3 Songs by Robert Browning Op.44 (1900)

Ah, Love, but a day!

I send my heart up to thee

The year’s at the spring

It’s a brave composer who chooses a text including the two lines “God’s in his heaven,/All’s right with the world!” from Browning’s Pippa Passess. But Amy Beach, a phenomenally gifted musician regarded in her time as one of America’s leading composers, was not lacking in confidence in her talent. As she said, "How inevitable it was that music should be my life's work. Both in composition and piano playing, there seemed to be such a strong attraction that no other life than that of a musician could ever have been possible for me.” When her husband prevailed upon her to limit her activities as a pianist, she threw herself into composition, largely self-taught in this area though she was, and uninhibitedly got to work in just about every major genre. It was, however, her songs (117 in all) that brought her most success in her lifetime and it is her songs, eclectic in style and spontaneous in inspiration, by which she is best remembered today.

Ah, Love, but a day, actually the second of the three songs written to a commission from the Browning Society of Boston in 1900, is particularly interesting for the change of mood half-way through where, to emphasise the poet’s growing anxiety, the composer drops the nostalgic counter-melody (scored for violin in one version) that seductively weaves itself round the vocal line in the first stanza. While rejecting Browning’s title In a gondola for I send my heart up to thee, Beach nevertheless takes the hint and sets his verses as a fervently melodious barcarolle in 9/8 with a rocking and rippling arpeggio accompaniment. Propelled by urgent piano triplets towards an elated climax not at all unworthy of its famous last lines, The year’s at the spring, though the first song in the Browning set as Beach published it, makes a most effective ending.