Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  The Malvern Hills did not merely ‘present the earliest classic ground of English poetry’. As the article goes on to observe, the spectacular view from Elgar’s recently built house on a hillside in Malvern Wells ‘begins and ends with two cities so long associated with the Three Choirs Festivals – Worcester on the left, Gloucester on the right. Between these extremes, through which the Severn flows its tranquil course, lies the vale of Evesham, where Muzio Clementi, “the father of modern pianoforte-playing,” had his cottage and where he died.* The venerable Abbey of Tewkesbury comes within the range of vision, and, on a clear day, even the historic battle-field of Edge Hill, although forty miles distant.’ The author has already pointed out ‘the site of a Roman encampment […] traditionally associated with Caractacus’, by which he in fact means the British Camp, where according to legend the first-century British king made his last stand against the Roman invaders – an episode Elgar had made the subject of an 1889 cantata. In short, the article locates Elgar not simply in an English landscape but amidst the places of English history: musical, ecclesiastical and military.

  In the inaugural lecture he delivered at the University of Birmingham, where he became the first Chair of Music in 1905, Elgar rejected the popular notion that ‘certain boisterous, heavy, strenuous choral works have represented the height of English music and represent the English spirit’. He felt that young composers should instead ‘draw their inspiration more from their own country, from their own literature – and, in spite of what many would say – from their own climate. Only by drawing from any real English inspiration shall we ever arrive at having an English art.’ Elgar himself drew on all these aspects of England, but it was the English landscape that had the greatest influence on him. He explored much of it by bicycle, sometimes travelling fifty miles in a day, and frequently claimed that the countryside could be heard in his works. While rehearsing the second movement of his Symphony No. 1, he told the orchestra: ‘Don’t play it like that: play it like – like something you hear down by the river,’ and claimed that he could not conduct his own music ‘without finding that his mind slipped back to summer days on the Malvern Hills, to Birchwood or to the drowsy peace of Longdon Marsh’. Birchwood was the rented cottage where he spent summer weekends between 1898 and 1903, while Longdon Marsh is another western brookland of streams and willows, this one near Upton-upon-Severn with views of the Malverns. The latter is where Elgar spent time composing his 1903 oratorio The Apostles: ‘In Longdon Marsh’ is written on the score.

  Even when exiled from what he called ‘that sweet borderland where I have made my home’, he continued to take his inspiration from it: the Cello Concerto was largely written in Sussex, but Elgar told a friend that he should not be surprised if, when out walking on the Malvern Hills, he should hear the concerto’s main theme: ‘it’s only me – don’t be frightened’. Someone who heard Elgar’s music all too loudly when walking on the Malverns was E.J. Moeran, who while staying in Ledbury, struggling to write his Second Symphony, claimed that Elgar had ‘cursed’ the surrounding landscape for other composers.

  In 1929 Elgar moved into his final home, on Rainbow Hill in Worcester, where he wrote his Severn Suite for brass band and the final Pomp and Circumstance march, the idea for which he originally sketched on an Ordnance Survey map of Gloucestershire while out motoring. When he was dying Elgar requested that he should be buried near Powick, where he had once been conductor of the lunatic asylum’s staff band and which stands at the confluence of the Severn and the Teme, two of the rivers that flow through A Shropshire Lad. ‘It is certain that no one was ever more involved with the very spirit and essence of his own country,’ Elgar’s daughter Carice recalled.

  It was in his very bones – Worcestershire was everything to him, the very look of spring coming, the cottages, the gardens, the fields and fruit orchards were different to his mind in Worcestershire from anywhere else. He loved England and would delight in seeing places new to him and get their atmosphere and understand the feeling of other parts of England – but Worcestershire remained supreme. From walking, driving and bicycling there was very little of the county he did not know, and his memory for every village however remote, and every lane however twisty and bewildering, was extraordinary. He had a wonderful gift of sense of locality and a wonderful memory.

  The Singing Lad

  The influential music critic Edwin Evans felt that A Shropshire Lad offered English composers what the poetry of Verlaine had recently offered the French. It was, he wrote in 1918, a volume ‘in which the truly lyrical qualities of the English language are reflected as they have seldom been, if ever, in our time. Within the same number of years, or less, from their publication, the poems of Verlaine, in which the essential lyrical qualities of the French language have the same prominence, had supplied the foundation of a veritable library of French song which threatens in course of time to become as formidable as that which owes its existence to the poetry of Heinrich Heine.’

