A member of the teaching staff at the Royal College of Music from 1925, and Professor of Music at Cambridge between 1946 and 1962, Patrick Hadley completed his short anthem My beloved spake (using the famous verses 10-13 of Solomon 2) in his hometown of Heacham in Norfolk on 20 April 1936. Written specially for one his RCM students, Ursula Grotrian, on her marriage in Ripon Cathedral in May, this exquisite miniature was also suitable, as the composer specified in the published edition of 1938, to be sung in the spring. The key musical event of Hadley’s through-composed scheme is the ascent to the climactic second-inversion chord (‘Rise up’) in the tonic, B flat major, at the beginning of bar 4, and a second, quieter rejoinder (‘and come away’) also in second inversion. A second climax occurs at the peak of the anthem’s tonal dissolution, but this time on a D flat second-inversion chord (‘Arise my love’), a gesture which throws into relief the hushed and telling return of B flat (‘away’) from the anthem’s opening.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2025