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Bantock wrote several extended choral works, but The Song of Songs is unique in its composer’s output in that it was conceived before the First World War—according to his diary it was started on 2 July 1912, and the completed manuscript vocal score is dated 1915. On Tuesday 2 July Bantock wrote in his diary: ‘Arranged “The Song of Songs” as a libretto for a Lyrical Drama for music in 5 scenes. Wrote the first 79 bars of the prelude, & sketched the themes for the King, & other portions.’

Bantock had clearly invented his scheme and all the motifs for the various characters at the outset, and it was evidently so vivid for him he had encapsulated it all in the orchestral Prelude, the short score of which is dated 17 July 1912. However the complete work would not be completed in full score until 10 December 1926.

From the order in which Bantock completed the various sections of this epic, it is clear he was least caught by the extended scenes of the King’s failure to win the Shulamite which form the Third and Fourth ‘Days’. Before them came the outer ‘Days’, strong in love interest; the vocal score of the Second Day is dated 14 July 1915 and that of the Fifth Day, 3 September 1915, both love duets, the Fifth Day referring back to the themes of the earlier one.

The Prelude and the First Day, in which the King first sings the praises of the Shulamite, were first heard at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in 1922, and published separately. It was the demands of a commitment to a firm and prestigious performance date that gave Bantock the impetus to set the rest of the music in full score at Birmingham during 1926: the Fifth Day was completed first, on 20 August; the Third and Fourth Days are dated 16 October and 10 December respectively. The huge vocal score was published complete in time for the first performance by Hallé forces conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty on 10 March 1927, with Dorothy Silk taking the role of the Shulamite and Frank Mullings her Shepherd lover. Soon the BBC announced a broadcast performance, but when it took place on Sunday 11 December 1927, with Dorothy Silk repeating the title role, although it ran for two hours, the Radio Times announced that ‘owing to the length of the work it has been found necessary to omit the orchestral Prelude and the First Scene’. Other performances followed, but the length was clearly a problem. When it was broadcast on 1 January 1932 it was now in a condensed version running for an hour and twenty-five minutes, Elsie Suddaby now taking the role of the Shulamite. Later, in 1935 and 1936, Adrian Boult and Bantock himself conducted extracts, when Laelia Finnberg was a very successful Shulamite, and in 1937 Bantock conducted the Prelude as a separate concert work in a programme of his own music, but that seems to have been the last time it was heard until now.

This is a setting of verses from ‘The Song of Songs’ taken from the Authorized Version of The Bible. Bantock personalises and dramatises these familiar words, words we normally associate with chaste ecclesiastic settings, treating them as a passionate love story, and giving them a luxuriant and exotic, indeed erotic, setting. Bantock allots the words to three main characters, the Shulamite (soprano), her Shepherd lover (tenor), and the King—King Solomon (bass-baritone), whose suit she rejects. Each ‘Day’ is punctuated by massive choral settings of the psalms, creating contrast from the overheated exchanges of the protagonists, and at key points there are set-piece orchestral interludes mainly in the form of exotic dances.

Bantock sets the words from ‘The Song of Songs’ (indeed, most of it) verbatim, and in the manuscript vocal score he calls it a ‘dramatic rhapsody’, but on the printed vocal score merely uses the form of words ‘set to music for 6 solo voices, chorus and orchestra’. But the score includes stage instructions and Bantock clearly envisaged it visually. He specifies the same set for the first four acts or scenes (the First Day, Second Day, etc) covering the span from noon on the first day to a later evening, where we are in the ‘women’s Apartment in the Palace of the King, Lattice Windows at the back’ which when opened reveal a starlit sky and the distant hills. In the Fifth Day, we are at dawn at the foot of a watchtower among the vineyards of Lebanon with a large apple tree in full flower centre stage.

Here we present the whole of the Second Day and the love duet that constitutes the greater part of the Fifth Day. In this performance they have been linked with an extended orchestral passage from the Third Day. In the Third Day the King has arrived in great pomp, treated in detail by Bantock, and crowned by a massive chorus, and has made a passionate suit to the object of his affections and ‘various offerings and costly presents are brought by slaves and laid at the feet of the Shulamite. She rejects one after another the proffered gifts’. We join the music at the tail end of this (vocal score page 157: ‘Imperioso’), as with wistful feelings on both sides, and a distant reminiscence of the Shulamite’s music from the Second Day, ‘The King, realising that his suit has failed, gives a signal for all his followers to retire, and the Shulamite is left alone with her female attendants, surrounded by the neglected offerings’. Soon, to familiar music, ‘The Shulamite reflects upon her absent shepherd-lover,’ ‘and sees him in a vision on the mountainside’.

Before our final extract, in the Fourth Day the Shulamite has been depicted pining, alone with her attendants who try to distract her with a succession of dances, and the King returns with one final attempt to woo her and sings of her beauty, before we reach the Fifth Day and the scene moves outside for the first time. The Watchman announces the entrance of the Shulamite with her Shepherd lover and they sing such well-known words as ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart’, ‘Many waters cannot quench love’ and ‘For love is strong as death’, given in a high-flown romantic style. Bantock vividly realises a colourful scene that was as immediate and realistic for him as had been the exotic desert landscape in Omar Khayyám, and the love-lorn world of Sappho.

from notes by Lewis Foreman © 2003