The Desert (1869)

Louis Alexander Emanuel was last heard of, in the early 1880s, as choirmaster of the Bayswater Synagogue in London. For many years before that he had been bandmaster to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and had combined a career as a military musician, much of it spent in India, with his moderately successful activities as a civilian composer. He seems to have been best known in his day for his vocal music, including The Desert which, according to a contemporary account, “vividly illustrates the dangers and horrors of desert travel.” A setting of words by one J.F. Smith, it is certainly a dramatic little composition, a scena rather than a song, beginning in E flat minor with gusty chromatic scales associated, we learn later, with the dreaded vulture wheeling round the thirsty traveller lost in the desert. But help is at hand and it arrives in the form of a scherzo jingling with camel bells in E flat major.

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