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01-Sargeant-PM CERI OWEN Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs On Singing and Listening in Vaughan Williams’s Early Songs CERI OWEN I begin with a question not posed amid the singer narrates with ardent urgency their sound- recent and unusually liberal scholarly atten- ing and, apparently, their hearing. But precisely tion devoted to a song cycle by Ralph Vaughan who is engaged in these acts at this, the musi- Williams, the Robert Louis Stevenson settings, cal and emotional heart of the cycle? Songs of Travel, composed between 1901 and The recollected songs are first heard on the 1904.1 My question relates to “Youth and Love,” lips of the speaker in “The Vagabond,” an os- the fourth song of the cycle, in which an unex- tensibly archetypal Romantic wayfarer who in- pectedly impassioned climax erupts with pecu- troduces himself at the cycle’s opening in the liar force amid music of otherwise unparalleled lyric first-person, grimly issuing a characteris- serenity. Here, as strains of songs heard earlier tic demand for the solitary life on the open intrude into the piano’s accompaniment, the road. This lyric voice, its eye fixed squarely on the future, is retained in two subsequent songs, “Let Beauty Awake” and “The Roadside Fire” I thank Byron Adams, Daniel M. Grimley, and Julian (in which life with a beloved is contemplated).2 Johnson for their comments on this research, and espe- cially Benedict Taylor, for his invaluable editorial sugges- With “Youth and Love,” however, Vaughan tions. Thanks also to Clive Wilmer for his discussion of Williams rearranges the order of Stevenson’s Rossetti with me. 1For an overview of Vaughan Williams’s career and critical reception as a songwriter, see Sophie Fuller, “The Songs and Shorter Secular Choral Works,” in The Cambridge 2“Let Beauty Awake” possesses no clear first-person voice, Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and though heard in the context of the surrounding songs— Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and in the absence of a third-person narration—it appears 2013), 106–20. to belong to the same voice found in “The Vagabond.” 19th-Century Music, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 257–282 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2017 by the Regents of 257 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2017.40.3.257. 19TH poems such that a new voice is introduced, piano forcefully and self-consciously enacts both CENTURY 3 MUSIC bearing a new burden of narration in the cycle. the “crying” and “singing” by quoting passages One of relatively few Travel poems cast in the from “The Roadside Fire.” Then, with a sud- narrative third person, it functions here to con- den return to the detached reflection of the firm both retrospectively and prospectively the opening, the protagonist slips away. As the emotional dilemma staged in the songs: love, singer-narrator informs us, “his face is gone.” and by implication a settled life with the be- (See ex. 2, pp. 266–68.) loved, versus solitude, the freedom to break The recall within “Youth and Love” of ma- out, to wander: terial exposed earlier in the cycle might be understood simply as a subtle piece of word To the heart of youth the world is a highwayside. painting, or a formal practice of self-quotation Passing for ever, he fares; and on either hand, familiar from the song cycles of Schumann and Deep in the gardens golden pavilions hide, Beethoven, whose works became emblematic Nestle in orchard bloom, and far on the level land of a powerful tradition to which a number of Call him with lighted lamp in the eventide. early-twentieth-century British song compos- ers sought to add a native voice. Such recollec- Thick as the stars at night when the moon is down, tions highlight music’s capacity to reflect upon Pleasures assail him. He to his nobler fate its own history, akin to what Michael Steinberg Fares; and but waves a hand as he passes on, has termed musical subjectivity.4 The recollec- Cries but a wayside word to her at the garden tions might thus be heard as memories arising gate, from the music’s consciousness, as they might Sings but a boyish stave and his face is gone. also in Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures (1899), per- haps a model for the young Vaughan Williams A change in tone for the narrating voice is in crafting a narrative cycle at the turn of the articulated by Vaughan Williams’s musical century.5 materials. Cast in a through-composed form The recognition of such self-consciousness (its two parts corresponding to Stevenson’s has assumed a peculiar significance in the dis- stanza division), “Youth and Love” replaces course surrounding Vaughan Williams’s cycle. the broad, regular melodies of the opening songs As Rufus Hallmark has emphasized, Songs of with a melodically indistinct recitation which Travel was published in two separate books hovers freely below a flexibly pulsating accom- following