Five Mystical Songs Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was a man without a faith but with a social conscience. He had a deep respect for the civilising and cultural traditions of the church, and did not hesitate to set sacred as well as secular texts. After the launch of The English Hymnal in 1906, he turned to the poems of George Herbert (1593-1633), an English poet, orator, MP (briefly) and Anglican priest. Herbert was known as ‘the sweet singer of the Temple’, playing the lute or viol, setting and singing his own hymns. His poems are described as devotional and spiritual on the one hand and metaphysical and witty – using clever conceits, paradoxes and structures – on the other. For him, music and the divine were closely related. Vaughan Williams set four of his poems; the first, Easter, divides naturally into two parts, making the first two of the five songs. The first performance of Five Mystical Songs took place at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester on 14 September 1911. This was a year after the triumphs of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and A Sea Symphony which were heard at Gloucester and Leeds in September and October 1910 respectively; the composer had made his mark and much was to be expected of him. The programme note observed that the setting had occupied Vaughan Williams at odd times over the last five years, but the songs had recently undergone considerable revision, and the third was written only that year. Long gestation and revision were characteristic of his work, illustrating his remarkable ability to work on a number of major works side by side over a long timescale. It seems that the composer had experimented with the scale of the work, since it can be performed with a variety of forces to suit the occasion. Campbell McInnes was accompanied in Worcester Cathedral by a small orchestra and an ad lib SATB chorus. The Times made reference to ‘the composer’s version in which the choral portion was omitted’ for the first London performance in November 1911, when McInnes was accompanied just by a piano, played by Hamilton Harty. The rarely played version heard on this album is for solo baritone with string quintet and piano. First heard in 1925, this is a first recording with these forces. As with the other versions, the score includes additional notes for the baritone to sing when, as here, the ad lib chorus is dispensed with. When I am dead, my dearest Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote this poem at the age of 18 in 1848; it was published as part of a collection in 1862 and became popular, with 83 known musical settings so far, three of them in German and one in Welsh. The subject urges his or her lover to remember them when they are gone, but not to waste time in long mourning. Vaughan Williams’s setting was published in June 1903, and the earliest performance found so far was given by Miss Viola Salvin the following December in Loughton, Essex. The first London performance was given by Alice Venning in November 1905. The song did not remain a female preserve, for we find the tenor Steuart Wilson singing it in King’s College, Cambridge, in June 1909. Wilson was one month short of his 20th birthday, and this is the first record of his singing music by Vaughan Williams. Albion Records made the first (and until now, only) recording with Sarah Fox accompanied by Iain Burnside on ALBCD002 Kissing Her Hair in 2007; this is the first recording with a male protagonist. Dreamland Christina Rossetti’s poem Dreamland was written in April 1849 and appeared in a publication called The Germ, the literary organ of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the first of just four monthly issues, published from January to April 1850, edited by her brother William. It was her first publication, but the author’s name was given as Ellen Alleyn. The poem paints an idealised view of death as eternal peace and perfect rest. This poem has been set by just eight composers. Vaughan Williams’s setting was given its first performance on 31 October 1905, by Gervase Elwes, accompanied by Frederick Kiddle, This was Elwes’s first documented encounter with the music of Vaughan Williams. The Times thought the music was ‘thoughtful and nobly conceived.’ There have been two recordings, by Ruth Golden, and by Sarah Fox on the album mentioned above. Again, this is a first recording by a male voice. Eight folk songs, with piano accompaniments by Ralph Vaughan Williams, rearranged for voice and string quartet by Roderick Williams In 2020 Albion Records recorded all 81 folk song settings for voice and piano with Roderick Williams, Mary Bevan, Nicky Spence, William Vann and additional contributions from Jack Liebeck (violin) and a small chorus. They were issued as ALBCD042-045, Folk Songs Volumes 1 to 4; the four albums have been and remain popular. The eight songs in this new recording sample all of the main published collections; these were thoroughly documented in booklet notes for that series. The booklets can be