  He went on to suggest that English composers had been ‘slow to discern’ the qualities of Housman’s poetry, and in this he and his colleague and rival, Ernest Newman, were for once in agreement. At this stage, Newman felt that composers had not yet taken full advantage of what Housman offered: ‘Mr. Housman’s book of poems, – now a quarter of a century old, – is so purely English a thing that it is a pity our English composers have not found a real musical equivalent of it. Had we a [Hugo] Wolf among us, it would not have been a mere poem or two here and there from the collection that he would have set. He would have felt that here was something peculiarly English from first to last; and he would have set virtually the whole of the sixty-three poems, doing for Mr. Housman what Wolf did for Mörike, for Goethe, for Eichendorff, and others.’

  By the time the two critics were writing, English composers had in fact begun to set Housman’s poems, though often without particular distinction. The earliest evidence of permission being sought to set a poem from A Shropshire Lad is a letter Housman wrote to Grant Richards in June 1903. ‘I have no objection to Mr Ettrick setting the verse to music,’ he told his publisher, ‘but I have not extracted fees from other people who have set other pieces, so I don’t want to begin now.’ There is no trace of any Housman settings by Henry Havelock Ettrick, a composer who appears similarly to have vanished into oblivion, leaving behind a handful of published songs. The letter makes it clear that Ettrick was not the first composer to have approached Housman, but it is not until 1904 that a setting is known to have been completed. ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, for voice and piano, was published that year by the baritone Michael Maybrick under his customary pseudonym of Stephen Adams. Maybrick was a popular performer of his own songs, most of them with words by Frederic Weatherby, the author of ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Roses Are Blooming in Picardy’. Many of the songs the two men composed are about seafaring, but perhaps their most famous song is ‘The Holy City’, a perennially popular and highly glutinous religious piece. There is presumably someone around who owns a copy of Adams’s Housman setting, but no copy exists in the files of its publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.

  Arthur Somervell’s A Shropshire Lad cycle of ten songs, dating from the same year, not only survives but was an immediate success, has been frequently recorded, and is regularly performed over a century after it was first published. The first known performance of the piece was given on 3 February 1905 by the well-known baritone Harry Plunket Greene at the Aeolian Hall, where it was paired with five of Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel. Situated in London’s Bond Street, the hall had become a leading venue for chamber-music recitals, and several of the musical compositions based on Housman’s poems received their premieres there. The Musical Times judged the Shropshire Lad settings ‘amongst the best Dr Somervell has written’, adding that ‘the work so pleased that Mr Plunket Greene announces that he will repeat the Cycle on March 9 in the same hall’. Somervell may have gritted his teeth and set the line ‘Lovely lads and dead and rotten’ unaltered
in ‘On the idle hill of summer’, but he took considerable liberties in setting other poems, omitting three of the five verses of ‘There pass the careless people’, repeating the first verse after the second in ‘Think no more, lad; laugh, be jolly’, and emphatically repeating the final line of ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’.

  Somervell had already written a song cycle derived from Tennyson’s 1855 monodrama Maud, condensing the poet’s long narrative into thirteen songs. The story there was ready-made, and it has been asserted that Somervell created a similar narrative for A Shropshire Lad: it ‘would seem to relate memorable incidents in the career of a lad who starts life in a village and ultimately becomes a soldier’, explained the critic in the Musical Times, which is about as far as one can go. As with the book itself, however, there have been later and unwise attempts to construct a rather more detailed narrative: ‘In No. 1 (“Loveliest of trees”) the hero, aged twenty, marvels at the beauty of spring and feels the stirrings of romance.’ There is in fact nothing in the poem (II) to suggest such stirrings: on the contrary, springtime blossom makes the ‘hero’ acutely aware of mortality and the passing of time. ‘Already in No 2, though a year or two later (“When I was one-and-twenty”), he rues having given away his heart, a theme pursued and deepened in No 3 (“There pass the careless people”), possibly because (as is implied by Housman in “Bredon Hill”, No 4) there has been a guilty outcome and the girlfriend has died in childbirth.’ Housman implies no such thing in ‘Bredon Hill’, and such fabrications merely serve to undermine an interesting thesis, which, however, further falls apart in an attempt to make the remaining songs outline a military career that ends with the hero ‘at the point of death in some foreign field’ (apparently represented by ‘Into my heart an air that kills’), with ‘The lads in their hundreds’ awkwardly providing some kind of coda. In fact Somervell’s arrangement merely follows Housman’s own order for the first eight songs, then places two poems out of sequence for the last two.

