A wonderful thing to come upon this beautiful recording of this song, that I haven't heard in almost 30 years! But I have well remembered it in all these years since! A gem, with Auden reading the poetry! I used to sign the whole record out from the library, in those days, all the time! Thanks so much for posting!
Liner Notes by W. H. Auden: When one considers the English school of madrigals and lute songs, it is hard to say which is the more extraordinary, the number of good composers and their fertility, or the brevity of the period within which they flourished. Dr. Fellowes's collection, "English Madrigal Verse", includes the work of fourty-five composers, and the printing of the verses which they set, the majority of which are quite short, requires some six hundred pages of close type; yet, between the first published music of this kind, "The Psalmes And Sonnets" of William Byrd, in 1588 and the last, the "Madrigals and Airs" of Walte Porter, lie no more than fourty-two years and, moreover, there is very little written after 1615 - magnificent as it is, Thompkin's anthem on the death of Absalom (track 14) must already have sounded a bit old-fashiouned to the ears of his contemporaries. Most of the material set is secular and, indeed, the school begins just as the great period of English church music, which had exerted considerable influence on the continent, was coming to an end. The initial stimulus came from Italy - some of the composers had studied there - but an indigenous style, suited to the English language, was developed very rapidly. At least one composer, John Dowland, was famous in Europe, but, on the whole, the school was little known outside England. One can never say with certainty just why a style should decline and disappear when it does. In the case of this late Elizabethan and early Jacobean music, changes in social habit due to the Puritans, the Civil War, and the Restoration, played a part, no doubt, but the spread of the baroque style from Italy was the most decisive factor. *** There are two extreme schools of thought which disapprove of setting verses with real poetic merit to music. There are lovers of poetry who hold that not only can nothing be added to a good poem by music but also something must be lost, that music, by distorting the rhythms and tempi of the spoken word, is bound to ruin it. There are lovers of singing, on the other hand, (few of them, I suspect, are actually composers) who hold that all a composer requires are so-and-so-many syllables of such-and-such a quality, that their verbal meaning is irrelevant and that good poetry is too intractable, too insubordinate, to be settable. Both doctrines are more popular, perhaps, in English-speaking countries than in others. One reason for this may be that it is harder for a solo singer or a choir to make English words audible than those of other European languages. In a polysyllabic language, the listening ear may miss a syllable but still get the word; in a language like English which abounds in monosyllables, a single syllable may be the key to the meaning of a whole sentence. Further, English is relatively poor in words ending in a vowel. If a word ending in a consonant is being sung on a sustained note, it is difficult to complete it audibly without doing violence to the music. Take the word "dark", for instance. A singer who cares most about his vocal effects will be tempted to sing da... ; if he thinks about enunciation, he is apt to finish with an explosive little accent which is musically not there and sing da..rke. The fact remains however that, despite all such difficulties, during the period represented by this record, good composers deliberately chose good poems to set, and good poets were glad to write verses for them. Shakespeare did not write "Come away, come away, death" or "Full fathom five" to be recited, nor did Dowland think of "I saw my lady weeping" (track 7) as merely a series of vaguely sad syllables. Of course, not all good poetry is settable. No composer in his senses, for instance, if he were writing an opera on "Troilus and Cressida", would attempt to set such a complicated succession of metphors and images as the following: ...Keep, then, the path; For emulation has a thousand sons That one by one pursue: if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide they all rush by And leave you hindbmost; Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank Lie there for pavement to the abject rear Oerrun and trampled on. Even if the words could be heard, the strain of attending to their meaning and listening to the music at the same time would be too much. Generally speaking, since music is essentially immediate and dynamic, those elements in language, like metaphor, which require reflection in order to grasp them, are dangerous. The limit of what is settable is probably reached in the poem attributed to Raleigh and set by Gibbons, "What is our life? A play af passion" (track 11) the whole of which is an elaboration of a single metaphor. Rather surprisingly, a dialectical playing with words seems well suited to musical treatment. The logical movement, the antitheses and repetitions 'translate' so to speak. Moreover, the musical translation may throw new light on the poem. For example, I, personally, had always thougt of Donne's poem "The Expiration" as serious and intense, an expression of suffering, but after hearing Ferrabosco's setting, I see it now as he interprets it, as "galante" rather than passionate. Again, if not all good poetry is settable, neither is all settable verse of first-rate poetic merit. No one would include in an anthology of great poetry, for example, such madrigal verses as "Flora gave me sweetest flowers" (track 3) or "Sweet honey-sucking bees" (track 8). Nevertheless, even such pieces are well worth study by any serious poet who is interested in writing words for music. Their conventional hellenistic paraphernalia may be a bit boring to read, but conventional properties can be very serviceable to a composer, precisely because, being conventional, they are instantaneously recognizable. A composer welcomes a poem which expresses either a single state of feeling or an obvious contrast of states and a diction centered round the dynamic elements of language, interjections, imperatives, verbs of motion, etc. The couplet: For if one flaming dart come from her eye, Was never dart so sharp, ah, then you die may not seem poetically very distinguished, but when one hears what Wilbye makes of it, one realizes how admirable for music is its structure. Moreover, anyone who reads through the first half of Dr. Fellowes' collection, the half devoted to madrigals, will be struck by two things, firstly, by the surprising number of verses which are not just convienient and trifling musical vehicles but beautiful in themseves and, secondly, by the appearance of a kind of short poem which was quite new in English poetry at the time. "Tan ta ra cries Mars" (track 1) is a good example. This would never have been written except to be used as a madrigal, yet the result is a poem at once beautiful and strange. Fortunately for both poets and composers, the period was one of controversy over an experimentation in prosody. Even when the prosodic notions were odd - the poet-composer Campion spent much time experimenting with classical metres in English - the conscious attention paid to metrical values bore fruit. Listening to almost any of the lute songs, for example, Dowland's "In darkness let me dwell" (track 10) one is amazed at how scrupulously the vocal line conforms to the natural rythm of the words, yet, at the same time, the notes form a real melody not a recitative. There is no wrenching of the natural accent and no racking out of a syllable over several notes, as one finds in baroque arias and which, at its worst, can produce such monstrocities as "When the bloo-hoo-hoom is o-hon the rye". There is no other period of English vocal music, perhaps, in which both the lover of words and the lover of song are so equally satisfied. W. H. Auden 1954 ------------------ Note: The music for some of the songs on this record may be found in the Anchor Book, "An Elizabethan Song Book", edited by Noah Greenberg, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. "An Elizabethan Song Book" contains the words and music of some eighty lute songs, madrigals, and rounds, and introductions to the songs of the period by W. H. Auden and Noah Greenberg.
