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Track(s) taken from CDD22071

When you are old and gray

composer
25 January 1919
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: 3 minutes 29 seconds

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

In When you are old and gray Bridge has omitted Yeats’s third stanza, repeating the first instead. (This is not an isolated incident; in Where she lies asleep Bridge repeats the first stanza to end, and in Into her keeping the poet himself does the same.) The poem ends:

And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a cloud of stars.

It may be that Bridge felt this was too active an image for the mood of the rest of the poem, and certainly the result is a heart-warming song with some magical moments.

from notes by Michael Pilkington © 1997

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