  Somervell’s settings sound much more of the nineteenth century than the pre-war cycles by Vaughan Williams and Butterworth. In particular, the swaggering march of ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ seems more appropriate to Kipling than to Housman, sheer heartiness eradicating any ambiguity in the glance exchanged by the soldier and the onlooker. Similarly, there seems an insufficient shift of tone between the first and second verses of ‘When I was one-and-twenty’: the tune slows down towards the end but does not quite lose its jauntiness, particularly in the seemingly irrepressible piano accompaniment. When The Times praised Somervell’s ‘broad and manly treatment’ of the poems, these were presumably the songs it had particularly in mind.

  A more convincing melancholy steals in with Somervell’s setting of the pared-down ‘There pass the careless people’, and the change of mood in ‘In summertime on Bredon’ is beautifully managed, with the pealing bells of the accompaniment dying out for the verse in which the speaker’s love goes to church alone for her funeral, then coming back again in the final verse as a heedless and intolerable reminder of lost happiness. The mere suggestion of a drum in the piano part of ‘On the idle hill of summer’, becoming more obvious and strident when the idler joins the colours in the final verse, is a far more delicate evocation of the military life than that of ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, while the sad and lovely tune Somervell writes for ‘White in the moon the long road lies’ contrasts well with the rollicking drinking song that is ‘Think no more lad’. Somervell’s most ingenious idea was to have the tune used for the cycle’s first song, ‘Loveliest of trees’, return on the piano for ‘Into my heart an air that kills’, the voice at first floating on it on a single repeated high note but then descending to follow the accompaniment at the moment the Lad recognises that the land he is looking at is one of lost content. This is both effective and affecting and sets us up for the final song, ‘The lads in their hundreds’, one of the very best settings of Housman’s poem, with its appropriate shift from major to minor at the point the singer wishes he could get to know the assembled young men.

  On the whole, Somervell got the musical afterlife of A Shropshire Lad off to a very good start, and the years before the outbreak of the First World War saw several more settings by both well-known and now forgotten composers. Those who set individual songs for voice and piano include the pianist and stage-musical composer Dalhousie Young (‘Bredon Hill’, 1905); H. Balfour Gardiner (‘The Recruit’ in 1906 and ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ as the second of his Two Lyrics of 1908); Ivor Gurney (‘On your midnight pallet lying’, 1907); Frances Weir (‘With rue my heart is laden’ under the sentimental title ‘Where Roses Fade’, 1911); Graham Peel (‘Soldier I wish you well’ from ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ and ‘In summertime on Bredon’, both 1911); Peter Warlock (‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’ as ‘Remembered Spring’ and ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry’ as ‘The Cherry Tree’, both around 1913 and now lost); Frank Lambert, best remembered for such popular Victorian ballads as ‘God’s Garden’ (‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’, 1914); and Arthur Bliss (‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’, published somewhat confusingly as ‘Wenlock Edge’ in 1914, and ‘When I was one-and-twenty’, composed the same year but not published until 1924). Of these, Peel’s ‘In summertime on Bredon’ is the most enduring, its immediate popularity further boosted when it was recorded by Gervase Elwes in 1916.

