Those clouds o’er the moon,
’Twill waft thee safe over
Yon silent Lagoon.’
(Jensen, Mendelssohn)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN: from Folksong Arrangements, Volume IV: Moore’s Irish Melodies (1957/1960)
At the mid hour of night
At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly
To the lone vale we lov’d, when life shone warm in thine eye;
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air,
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there,
And tell me our love is remember’d, even in the sky!
Then I sing the wild song ’twas once such pleasure to hear!
When our voices commingling, breath’d, like one, on the ear;
And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls,
I think, oh my love! ’tis thy voice, from the Kingdom of Souls,
Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.
(Cowen, MacCunn, Wood)
Oft in the stilly night1
(To a Scotch air)
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimmed and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends, so linked together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
(Gibbs, Parry)
’Tis the last rose of summer
[The last rose of summer]1
(to the air ‘Groves of Blarney’)2
’Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rose-bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh.
I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one!
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter
Thy leaves o’er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.
So soon may I follow,
When friendships decay,
And from Love’s shining circle
The gems drop away.
When true hearts lie wither’d
And fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?
(Nelson)
JANE TAYLOR
(1783–1824)
In Britain and America, and wherever the English word is spoken, the children become joyful and wise listening to the same traditional verses. In the New World as in the Old their first poetic memory is of ‘Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’, ‘A slipkin, a slopkin, a pipkin, a popkin’, ‘Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man’, and ‘Over the hills and far away’. Almost the only point of difference is that in England the verses are known as ‘nursery rhymes’, and in America as ‘Mother Goose songs’. The term ‘nursery rhyme’ seems to have sprung up in the third decade of the nineteenth century; no use of the name has been found earlier than in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for July 1824, when an anonymous writer, possibly John Wilson, parodied Hazlitt with an essay ‘On Nursery Rhymes in General’. Previously the rhymes had been known as ‘songs’ or ‘ditties’, and in the eighteenth century usually as ‘Tommy Thumb’s’ songs, or ‘Mother Goose’s’, the title retained in America.
IONA AND PETER OPIE: Introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951)
Admired by Scott and Browning, Jane Taylor and her sister Ann (1782–1866) were the authors of several books for children that once enjoyed enormous popularity. Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804) was translated into German, Dutch and Russian and ran into fifty editions in England. It was followed in 1806 by Rhymes for the Nursery (twenty-seven editions by 1835), a collection that included ‘The star’ (‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’), which Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes call ‘one of the best-known poems in the English language’. This celebrated nursery rhyme was set to music by J. Green in c.1860, and appeared in Little Songs for Me to Sing (1865), illustrated by Sir John Millais.
The melody, known as ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’, originally appeared (without the words) in 1761 in ‘Les Amusements d’une Heure et Demy’ by M. Bouin (Paris). The French rhyme first occurred with the melody in volume two of Recueil de romances in 1774, under the title ‘La Confidence – Naive’ (page 75). There are several versions of the French lyrics, but the best known is probably:
Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman,
Ce qui cause mon tourment.
Papa veut que je raisonne
Comme une grande personne.
Moi, je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.
There have been numerous parodies of Jane Taylor’s poem, including the one recited by the Hatter during Chapter VII (‘A mad tea-party’) in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Many classical compositions have been inspired by the tune, including Mozart’s Variations on ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’, K.265/K.300e; Haydn’s Symphony 94 in G (‘The surprise’); Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (twelfth movement); Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune, Op. 25, for piano and orchestra, subtitled ‘For the enjoyment of humorous people and for the annoyance of others’; and Liszt’s Album Leaf: ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’ (1833) (S.163b).
RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT: from Songs Before Sleep (2002–3)
The star
[Twinkle, twinkle, little star]
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
’Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the traveller in the dark –
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
GEORGE GORDON BYRON
(1788–1824)
When Byron’s eyes were shut in death,
We bowed our head and held our breath.
He taught us little; but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder’s roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of passion with eternal law;
And yet with reveren
tial awe
We watch’d the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife.
