Benjamin Britten has been described as the greatest English composer since Henry Purcell, and although a substantial passage of time separates the two, they shared similar musical preoccupations and principles. Britten said of Purcell: “He was open to many influences, he was a practical composer, he wrote for many different occasions… all that I find immensely sympathetic. Above all, I love his setting of words. I had never realised before I first met Purcell’s music that words could be set with such ingenuity, with such colour.” In 1959, Britten wrote of the warm response he and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, received for their performances of Purcell: “In practically every one of our concerts, given the length of three continents over the last twenty years, Peter Pears and I have included a group of Purcell’s songs… It is pleasant to get cheers at the end of Purcell’s ‘Alleluia’ in the home of Schubert and Wolf, requests for a repeat of ‘Man is for the woman made’ in the birthplace of Mozart… and an impressive silence as the last bars of ‘Job’s Curse’ die away in Düsseldorf, where Schumann spent many years.”

On the challenge of realising Purcell’s music, Britten explained that “the realiser must soak himself in the composer’s idiom in order to provide natural Purcellian harmonies for the melodies. Nor must he be afraid of those very Purcellian qualities of clarity, strangeness, tenderness and attack.” Man is for the woman made was realised by Britten in 1947, and his sensitivity to Motteux’s text is reflected in the subtly different settings of each verse: “In each successive verse of ‘Man is for the woman made’ I have invented new figuration to match the increasing dottiness of the words.”

Purcell’s influence is apparent in Britten’s Canticle I, ‘My Beloved is Mine’, also dating from 1947 and described by Pears in 1952 as Britten’s finest vocal work to date. In 1963, Britten explained that: “The First Canticle was a new invention in a sense although it was certainly modelled on the Purcell Divine Hymns; but few people knew their Purcell well enough to realise that.” While he was writing the work, Britten recorded: “My Canticle goes nicely now & I’m in love with the form”. He and Pears first performed it on 1 November 1947 at a memorial concert for the Rev. Dick Sheppard, one of the founders of the Peace Pledge Union. The 17th-century text, by Quarles, is partly derived from the Song of Solomon, and the music reflects the imagery of two streams overlapping until they merge, weathering a stormy central section but ending as one. Britten contemplated several Goethe settings but only completed one, in 1960: Um Mitternacht. Spare piano chords accentuate a haunting vocal line, tracing a man’s journey from a small boy marvelling at the stars to a grown man drinking in the beauty of his beloved with the same sense of wonder.

Hugo Wolf first became entranced by the words of Mörike in 1886, after which he set over 50 of the poet’s texts during a great surge of creativity. He wrote in February 1888: “I have just put a new song down on paper. A divine song, I tell you! Quite divinely marvellous! … I feel my cheeks glowing like molten iron with excitement, and this state of inspiration is more an exquisite torment to me than pure pleasure”. He went on: “What will the future unfold for me? … Have I a calling? Am I really one of the chosen? … That would be a pretty kettle of fish”.

Mörike wrote five ‘Peregrina’ poems in the wake of an anguished and ultimately doomed relationship. As Wolf explained in a letter of 1890, whilst touring Swabia in Germany or “Mörike country” as he called it, he did not fully understand three of the poems and so opted to set two as a pair of linked songs, Peregrina I and II. Both were completed by the end of April 1888, and became Nos. 33 and 34 of Wolf’s substantial Mörike-Lieder cycle. Peregrina I sets poetry of deep longing, Wolf’s music reflecting its nuances with subtle harmonic shifts in the piano and a caressing, increasingly passionate vocal line. An die Geliebte comes just before Peregrina I in the Mörike-Lieder and its ecstatic quality is matched by Wolf’s sensual music, the piano’s rippling textures emulating the poem’s vivid imagery: “The springs of fate ripple in melody”. The ardent Nimmersatte Liebe is the ninth in the cycle, heard here alongside Verschwiegene Liebe, to words by Eichendorff. Wolf frequently drew inspiration from Eichendorff’s words and had attempted to set this serenely beautiful poem once before, finally succeeding while staying in Vienna. The result is a song of exquisite tenderness; it became the third of the 20 Eichendorff-Lieder of 1889.

