Friday Performance Pick – 484

Vaughan Williams, Bredon Hill

The collection of 63 poems by A. E. Housman (1859-1936) entitled A Shropshire Lad became a favorite source for song texts in England at the beginning of the 20th century. Major publishers initially turned it down, but Housman himself subsidized its publication in 1896.

As we’ve noted before, English composers at the time were heavily involved in preserving their folk heritage, and composers like Gustav Holst, Percy Grainger, George Butterworth, and Ralph Vaughan Williams incorporated folk styles in much of their music. Housman’s poems contain some of those same folk qualities.

Many of the poems deal with untimely death, often of soldiers going off to war—a theme that spoke the generation fighting World War I. If you missed the post on Butterworth’s The Lad’s in their Hundreds, also from A Shropshire Lad, I strongly recommend it. (My introduction to Housman came in high school where we learned To an Athlete Dying Young.) Some of the poems address other aspects of youth and the Shropshire countryside, which lies in the west Midlands bordering Wales.

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his song cycle On Wenlock Edge in 1909 using six of the poems from Housman’s series. Bredon Hill opens Butterworth’s cycle Bredon Hill and Other Songs (1912), but Vaughan Williams’ setting is quite different. It takes a much slower pace, uses a string quartet in addition to the piano to set a more ethereal mood and highlight the narrative.

I include the text below and can’t resist also providing a very effective reading by the actor Hume Cronin.

In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.

The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away;
“Come all to church, good people;
Good people come and pray.”
But here my love would stay.

And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
“Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time.”

But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.

They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.

The bells they sound on Bredon,
And still the steeples hum,
“Come all to church, good people.”—
O noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.