls. His pretence to know nothing of music is, however, exploded by the recent discovery of a letter to Arthur Somervell, who in 1904 was one of the very first composers to set poems from A Shropshire Lad. Since most applications to set his words to music came through his publisher, Housman was inclined to let Grant Richards reply on his behalf, only rarely entering into direct correspondence with composers. This was perhaps as well. Like some of the composers who came after him, Somervell not only set Housman’s words but occasionally adapted them, and while it seems unlikely that he sought permission to do so, he evidently had the temerity to write to Housman complaining about the use of the word ‘rotten’ to describe dead soldiers in ‘On the idle hill of summer’ (XXXV), which he set as the sixth song in his A Shropshire Lad cycle. Housman was not pleased.

  My dear Sir,

  I returned from abroad a few days ago and found your letter here.

  As to what I have written, I resemble Pontius Pilate and Mr Chamberlain; and my opinion of the propriety of the word has not been altered by the death of one of my brothers in the war. I am however disposed to agree with you as to the difficulty of sitting down to the piano and warbling out ‘rotten’. But I am not willing that poetry should make any concessions to music, at any rate to modern European music, which I regard (I am afraid you will think this another hard saying) as unsuitable for union with words. Europeans, in order to enjoy the sensual luxury of harmony, employ the diatonic scale, whose intervals have no resemblance to the modulations of human speech, which is the interpreter of human emotion; and consequently European music can only express emotion in the vaguest manner, and when wedded to words, which express emotion with precision, it becomes, strictly speaking, nonsensical. I am just returned from Constantinople where I have been listening to a good deal of Asiatic music: I think it ugly, but it is not unsuitable for union with words, because it is very chromatic and its range is hardly more than half an octave.

  In expressing these opinions to you I must naturally do so with the diffidence which you are good enough to say you feel in taking exception to my verse.

  I am yours very truly

  A.E. Housman

  The style is characteristic, notably in the deadly use of the word ‘warbling’ and the apparently polite but in fact heavily ironic last paragraph. What is more remarkable, however, is that Housman, who claimed to have no knowledge of music, is nevertheless capable of writing about the technical differences between European and Eastern music, and between the diatonic and chromatic scales.

  If Housman thought European music unsuitable for the setting of words, and greatly disliked the results, it seems odd that he gave so many
composers permission to use his poetry. By the time he died in 1936, some seventy-five individual songs and twenty-nine song cycles had been composed setting poems from A Shropshire Lad – as well as other songs and cycles setting verses from Last Poems. Most of the individual songs were for the usual ‘art song’ combination of voice and piano, though there were also settings for voice, piano and string quartet and men’s, women’s and mixed choruses. In addition, Housman’s correspondence contains a substantial number of letters giving permission for settings that either never materialised or have since disappeared. Housman occasionally provided explanations why he allowed the wholesale ransacking of his poetry by composers, but he was not consistent and was often flippant. In 1906, for example, giving H. Balfour Gardiner permission to publish his setting of ‘The Recruit’, he told Richards: ‘I always give my consent to all composers, in the hope of becoming immortal somehow.’ Richards felt that it was rather the other way round and referred to composers who ‘helped themselves to fame and popularity’ by plundering A Shropshire Lad.

  Richards did, however, concede that this large number of settings by English composers contributed to the increased sales of the volume. Indeed, while Housman’s remark may have been intended ironically, it is fair to say that some degree of the immortality he achieved was indeed due to the musical settings of his poems, which brought them to a whole new audience beyond that of the poetry-reading public. Housman gave Percy Withers a different reason for invariably granting composers permission to set his words: the results ‘mattered nothing; words sung ceased to be poetry, and were not estimated as poetry’. A few weeks before his death, giving permission for an unlikely and apparently unfulfilled plan to set ‘Hell Gate’, Housman cheerfully supposed that ‘the orchestra will drown out the words’. He similarly imagined that broadcasting song recitals based on his poems would achieve poor results: ‘I don’t allow the wireless people to recite my poems,’ he reminded Richards in 1927, when radio technology was still comparatively crude, ‘but as I allow the poems to be sung to music there is no reason why the songs should not be broadcast. I daresay the music is spoilt; but that is the composer’s look out; and the words are mostly inaudible.’ If audiences could not make out the words, Housman was not going to help them, and he would not allow composers to print his verses in concert programmes.

  Land Without Music

  Reluctant as Housman was to be taken up so readily by English composers, he had inadvertently provided them with something they had long been seeking. As Newman put it: ‘Never before had an English poet produced so many poems that had all the qualities requisite to poetry that is to be set to music – concision and intensity of tone, the utmost simplicity of language, freedom both from involution of structure and from simile, and a general build that was virtually that of musical form.’ There was, however, a more important reason that Housman proved so popular with composers. The publication of A Shropshire Lad coincided with a widespread movement to re-energise English music and forge a new national style.