its premiere at London’s Bechstein paniment (a reinterpretation, in turn, of the Hall on 2 December 1904. The first book, is- militantly regular “tramping” figures with sued in 1905, comprised the more “popular,” which the cycle begins). Soon into the B sec- accessible songs (as apparently assessed by tion, however, the lyric voice of the earlier songs returns in the piano’s instrumental voice. As the “pleasures” of nightfall “assail” the wan- 4Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Sub- jectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: derer, an emphatic recall of the cycle’s opening Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 4–11. horn call shatters the reverie and precipitates 5The absence of a clearly unified voice in Sea Pictures— decisive action. For no sooner does the narrator which amalgamates texts by five different poets—has long prompted questions about its status as a cycle, a reception declaim “he to his nobler fate fares” than the history challenged in two recent accounts, both of which narrated “he” of the poem seems to hear, to attend to issues of thematic recollection, narrative coher- react to the statement: he “cries but a wayside ence, and constructions of subjectivity; Karen Leistra-Jones, “The Deeps Have Music Soft and Low: Sounding the Ocean word” and “sings but a boyish stave” while the in Elgar’s Sea Pictures,” Music & Letters 97/1 (2016): 61– 99, and Charles Edward McGuire, “Three Journeys, Two Paths: Locating the Lyric and Dramatic in Elgar’s Sea Pic- 3Vaughan Williams set nine poems from Stevenson’s post- tures,” in The Sea in the British Musical Imagination, ed. humously published Songs of Travel and Other Verses Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer (Woodbridge: (1896). On their selection and rearrangement, see Rufus Boydell, 2015), 179–203. On the narrative song cycle in Hallmark, “Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Will- early-twentieth-century British musical culture, see iams and Their Songs of Travel,” in Vaughan Williams Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song: Critical Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot: Studies of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cam- Ashgate, 2003), 129–56, esp. 130–35. bridge University Press, 1988), 42–64. 258 Boosey)—namely “The Vagabond,” “The Road- and Love”—“In Dreams” and “The Infinite CERI OWEN side Fire,” and “Bright Is the Ring of Words” Shining Heavens”—are furthermore different Vaughan (originally the last song of the cycle). The sec- from those that precede it, exhibiting the most Williams’s ond book, issued in 1907, gathered together the consciously “artful” and harmonically explor- Early Songs remaining “Youth and Love,” “Let Beauty atory music found anywhere in the cycle. Like Awake,” “In Dreams” (originally song 5), and the penultimate “Whither Must I Wander?” “The Infinite Shining Heavens” (song 6). The these songs return to the first-person lyric voice, work, then, was not issued in the form pre- as the poems selected by Vaughan Williams miered and apparently intended by Vaughan become for the first time rich in memory, his Williams—and including “Whither Must I Wan- music newly anguished and melancholic in its der?” (song 7, composed in 1901 and published response to the poetic subject’s reflection upon separately in 1902)—until 1960, at which point the past. an epilogue was added having been found among It seems fitting, with all this in mind, that the composer’s papers following his death two the cycle concludes with “Bright Is the Ring of years earlier.6 “Youth and Love” has thus pro- Words,” in which the poem’s self-conscious vided crucial internal evidence for the cycle’s preoccupation with song-making—“Bright is otherwise questionable integrity, as such, and the ring of words / When the right man rings has offered persuasive evidence, in turn, for the them, / Fair the fall of songs / When the singer identity of the journeying protagonist as a Ro- sings them”—is heightened by musical setting, mantic “vagabond-artist.” and may be heard as a confirmation of the In this reading the song marks a moment of wanderer’s progressive passage toward and re- internalized creative enlightenment (a “flash- alization of creative fulfillment. This reading is back or reminiscence,” as Hallmark has it), as ostensibly consonant, in turn, with the senti- the Vagabond shuns the “pleasures” of domes- ments advanced in the epilogue, “I have trod ticity in favor of a “nobler” creative fate. In the upward and the downward slope,” in which reflecting upon in order to leave behind his the poetic subject delivers an intensely intro- “boyish staves”—an “earlier and easier con- verted, elegiac reflection upon a journey near ventional art”—the artist sheds the burdens of its end, as Vaughan Williams furnishes music domesticity and his own immaturity as one rich in further thematic recollection (a weary, and the same.
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