Daughters4 of northern Magnus, hail!
The lamp is lit, the flame is clear, –
To you I come to tell my tale,
Awake, arise, my tale to hear!
FRANZ SCHUBERT: Song from Scott’s Ivanhoe
The Crusader’s return
[translated as ‘Romanze des Richard Löwenherz’, D907, by Karl Ludwig Müller] (1826/1828)1
High deeds atchieved of knightly fame,
From Palestine the champion came;
The cross upon his shoulders borne,
Battle and blast had dimm’d and torn.
Each dint upon his batter’d shield
Was token of a foughten field2;
And thus, beneath his lady’s bower,
He sung, as fell the twilight hour:
‘Joy to the fair! – thy knight behold,
Return’d from yonder land of gold;
No wealth he brings, nor wealth can need,
Save his good arms and battle-steed;
His spurs, to dash against a foe,
His lance and sword to lay him low;
Such all the trophies of his toil,
Such – and the hope of Tekla’s3 smile!
‘Joy to the fair! whose constant knight
Her favour fired to feats of might;
Unnoted shall she not remain
Where meet the bright and noble train;
Minstrel shall sing, and herald tell –
“Mark yonder maid of beauty well,
’Tis she for whose bright eyes was won
The listed field at Ascalon!4
‘ “Note well her smile! – it edged the blade
Which fifty wives to widows made,
When, vain his strength and Mahound’s spell,
Iconium’s5 turban’d Soldan6 fell.
See’st thou her locks, whose sunny glow
Half shows, half shades, her neck of snow?
Twines not of them one golden thread,
But for its sake a Paynim7 bled.”
‘Joy to the fair! – my name unknown,
Each deed, and all its praise, thine own;
Then, oh! unbar this churlish gate,
The night-dew falls, the hour is late.
Inured to Syria’s8 glowing breath,
I feel the north breeze chill as death;
Let grateful love quell maiden shame,
And grant him bliss who brings thee fame.’
CHARLES LAMB
(1775–1834)
To Clara N[ovello]
The Gods have made me most unmusical,
With feelings that respond not to the call
Of stringed harp, or voice – obtuse and mute
To hautboy, sackbut, dulcimer, and flute;
King David’s lyre, that made the madness flee
From Saul, had been but a jew’s harp to me:
Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars,
Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars;
I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float
Upon the captive air; I know no note,
Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say,
Of the strange mysteries of Sol and Fa;
I sit at oratorios like a fish,
Incapable of sound, and only wish
The thing was over. Yet do I admire,
O tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire,
Thy painful labours in a science, which
To your deserts I pray may make you rich
As much as you are loved, and add a grace
To the most musical Novello race.
Women lead men by the nose, some cynics say;
You draw them by the ear – a delicater way.
CHARLES LAMB
The son of a lawyer, Lamb was born in Crown Office Row in the Inner Temple, London. He went to school in nearby Fetter Lane, and later entered Christ’s Hospital, where he met and befriended Coleridge. In 1789 he worked as a clerk in the South Sea House, and subsequently at the East India House, where he was an accountant until his retirement in 1825. Four of Lamb’s sonnets appeared in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (1796), and another ten in his Poems of 1797. Through Coleridge he became acquainted with Wordsworth, but later distanced himself from both. Several members of Lamb’s family were mentally unstable, and his sister Mary Ann Lamb murdered their mother in 1796, was confined to an asylum and finally released into her brother’s care. Lamb too was prone to fits of insanity – hence his sympathetic poem on Cowper’s mental state, ‘To the poet Cowper – on his recovery from an indisposition. Written some time back’ (1796). Several of Lamb’s works were written for children: Tales from Shakespear (1807), which he wrote in collaboration with his sister, The Adventures of Ulysses (1808), Beauty and the Beast (1811), Prince Dorus (1811) and his Poetry for Children (1809) which anticipates Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Lamb also tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at drama, and Mr H., a farce, was hissed off the stage at Drury Lane in 1806. He wrote a number of essays and articles between 1810 and 1820, including a perceptive study of Wordsworth’s The Excursion. From 1820 to 1823 he made regular contributions to the London Magazine, and a number of these essays were published as Essays of Elia in 1823; a second series, The Last Essays of Elia appeared a decade later. Though Lamb had little interest in critical theory, he was a sympathetic and highly readable reviewer of poetry and plays, and his letters also contain many acute observations on literature.
CECIL ARMSTRONG GIBBS
Hypochondriacus (1949)1
By myself walking,
To myself talking,
When as I ruminate
On my untoward fate,
Scarcely seem I
Alone sufficiently,
Black thoughts continually
Crowding my privacy;
They come unbidden,
Like foes at a wedding
Thrusting their faces
In better guests’ places,
Peevish and malecontent,
Clownish, impertinent,
Dashing the merriment:
So in like fashions
Dim cogitations
Follow and haunt me,
Striving to daunt me,
In my heart festering,
In my ears whispering,
‘Thy friends are treacherous,
Thy foes are dangerous,
Thy dreams ominous.’
