A Garland for Marjory Fleming (1969)

In Isas Bed

A Melancholy Lay

On Jessy Watsons Elopement

Sweet Isabell

Sonnet on a Monkey

It takes an experienced composer to make s successful setting of words as naive as the poems of Marjory Fleming. And at the age of 33 Richard Rodney Bennett - who had by then composed all five of his operas, two of his symphonies, a piano concerto, a major choral work and more than half his dozens of film scores - was not inexperienced. Certainly, in writing his tribute to little Marjory, who was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803 and died at the age of eight, he was able not ony to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality, condescension and send-up but also to reflect and even enhance the freshness of her verses.

In Isas Bed - Isabelle Keith was Marjory’s cousin and best friend - is sheer joy. The piano exults in the dotted rhythms of the recurring opening bars while the vocal line is both ecstatic in its delight and, as the piano rhythms even out, quietly caring in concern for Isa’s comfort. A Melancholy Lay is a miniature dirge for three turkeys, the vocal line poised on a rocking left-hand ostinato which is no more seriously displaced by the pathos of parental mourning and the thought of bone-crunching rats than by the the inspired bathos of “She did not give a single dam.” The contrastingly feisty On Jessy Watson’s Elopement, with its percussive rhythms and agressive dissonances, is followed by the lyrically expressive Sweet Isabell, which sustains its loving line except when it comes up against the disgust caused by Mister Worgan “who plays upon the organ.” Sonnet on a Monkey is ingeniously set to a bar-by-bar alternation of 7/8 and 2/4 dancing idiomatically alongside the exotic subject of the poem - until, that is, the lack of a rhyme for “roman” breaks the rhythmic pattern (which, however, is resumed by the piano in the closing bars). he was able not ony to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality, condescension and send-up but also to reflect and even enhance the freshness of the texts.

In Isas Bed - Isabelle Keith was Marjory’s cousin and best friend - is sheer joy. The piano exults in the dotted rhythms of the recurring opening bars while the vocal line is both ecstatic in its delight and, as the piano rhythms even out, quietly caring in concern for Isa’s comfort. A Melancholy Lay is a miniature dirge for three turkeys, the vocal line poised on a rocking left-hand ostinato whose rhythms are more seriously displaced by bone-crunching rats than the wonderful bathos of “She did not give a single dam.” The contrastingly feisty On Jessy Watson’s Elopement, with its percussive rhythms and agressive dissonances, is followed by the lyrically expressive Sweet Isabell, which sustains its loving line except when it comes up against the disgust caused by Mister Worgan “who plays upon the organ.” Sonnet on a Monkey is ingeniously set to a bar-by-bar alternation of 7/8 and 2/4 dancing idiomatically alongside the exotic subject of the poem - until, that is, the lack of a rhyme for “roman” breaks the rhythmic pattern (which, however, is resumed by the piano in the closing bars).