MATTHEW ARNOLD: Memorial Verses (1850)
The son of an admiral and his second wife, a Scottish noblewoman, Byron grew up in Aberdeen. His childhood was unhappy and he suffered from a ‘diabolical’ mother and a vicious nurse. His club foot strengthened his resolve to excel at physical activities, and he was by all accounts a prodigious swimmer. In 1788, on the death of his great uncle, Byron inherited his title and the family estate at Newstead Abbey. He was educated at Harrow, where, aged fifteen, he fell passionately in love with Mary Chaworth (see ‘To a lady’), the first of his erotic liaisons. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1807 Hours of Idleness was published. It was in Cambridge that he experienced the most intense of his homosexual relationships – with the fifteen-year-old chorister John Edleston, whose death was to trigger the series of elegies known as the ‘Thyrza’ cycle, six of which were added to the first and second editions of Childe Harold.
From 1809 to 1811 Byron undertook a Mediterranean grand tour. His private life resembled, if not quite rivalled, that of Casanova. He married Annabella Milbanke in 1815 but left her after a year. He then shocked the public by his relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, who became his constant companion. Having left England in 1816, he sailed up the Rhine to Switzerland, where he joined Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In January 1817 Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister, bore Byron a daughter. He agreed to support mother and daughter (Allegra) but left them later in the year when the Shelleys returned to England. He then embarked on a number of relationships before settling down for a time with Teresa Guiccioli in Italy, who left her husband for Byron in 1821. Together they became involved with the Carbonari, a militant nationalist movement that Byron supported financially. When the Carbonari’s struggle foundered, Byron embraced another cause – that of Greek liberation from Turkish oppression. He set sail from Leghorn in the Hercules, which he had armed at his own expense, and arrived ten days later in Cephalonia. He was joined in January 1824 by the Greek leader Alexander Mavrocordato, whose plan was to attack the Turkish stronghold at Lepanto. In April 1824 Byron caught a severe chill, which led to rheumatic fever from which he died on 19 April 1824. Memorial services were held throughout Greece, where his heart and lungs were buried, but his body was returned to England. When the Deans of St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey refused to bury the poet, his friend Hobhouse arranged for the body to lie in state for a few days in London. He was finally interred in the family vault in the church of Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey.
Byron’s promiscuity is echoed in his finest work, Don Juan, the first two cantos of which were published by John Murray in 1819 (‘Almost all Don Juan is real life – either my own – or from people I know’). In this extraordinary work, full of irony, self-mockery, cynicism, exuberance, sarcasm, the hero is continually seduced by the women he encounters. Byron’s letters, edited in thirteen volumes by Leslie A. Marchand and published by John Murray, provide a fascinating commentary on the times in which he lived.
Arnold’s lines, quoted above, give some idea of Byron’s contribution to English literature. He gave poetic shape to the new feelings of Romanticism in a way that the public could understand. With the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) Byron became a celebrity overnight, and his fame was consolidated with the success of The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813) and The Corsair (1814). The heroic and melancholy nature of many of his characters, and the manner of his own death while fighting for the liberation of Greece, endeared him to the Romantic generation of painters and composers. Gooch and Thatcher (1982) list 1,287 musical works based on Byron’s poems. Pushkin imitated the Byronic hero in Eugene Onegin, and there were many composers who were inspired by his poems. Byron-based operas include Donizetti’s Parisina (1833) and Marino Faliero (1835), and Verdi’s I due Foscari (1844) and Il Corsaro (1848). Berlioz, a great admirer, turned to Byron for Le Corsaire and Harold en Italie; Manfred influenced Schumann and Nietzsche (the Manfred-Meditation for piano); and Liszt based his Tasso on The Lament of Tasso. Byron’s poems have also proved popular with song composers, especially Issac Nathan (30 settings), Loewe (24), Schumann (6), Busoni (3), Mendelssohn (2), and Mussorgsky, Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov (1 each).
It was Byron’s Hebrew Melodies that attracted composers most. The eighteenth century’s taste for the ancient and national yielded a number of musical volumes that featured the poems of Byron, Moore and Scott, set to music by the likes of Haydn, Hummel, Weber and Beethoven. George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs was published in 1793 – a work that was rivalled by James Power’s First Number of A Selection of Irish Melodies in 1808, which joined the poems of Thomas Moore to the accompaniments of Sir John Stevenson. Power’s next publication, A Selection of Scottish Melodies, dates from 1812, and was set to music by Henry Bishop. Thomson responded with his Select Collection of Original Irish Airs (1814), for which he tried to enlist the services of Byron – without success. Power, in the face of competition from Thomson, now published the First Number of Moore’s Sacred Songs in 1816 (the Second Number followed in 1824). The First Number of Moore’s National Airs appeared in 1818 and by 1827 had run to six parts.