Fierce Anthropophagi2,
Spectra, Diaboli,
What scared St. Anthony,
Hobgoblins, Lemures3,
Dreams of Antipodes4
Night-riding Incubi5
Troubling the fantasy,
All dire illusions
Causing confusions;
Figments heretical,
Scruples fantastical,
Doubts diabolical,
Abaddon6 vexeth me,
Mahu7 perplexeth me,
Lucifer teareth me –
Jesu! Maria! liberate nos ab his diris tentationibus Inimici.8
THOMAS MOORE
(1779–1852)
With respect to the verses which I have written for these Melodies, as they are intended rather to be sung than read, I can answer for their sound with somewhat more confidence than for their sense. Yet it would be affectation to deny that I have given much attention to the task, and that it is not through want of zeal or industry, if I unfortunately disgrace the sweet airs of my country, by poetry altogether unworthy of their taste, their energy, and their tenderness.
THOMAS MOORE: ‘Prefatory Letter on Music’, from Irish Melodies
The son of a Dublin grocer, Moore was educated at Trinity College, came to London in 1799 to study law at the Middle Temple, and a year later translated Anacreon’s Odes, which he dedicated to the Prince of Wales, thus launching himself on a successful poetical and social career. Thomas Moore’s claim that he had ‘an instinctive turn for rhyme and song’ has been endorsed by posterity. Though his early publication
s – The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (1801) and Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) – are now little read, his Irish Melodies, and National Airs (which were published as a multi-national sequel), have always enjoyed enormous popularity. The poems were grafted onto mostly eighteenth-century airs, largely drawn from anthologies of ancient harp music, especially the collections of Edward Bunting. Ten volumes of Irish Melodies were published in London and Dublin between 1808 and 1834 by James and William Power, earning Moore as much as £100 a song. Moore’s friend Sir John Stevenson provided the accompaniments for the first eight volumes, but they were soon considered too intricate for the simple beauty of the airs; the Power brothers fell out, William stopped publishing the Melodies in Dublin, and the last volumes were issued by James Power in London, with simpler accompaniments by Henry Rowley Bishop. Michael William Balfe wrote new accompaniments to the songs in 1859. In the advertisement to National Airs (1819–28) Moore wrote:
It is Cicero, I believe, who says, Natura ad modos ducimur [‘By nature we are led to melody’]; and the abundance of wild indigenous airs which almost every country except England possesses, sufficiently proves the truth of his assertion. The lovers of this simple but interesting kind of music are here presented with the first number of a collection, which I trust their contributions will enable us to continue. A pretty air without words resembles one of those half creatures of Plato, which are described as wandering, in search of the remainder of themselves, through the world. To supply this other half, by uniting with congenial words the many fugitive melodies which have hitherto had none, or only such as are unintelligible to the generality of their hearers, is the object and ambition of the present work. Neither is it our intention to confine ourselves to what are strictly called National Melodies; but wherever we meet with any wandering and beautiful air, to which poetry has not yet assigned a worthy home, we shall venture to claim it as an estray swan, and enrich our humble Hippocrene with its song.
He then prints poems to over seventy airs of Cashmerian, Catalonian, English, French, German, Highland, Hungarian, Indian, Italian, Languedocian, Mahratta, Maltese, Neapolitan, Portuguese, Russian, Savoyard, Scotch, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Venetian and Welsh origin. His Irish Melodies eventually earned him an income of £5,000 a year, but when in 1819 his deputy registrar at the Admiralty Court in Bermuda absconded with £6,000, Moore was compelled to flee the country to avoid arrest.
An accomplished musician with an attractive voice, Moore was soon regarded as the national bard of Ireland. He also had a talent for satire, manifested in Intercepted Letters: or The Twopenny Post Bag (1813), in which he pilloried the Prince Regent. Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance was commissioned by Longmans and published in 1817 – a romantically exotic volume, written in the wake of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), The Corsair (1814), The Siege of Corinth and Parisina (1816). Moore returned to satire in The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). The Loves of the Angels (1823), another attempt at orientalism, proved to be as financially successful as Lalla Rookh.
Moore became a close friend of Byron, when the latter returned from the eastern Mediterranean in 1811, and their friendship lasted till Byron’s death. Byron gave Moore his memoirs when the latter visited Venice in 1819, and Moore – with Byron’s approval – subsequently sold them to John Murray for posthumous publication. When they were burned after Byron’s death, Moore was incandescent with rage. He made some amends by publishing his own Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of His Life in 1830, which moved Macaulay to declare that ‘it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose which our age has produced’. Moore also wrote a Life of Sheridan (1825), The Epicurean (1827), a novel about a Greek philosopher, a Life of Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and a History of Ireland (1835–46). He was awarded a Civil List pension in 1850.
