Earth and Air and Rain Op.16 (1928–1935)

Summer Schemes

When I set out for Lyonnesse

Waiting both

The Phantom

So I have fared

Rollicum-Rorum

To Lizbie Browne

The Clock of the Years

In a Churchyard

Proud Songsters

Finzi’s collection of Hardy songs, Earth and Air and Rain, is not a cycle in the same sense as Schumann’s Dichterliebe is a cycle. There is no narrative thread of any kind between them and there is no common theme, either musical or poetic. Even so, they belong together for a better reason than that they are all to words by the composer’s favourite poet. The ten songs cohere by virtue of their carefully chosen proportions and, although there is a link between the first and last, by the contrasts rather than the similarities of their subject matter. It is not at all unlikely that one of the latest songs in the cycle, the joyful When I set out for Lyonnesse, was written specially to offset the metaphysical thinking of one of the earliest, Waiting both. The pianist’s marching rhythms in the first of them are directly opposed to the starlit sonorities of the other, suspended near the top of the keyboard before descending heavily to earth. In much the same way the drinking-song jollity of Rollicum-Rorum precedes the lyrical regrets of To Lizbie Browne – two contrasting but characteristic examples, incidentally, of Finzi’s uncannily accurate musical reflection of the rhythms and pitch inflections of Hardy’s verse. The title of the collection comes from the last line of the last song, Proud Songsters – which not only echoes the bird-song theme of the opening Summer Schemes but also, given its comparatively extended piano prelude and postlude, is endowed with the proportions to make a conclusion to the cycle.