Such, then, was the background that prepared the way for the success of Isaac Nathan. He first wrote to Byron on 13 June 1814, and received no reply. On 30 June he tried again:
I have with great trouble selected a considerable number of very beautiful Hebrew melodies of undoubted antiquity, some of which are proved to have been sung by the Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. […] I am most anxious that the Poetry for them should be written by the first Poet of the present age, and though I feel and know I am taking a great liberty with your Lordship in even hinting that one or two songs written by you would give the work great celebrity, yet I trust your Lordship will pardon and attribute it to what is really the case, the sincere admiration I feel for your extraordinary talents. It would have been my most sanguine wish from the first to have applied to your Lordship had I not been prevented by a knowledge that you wrote only for amusement and the fame you so justly acquired. I therefore wrote to Walter Scott offering him a share in the publication if he would undertake to write for me, which he declined, not thinking himself adequate to the task, the distance likewise being too great between us, I could not wait on him owing to my professional engagements in London.
Byron, unlike Scott, accepted Nathan’s offer, and the poet’s excitement is apparent in the postscript of a letter he wrote to Annabella on 20 October 1814:
Oh, I must tell you of one of my present avocations. Kinnaird (a friend of mine, brother to Lord Kd.) applied to me to write words for a musical composer who is going to publish the real old undisputed Hebrew melodies, which are beautiful & to which David & the prophets actually sang the ‘songs of Zion’ – & I have done nine or ten on the sacred model – partly from Job &c. & partly my own imagination […]. It is odd enough that this should fall to my lot, who have been abused as ‘an infidel’. Augusta says ‘they will call me a Jew next’.
Byron heard Nathan recite his airs and joked to Thomas Moore about the composer’s ‘vile Ebrew nasalities’. He became, however, clearly attracted to Nathan as a person – partly perhaps as a result of his sympathy for victim nations, and also because of his sense of being an outcast himself. The First Number of A Selection of Hebrew Melodies was published in April 1815 and comprised twelve poems: ‘She walks in beauty’, ‘The harp the monarch minstrel swept’, ‘If that high world’, ‘The wild gazelle’, ‘Oh! weep for those’, ‘On Jordan’s banks’, ‘Jephtha’s daughter’, ‘Oh! snatched away in beauty’s bloom’, ‘My soul is dark’, ‘I saw thee weep’, ‘Thy days are done’ and ‘It is the hour’. The success of these songs was such that John Murray then published, a mere month after the First Number of A Selection of Heb
rew Melodies, a demi-octavo volume that bore the title: Hebrew Melodies. This publication contained twenty-five poems without the music, twelve from Nathan’s First Number, and thirteen new poems. Nathan then published his Second Number of A Selection of Hebrew Melodies in April 1816. The twelve new Hebrew Melodies were: ‘Song of Saul before his last battle’, ‘By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept’, ‘Vision of Belshazzar’, ‘Herod’s lament for Mariamne’, ‘Were my bosom as false as thou deem’st it to be’, ‘The destruction of Semnacherib’, ‘Saul’, ‘When coldness wraps this suffering clay’, ‘All is Vanity, saith the preacher’, ‘On the day of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus’, ‘Francisca’ and ‘Sun of the sleepless!’
Byron left England for good eight days after the publication of Nathan’s Second Number, and had nothing more to do with the Hebrew Melodies. Nathan’s two publications proved to be a huge success, and according to Olga S. Phillips in Isaac Nathan, Friend of Byron, sold 10,000 copies, 4,000 more than Murray’s edition of the Hebrew Melodies.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: from Volkslieder, Op. 108/12 (1816)1
To a lady
[Oh! had my fate been join’d with thine]
Oh! had my fate been join’d with thine,
As once this pledge appear’d a token2,
These follies had not then been mine,
For then my peace had not been broken.
To thee these early faults I owe,
To thee, the wise and old reproving:
They know my sins, but do not know
’Twas thine to break the bonds of loving.
For once my soul, like thine, was pure,
And all its rising fires could smother;
But now thy vows no more endure,
Bestow’d by thee upon another;
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 30