  More significantly, A Shropshire Lad was also used as the basis for further song cycles, including Graham Peel’s Four Songs of a Shropshire Lad (1910), Hugh Priestley-Smith’s From the West Country (consisting of five songs, 1913), and Alfred Redgrave-Cripps’ Five Shropshire Lad Songs (1914). In effect, most of these were simply collections of songs, but both Vaughan Williams and Butterworth produced cycles similar to those constructed by Schubert and Schumann from poems by Müller and Heine. Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, for tenor, piano and string quartet, was first performed at the Aeolian Hall on 15 November 1909 by its dedicatee, Gervase Elwes, the pianist Frederick Kiddle and the Schwiller Quartet. It remains, along with Butterworth’s two cycles, the best known of all Housman settings and would reach a new and wider audience when a gramophone recording was released in March 1917, with the same singer and pianist but with the London String Quartet replacing the Schwiller.

  Elwes was noted for ‘his policy of encouraging the young English composers of merit’ and had already performed a version of ‘Is my team ploughing’ for voice and piano at the Aeolian Hall in January 1909, when it was described in The Times as ‘a miniature tragedy of the utmost force and originality’. For the November concert he was unwell, and decided not to sing the other songs in the programme in order to save his voice for Vaughan Williams’s cycle. The performance nevertheless impressed the critic of The Times, who – although he unfortunately attributed the words of the songs to Laurence Housman – wrote that all six songs were ‘remarkable for accurate accentuation of the words and for genuinely deep expression, with an appropriately rustic flavour about the themes’.

  Somervell’s settings of Housman, good as they are, seem rather Victorian and staid when placed alongside Vaughan Williams’s dramatic and richly coloured ones. This is partly the result of the forces Vaughan Williams employed, but also of the three months the composer had spent in Paris being taught by Ravel and coming under the influence of French impressionism. The drama of the cycle is apparent from the first song, ‘On Wenlock Edge’, which opens with the agitated strings imitating the threshing of storm-blown trees. The second song, ‘From far, from eve and morning’, introduces tranquillity; the voice hovers above slow piano chords and gentle runs, and the introduction of the strings is held off until the second verse. This is followed by a highly dramatic, not to say overwrought ‘Is my team ploughing?’ and a charmingly jaunty ‘Oh when I was in love with you’, before we come to the cycle’s showpiece, ‘Bredon Hill’. The cycle ends wit
h ‘Clun’, in which the rippling notes of the piano suggest the poem’s ‘valleys of springs of rivers’, and in which singers invariably mispronounce ‘Ony’.*

  The strengths and weaknesses of the cycle are most clearly displayed in its two most dramatic songs. In ‘Bredon Hill’, Vaughan Williams takes full advantage of having a chamber ensemble at his disposal rather than just a piano. In a slow instrumental introduction the strings and piano evoke the still summer’s day in which the two lovers lie on a hilltop surveying the surrounding countryside and listening to skylarks singing far above them, before the piano drifts off to create the sound of the pealing bells. When the voice is introduced, it pursues its own line, floating dreamily on top of the music which does not so much accompany it as form a continuing atmospheric backdrop. In the third and fourth verses, which Vaughan Williams runs together, the bells become more insistent as they summon the lovers to church, and a sense of foreboding is suggested by the strings, which had created the summer idyll, falling silent. They return with chilly, long-drawn-out notes suggestive of the ominous ‘snows at Christmas’ in the fifth verse, and a plucked string joins the piano to imitate the single tolling bell that sounds throughout the sixth verse describing the funeral of the dead girl. For the final verse, the music returns (as the poem does) to the opening line and once again evokes a tranquil summer’s day, but ‘noisy bells’ crash in on the piano, making the steeples not so much ‘hum’ as positively judder; agitated strings meanwhile suggest the worked-up state their pealing now provokes in the singer, who eventually cries out ‘Oh, noisy bells, be dumb’ before reluctantly answering their summons. The bells die away and the untroubled summer’s day returns, though now overlaid with defeat as the singer repeats the last half of the poem’s final line: ‘I will come’. The song amounts to an entire monodrama and it is unusually long, lasting between around six and three-quarter and eight and a half minutes, depending on the performers. (Compare this with settings of the same poem by other composers, which last between two and three-quarter and four and three-quarter minutes.) The influence of Ravel, particularly ‘La vallée des cloches’ from his Miroirs (1905), is very apparent here, while at the same time the music seems quintessentially ‘English’, its evocation of lovers lying at peace in the English countryside recalling the composer’s much simpler but extraordinarily beautiful setting for voice and piano of Rossetti’s ‘Silent Noon’ (1904).