5 Songs

Youth (1918)

In the Morning (1926)

When I was one and twenty (1918)

Carrey Clavel (1925)

The Market Girl (1923)

The distinctive quality of Bax’s settings of English lyric poetry is their harmonic and textural abundance. Vocal melody is not unimportant but the essence of the song is often in the piano part, as it is in the setting of Youth by the composer’s brother Clifford, where the vocal line does little more than provide a poetic context for the evocative image introduced by the piano in the opening bars, developed throughout and recalled at the end. The whole point of the first of the two Housman songs in this group, In the Morning, is the way in which the sweetly luxuriant harmonies of the piano part turn briefly but ironically hollow on the very last line. When I was one-and-twenty begins more conventionally, the singer’s claim to the main melodic interest undisputed by the pianist. In the second stanza, however, while the melodic line remains much the same, a characteristic urge to intensify the expression overflows in an extraordinarily elaborate piano part. Although the two Hardy settings are modestly conceived in a basically folk-song idiom, they both of them get chromatically carried away – The Market Girl in exuberance in the triumphant last line, Carrey Clavel in an erotic little scene towards the end.