On 6 April 1883, Wolf met Franz Liszt and played him some of his songs; Liszt responded by hugging him and offering words of encouragement. Wolf was profoundly influenced by Liszt’s music, although he tempered profuse praise with the argument that Liszt’s output was often “more intellectual than deeply felt”. Liszt’s three-volume collection of piano pieces, the Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), traces the composer’s emotional journey through key years of his life. Book II, ‘Italy’, is contemplative in tone, and includes Liszt’s responses to great texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Petrarch’s Sonnet 104, one of three of Petrarch’s poems set by Liszt in a triptych of songs, the Tri Sonetti del Petrarca. Petrarch’s sonnets about his unrequited love for a woman named Laura fascinated Liszt for many years, and the Tri Sonetti del Petrarca, S270a, were composed between 1838 and 1842, originally for high voice. A piano transcription of the songs was published in 1846, and Liszt later made substantial revisions to produce a low voice version in the 1860s, published in 1883. We hear the original version. Liszt’s setting of Petrarch’s Sonnet 104 opens with a recitative-like introduction followed by an aria of inflamed passion, conveying Petrarch’s account of the extremities of love with daring harmonies and operatic vocal writing. The second song, Benedetto sia ‘l giorno (‘Blessed be the day’) articulates Petrarch’s celebration of the first time he saw Laura, with Liszt’s tonal shifts mirroring the poet’s additions to his list of blessings. The set concludes with Liszt’s dreamy treatment of a sonnet in which Petrarch’s love finds echoes in the beauty of Nature.

Clara Wieck heard Liszt performing in 1838 and wrote: “He can be compared to no other player … he arouses fright and astonishment. He is an original”. Two years later, Robert Schumann wrote to Clara, by then his fiancée: “Oh Clara, what bliss it is to write songs, I can’t tell you how easy it has become for me… it is music of an entirely different kind, which doesn’t have to pass through the fingers – far more melodious and direct.” Schumann was alluding to his recent shift away from composing exclusively for the piano. Many songs followed, after which there was a long hiatus in song-writing until 1849, when Schumann wrote the song cycle Minnespiel, Op.101, to words from the first of six volumes of Gesammelte Gedichte by Rückert. The fourth song is Mein schöner Stern!, in which the poet likens his beloved to a star illuminating his inner darkness. Schumann’s “rich harvest of songs” composed during 1840 include Myrthen, Op.25, part of a wedding present finished in April and published later that year. The first, Widmung, to another Rückert text of profound and uncomplicated devotion, was transcribed by Liszt for solo piano in 1848. Towards the end of 1840, Schumann turned to the poetry of Kerner to produce the Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner, Op.35, the second of which is the Schubertian Stirb’, Lieb’ und Freud’! in which the poet expresses his love for a woman who has devoted herself to God. Schumann’s Lieder und Gesänge Volume III, Op.77, straddles the fallow period in his song-writing output. The first song dates from 1840, but the remainder are from 1850, including the third, Geisternähe, to poetry by Halm, describing the spirits of two lovers intermingling in the ether, their “harp-like murmuring” evoked in the agile piano part.

William Denis Browne was an English composer and critic born in Leamington Spa. He died in action during the First World War soon after burying his friend, the poet Rupert Brooke. Browne’s songs were published posthumously, among them To Gratiana dancing and singing. Setting poetry by Richard Lovelace, this is Browne’s most famous song, composed in February 1913 for his friend, the tenor Steuart Wilson. In 1908, Browne had participated in a student production of Milton’s Comus, during which he heard 17th-century music from Elizabeth Rogers’s Virginal Book, including an anonymous Allmayne that forms a countermelody realised in this song over a sequence of rich piano chords, above which the voice soars.

© Joanna Wyld, 2020