  Throughout the nineteenth century English music had been dominated by foreign composers and foreign performers. The classical concert repertoire was largely made up of the works of the established composers of Germany, Austria, France and Italy, while a survey of London’s principal orchestras carried out in 1866 discovered that of 419 instrumentalists only 253 were British, and that many of these had been obliged to go abroad for their musical training. The Royal Academy of Music had been founded in 1822, but only a tiny proportion of professional musicians had trained there: no more than 17 percent of those surveyed. Even many of the instruments English musicians played and the sheet music from which they read were manufactured or published abroad, mostly in Germany. Britain’s favourite ‘English’ composers were in fact both German: Handel did not settle in London until the age of twenty-eight, after being educated in his native land and working for six years in Italy, while a century later Mendelssohn, although similarly adopted by the English, remained a German subject, based and principally employed in the country of his birth. Both composers excelled at the oratorio, a form that dominated Victorian English music-making, largely thanks to a proliferation of choral societies in the nineteenth century, and Mendelssohn’s hugely popular Elijah (1846) had provided a useful model for English-language choral works.

  English opera barely existed during the Victorian period, partly because the grand romantic emotions characteristic of such stage works were simply considered un-English. As one historian put it: ‘It has more than once been suggested that the reason why opera never developed here as it did in Italy is to be found in our individual attitude to music in general. For the Italian, it is thought, music is a direct expression of emotion; hence with him drama naturally issues in song. For the Englishman music is something loftier than this, so that he is not so easily inclined to subordinate it to the theatre.’

  It would certainly be difficult to envisage an English La Traviata, Carmen or La Bohème at this period. Similarly, art songs such as the German Lied or French chanson had no real English equivalent at this time: instead English composers churned out drawing-room ballads, which were hugely popular but largely sentimental in both their music and lyrics. It was only in churches that an English musical tradition remained unbroken from the days of Byrd and Tallis, though it was considerably diluted during the nineteenth century. Much of the music performed at England’s foremost triennial music festivals – the Three Choirs (founded in 1724, which took place by rotation at Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford), Birmingham (1768), Norfolk & Norwich (1824), Leeds (1858) and the London Handel Festival (1859) – was religious. ‘Loftier’ than Italian song this may have been, but as one historian observed in 1947, ‘The choral festivals have been responsible for quantities of rubbish by [English] composers now mercifully forgotten.’

  In spite of the appearance of new choral pieces, the works of Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn remained a mainstay of these festivals until the 1880s. It was in that decade that the works of J.S. Bach were rediscovered and widely performed, but more importantly it saw renewed interest in Henry Purcell. Although Purcell had died in 1695, aged just thirty-six, he was seen by many people as the last genuinely great English composer until the arrival on the musical scene of Elgar 240 years later. The founding in 1876 of a Purcell Society belatedly acknowledged his importance, and resulted in his works entering the repertoire once more. A particular significance of Purcell was that he set English words, and in Dido and Aeneas (1688) composed the last truly English opera of any lasting significance until Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945.

  Housman was not alone in professing to have little time for classical music. England’s musical reputation abroad during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was summed up in the title of Oscar Schmitz’s notorious 1904 book Das Land ohne Musik. England, Schmitz declared, was ‘the only cultured nation without its own music (except street music)’ – this being the kind of music Housman himself claimed most to enjoy. By the time Schmitz published his opinion, things had in fact changed considerably, but this dim view of English musical culture had been expressed much earlier – in 1871, and by an Englishman. The Rev. H.R. Haweis was an extraordinary figure. The son of a clergyman, he was born with a club foot, and a disease of the hip during childhood restricted his growth to under five feet tall. He nevertheless became a skilled fiddle player and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he founded a quartet society, began contributing to newspapers and periodicals, and studied the manufacture of violins. After graduating, he travelled to the Continent for his health and ended up fighting alongside Garibaldi. Having celebrated the unification of Italy, he returned to England and entered holy orders, becoming a priest in London’s East End, where both oratorios and orchestral music were performed at the cultural evenings he organised for his working-class parishioners. He soon gained a reputation as a popular preacher, even when he embraced spiritualism, a creed he did not find incompatible with the t
enets of the Church of England. Thomas Hardy left an unkind account of Haweis having difficulty climbing into a pulpit to deliver a sermon on Cain and Abel (in which he made excuses for the former): ‘His black hair, black beard, hollow cheeks and black gown made him look like one of the skeletons in the Church of the Capuchins, Rome.’ Haweis declined to believe in the doctrine of eternal damnation, and, although married, took one of his parishioners as a mistress and had an illegitimate child with her. He was a well-known lecturer who undertook extensive tours both in Britain and abroad, a leading Wagnerite, an editor of Cassell’s Family Magazine, contributed an article on bell-ringing to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and wrote several books on musical and religious topics.