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Track(s) taken from CDD22071

Tears, idle tears

composer
1905
author of text

Gerald Finley (baritone), Roger Vignoles (piano)
Recording details: January 1997
Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Arthur Johnson
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: June 1997
Total duration: 5 minutes 29 seconds

Cover artwork: Alby, Norfolk. John Middleton (1827-1856)
Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery
 

Tennyson’s famous poem Tears, idle tears receives a large-scale and deeply emotional setting. Though Banfield finds ‘it certainly does not convince us that the tears are really ‘from the depth of some divine despair’’, Tennyson himself said ‘it was not real woe, as some people might suppose; it was rather the yearning that young people occasionally experience for that which seems to have passed away from them for ever’.

from notes by Michael Pilkington © 1997

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