downloaded from the web pages for those albums to be found at rvwsociety.com/albion-records. The notes below provide information about individual songs, but do not reproduce all of the background material. Vaughan Williams’s folk song arrangements do not seek to develop the songs into bigger works, as some of his contemporary composers did; the drama of each song is reflected in the accompaniment, which respects both the singer and the song. A common instruction is colla voce: follow the voice. Willow-Wood This cantata is closely connected to Vaughan Williams’s song-cycle The House of Life, since both are settings of sonnets from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life. The programme note for the first performance of Willow-Wood gives the order of things: Vaughan Williams determined in 1900 to compose a cycle of Rossetti’s sonnets, which began with Silent Noon. Then an idea came to him ‘in the Quantocks’ which developed into a bigger scale work in 1902, was advertised as a ‘Vocal Scena’ from October 1902, and became a ‘cantata’ called Willow-Wood by the time of the first performance on 12 March 1903. The programme noted that Heart’s Haven and Death in Love had also been composed at that point, so that three of the six House of Life (1904) settings were ready. One of the three songs in that cycle still to come, Love’s Last Gift, inherits music from the beginning of Willow-Wood’s instrumental introduction (the piano accompaniment at bar 64, for the words: “But Autumn stops to listen…”), thus tying the two works together musically as well as poetically. The first performance was for voice (Campbell McInnes) and piano accompaniment (Evlyn Howard-Jones). Reception in the press was decidedly mixed. The Times critic (either Fuller Maitland or H C Colles) suggested that the music seemed to demand an orchestral medium rather than a piano; the critic probably knew that Vaughan Williams was working on orchestration, and the composer was to describe the work as a piece for baritone and orchestra as early as June 1903. Nonetheless he concluded that beauty and significance prevailed. Other critics thought that sonnets were particularly difficult to set to music, and opinions varied as to the success with which the composer had done so. The Evening Standard wrote that ‘There are numerous good points in the work, but it is somewhat unnecessarily sombre throughout, and, to be candid, much of it is unlovely.’ The Ladies’ Field noted, perceptively, that ‘The music might almost be called impressionistic, for Dr. Vaughan Williams has evidently tried to breathe the spirit of the four sonnets which he has chosen [rather] than to embellish them with set melody.’ Vaughan Williams did not revise the cantata until April 1908, when he orchestrated it and broadened the ending, adding a women’s chorus. Much of this work was carried out with scraps of manuscript paper and a glue-pot, so that the simpler 1903 score is not now recoverable. This new recording, summoning the spirit of the original, is thus based on the piano version of the score, published in 1909, omitting the ad lib women’s chorus. After the performance of the orchestral version by Frederic Austin (with the Liverpool Welsh Choral Union, conducted by Harry Evans) in Liverpool on 25 September 1909, the composer wrote ‘complete flop’ on the score, and withdrew the work, though he considered reprinting it in the 1950s. The composer’s dissatisfaction may reflect the extent to which his music had developed over the years, since many press reports were favourable and the composer was “called” repeatedly by the audience. The Evening Standard was kinder than last time: ‘Dr. Vaughan Williams has never given us anything better…’. The Times, however, identified a patchy use of material and well-worn devices. The critic Ernest Newman (who became rather a late convert to Vaughan Williams) described the work as the composer’s ‘gallant but unsuccessful attempt to see life through eyes other than his own.’ The Daily Telegraph found it ‘poetical to a degree, and thoroughly modern, though never sensational in its effect.’ Willow-Wood (or Willowwood) was Rossetti’s sub-title for a group of four sonnets, numbers 49-52 in his House of Life cycle (published in its final form with 101 sonnets in 1881). Does the cantata tell a story? Perhaps his Introductory Sonnet has the answer: ‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, memorial from the soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour …’ and ‘A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul…’. Willow-Wood is a song of love and grief, love lost and love remembered. Poetry stands precedent over narrative and finds further expression in music. The 1909 score contains a piano or orchestral passage of fifteen bars just before the last line of the text, but it is marked in a later edition with an instruction to omit it. This recording follows that instruction, but we have another recording that includes the omitted music which will be made available in due course. Notes by John Francis