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Purcell’s Evening Hymn follows a similar pattern; the shift from minor to major, the repeated ‘Hallelujah’ to close the song, and above all a sense of quiet joy and deep faith; these could be the words of a young nun praying before bed. Henry Purcell was himself a devout Anglican and set many sacred texts to music, this song being one of his most-loved. Being a great admirer of Purcell, Benjamin Britten made realizations of 45 of his songs, his aim being to modernise the accompaniments whilst staying true to the style of the era and Purcell’s voice. Continuing with the theme of night-time and dreams, we come to the next three songs. Frank Bridge’s setting of Matthew Arnold’s Come to me in my dreams is a favourite of the English song repertoire, due to its sweeping romanticism and the intimacy it invokes. It would be easy to read the poem as an expression of longing for a distant lover; after all, Arnold wrote the poem shortly after his future wife’s father forcibly stopped their correspondence. Or it could be sung with the idea of a loved-one recently departed and only reachable through dreams. Fauré’s Après un rêve can similarly be read either way. The poem by Romain Bussine is based on an Italian poem by Niccolo Tommaseo, and tells of a romantic flight of lovers away from the earth and ‘towards the light’, experiencing ‘unknown splendours, celestial fires’. Upon awakening, the dreamer longs for a return to those sweet delusions, but the sad reality of life remains. Is the speaker longing for a lover who has already ‘departed the earth’ or simply wishing to be free to love this person in the private and intimate way normally associated with night-time…? Clara Schumann’s Die gute Nacht, die ich dir sage holds an altogether more simple and innocent meaning. The poem by Rückert describes an angel flitting between two lovers, bringing the message ‘good night’. The piano part, in a departure from Clara Schumann’s usual flamboyant style, speaks of peace and domestic harmony (perhaps due to this being one of four songs she wrote for Robert’s 31st birthday), while moments of angelic flight place the heavenly alongside the homely. Surprisingly, this was the only song omitted by Robert from their shared Liebesfrühling cycle, and therefore was not published in either of their lifetimes.
Appropriately perhaps, we move from Clara Schumann to her great friend, Johannes Brahms. In conversation with Lieder expert Richard Stokes during research for this album, he proclaimed: “Death as peace, solace: there is no greater example than the third of Brahms’s Vier Ernste Gesänge: O Tod, wie bitter bist du.” Brahms himself was deeply affected by the song, and upon performing it for friends immediately after Clara’s death, was choked with emotion and barely able to sing the words “O Tod, wie wohl tust du.”
When writing Peace on Earth, Errollyn Wallen (the only living composer on this album) says that one of the images she had when composing was ‘of a deserted London street in the early hours of a winter’s morning. A solitary figure stands amid the concrete figures of a council estate square, thinking about the world.’ The music repeats a cycle of notes in the piano over and over again, while the voice weaves a simple hymn-like tune, invoking a sense of peace and stillness, almost like the singer doesn’t want to disturb the scene.
Schumann’s Requiem is for me the emotional heart of this album, perhaps because it aligns with the belief system of my childhood; a hopeful part of me still believes that what awaits us when we die is the kind of joy and peace that one can only really imagine, perhaps when listening to songs like Requiem. The fervent middle section of the song climaxes when the ‘Jubelsang erklingt’, but the peace and patience we all need while we await our own angelic choir can be found in the final 10-beat long note that closes the song.
Canadian composer Jeanne Landry came under the influence of the European song cycle during her studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the mid-1900s. The small and mysterious Mort quand tu me viendras prendre is taken from the cycle Amour comme un oiseau captif. I discovered this and many other beautiful French songs by female composers on the album L’heure Rose (Hélène Guilmette / Martin Dubé), well worth a listen. Another song I discovered on this album was Lamento, by the highly-acclaimed mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, who forged professional and personal relationships in her lifetime with many eminent musicians such as Chopin, Brahms, Lizst, Gounod and Berlioz. In Lamento, the fisherman mourns over the repetitive keening of the piano and the motion of a boat on the water is invoked through the lilting and wistful melody, reaching higher and higher in the vocal line before finally dropping down into ‘la mer’ at the final phrase.
It is appropriate that the text of Vaughan Williams’ Tired was written by his wife Ursula, since here is a love song of sweet domesticity, with a depth of feeling in both words and music that suggests one of them will soon be gone. The couple married when they were 42 and 81 respectively, so the poignancy of this song cannot have been lost on them. It appears as one of the Four Last Songs assembled for publication by Ursula after her husband’s death.
Edvard Grieg was heavily influenced by the German Lieder art form, and wrote some 20 of his 170 Lieder to texts by German poets, including Dereinst, Gedanke mein. The Sechs Lieder are set firmly in the late-Romantic tradition, and in this song we find typical chromatic chord progressions and expressive sustained notes that paint the picture of a longing for death beneath ‘cold earth’. The theme of the song is similar to Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, and it is notable that neither poem mentions God or religious belief as comfort when death is approaching. This is perhaps due to the complex relationships that both Emanuel Geibel and Friedrich Rückert had with the Church. In the Mahler, the singer remains alone ‘in my heaven’, but this is suggested to be their ‘love’ and ‘song’ rather than the heaven of Christian belief. However, the song isn’t lacking in spirituality, and one could argue that the music itself implies a magnitude far bigger than anything we can comprehend. The song I have placed between these two, Barber’s The Desire for Hermitage, has the same bleak view of the world, but with a strong religious undertone; in fact, the singer is longing for solitude so as to prepare for the ‘pilgrimage to Death’.
One of the challenges of performing Strauss’ Morgen! lies in the weight of historical performances that have come before. The only way to come to it with a fresh mind is to think of the words and whatever meaning they hold in that moment. When I recorded this I was a newly-wed, so the images in my mind were of a couple promising to each other that their love will last even beyond death. But when I sang it at Dartington, it was my dad that I was thinking of, and how I was hoping to see him again at the end of my life. I suppose this is why songs like these are timeless; in 2025, we feel the same emotions that humans felt in 1825 or 1925 and we’ll still feel these in another 100 years. Love, longing, grief, joy, hope, anger—all of these raw human emotions have been translated into poetry and music by great artists so that we can understand and make sense of them.
Mary Bevan © 2025
Mary Bevan © 2025