Robert Schumann included Freiligrath’s translations of two of Moore’s poems in Myrthen, his wedding present for Clara, and also used Lallah Rookh, for which Moore was paid an astonishing advance of £3,000, as the basis of Das Paradies und die Peri (1843). Berlioz, too, was greatly influenced by Moore’s Irish Melodies, partly no doubt because of his passion for the Irish Shakespearian actress Harriet Smithson. With Thomas Gounet, who translated the poems into French, Berlioz published the Neuf mélodies (Irlande) at his own expense in February 1830, and such was the success that it was not long before people were talking enthusiastically about these new mélodies, thus coining unwittingly the very word by which the French art song became known.
HENRI DUPARC
Oh! breathe not his name
[translated as ‘Élégie’ by ?Henri Duparc] (1874)1
Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid;
Sad, silent and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.
But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps;
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.
(Hughes)
HECTOR BERLIOZ: from Neuf mélodies (Irlande) (1829–30)
Composed in 1829–30, these songs were first published in 1830 under the title Neuf mélodies/imitées de l’anglais/(Irish Melodies)/pour/une et deux voix, et chœur/avec accompagnement de piano. It was not until the third edition (1849) that the songs were re-christened Irlande, with the subtitle Neuf mélodies.
How dear to me the hour
[translated as ‘Le coucher du soleil’ by Thomas Gounet]
How dear to me the hour when daylight dies,
And sunbeams melt along the silent sea,
For then sweet dreams of other days arise,
And memory breathes her vesper sigh to thee.
And, as I watch the line of light, that plays
Along the smooth wave tow’rd the burning west,
I long to tread that golden path of rays,
And think ’twould lead to some bright isle of rest.
(Sjögren)
Rich and rare were the gems she wore
[translated as ‘La Belle Voyageuse’ by Thomas Gounet]1
Rich and rare were the gems she wore,
And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore;
But, oh! her beauty was far beyond
Her sparkling gems, or snow-white wand.
‘Lady, dost thou not fear to stray,
So lone and lovely, through this bleak way?
Are Erin’s sons so good or so cold,
As not to be tempted by woman or gold?’
‘Sir Knight! I feel not the least alarm,
No son of Erin will offer me harm:
For, though they love women and golden store,
Sir Knight! they love honour and virtue more!’
On she went, and her maiden smile
In safety lighted her round the green isle;
And blest for ever is she who relied
Upon Erin’s honour and Erin’s pride.
(Britten)
The origin of the Harp
[translated as ‘L’Origine de la Harpe’ by Thomas Gounet]
’Tis believ’d that this Harp, which I wake now for thee,
Was a Siren of old, who sung under the sea;
And who often, at eve, thro’ the bright waters rov’d,
To meet, on the green shore, a youth whom she lov’d.
But she lov’d him in vain, for he left her to weep,
And in tears, all the night her gold tresses to steep;
Till heav’n looked with pity on true-love so warm,
And chang’d to this soft Harp the sea-maiden’s form.
Still her bosom rose fair – still her cheeks smiled the same –
While her sea-beauties gracefully form’d the light frame;
And her hair, as, let loose, o’er her whit
e arm it fell,
Was changed to bright chords, uttering melody’s spell.
Hence it came, that this soft Harp so long hath been known
To mingle love’s language with sorrow’s sad tone;
Till thou didst divide them, and teach the fond lay
To speak love when I’m near thee, and grief when away.
(Taneyev)
ROBERT SCHUMANN: from Myrthen, Op. 25 (1840/1840)
Row gently here
[translated as ‘Leis’ rudern hier’ by Ferdinand Freiligrath]1
Row gently here, my gondolier; so softly wake the tide,
That not an ear on earth may hear, but hers to whom we glide.
Had Heaven but tongues to speak, as well as starry eyes to see,
Oh! think what tales ’twould have to tell of wandering youths like me!
Now rest thee here, my gondolier; hush, hush, for up I go,
To climb yon light balcony’s height, while thou keep’st watch below.
Ah! did we take for heaven above but half such pains as we
Take day and night for woman’s love what angels we should be!
(Jensen)
When through the piazzetta
[translated as ‘Wenn durch die Piazzetta’ by Ferdinand Freiligrath]1
When through the piazzetta
Night breathes her cool air,
Then, dearest Ninetta,
I’ll come to thee there.
Beneath thy mask shrouded,
I’ll know thee afar,
As Love knows, though clouded,
His own Evening Star.
In garb, then, resembling
Some gay gondolier,
I’ll whisper thee, trembling,
‘Our bark, love, is near!
Now, now, while there hover
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 29