The Forgotten Rite - prelude for orchestra

Ireland’s ironic nicknames for his first two orchestral works - The Forgotten Rite became “forgotten quite” and Mai-Dun “may not be done” - have proved to be all too prophetic. Apart from A London Overture which still gets the occasional performance, his orchestral music is rarely if ever done and is all but forgotten. Even the songs and piano pieces, which once had a secure place in recital programmes, are heard far less often than they were in his lifetime and for a few years after that. It’s a pity because we are depriving ourselves of the work of a composer with, at his best, a uniquely poetic musical voice.

Ireland was uncommonly sensitive to the atmosphere of places, above all those with ancient historical associations like Mai-Dun in Dorset or Chanctonburry Ring in Sussex. His consuming interest in the writings of the “pagan mystic” Arther Machen, whose The House of Souls he discovered on a book stall at Charing Cross Station in 1906, sharpened his perception of the presence of the the pre-Christian past. The Channel Islands, which he visited every year from 1909 to 1914, he found particularly rich in such associations. The Forgotten Rite of 1913 is a Channel Islands, specifically Jersey, inspiration. “I wrote it after being alone for six weeks in Jersey,” he recalled, “and one felt so intensely, painfully in fact, the indescribable beauty of the light, the sea, and the distant other islands. At that time one felt that the very thinnest of material veils separated one from the actual Reality behind all this smiling beauty.”

Experienced composer though he was by then, Ireland hadn’t written for the orchestra before - which makes his translation of those observations into musical terms in The Forgotten Rite all the more remarkable. The quiet drum roll, the modal string harmonies, the horn calls that seem to echo from some ancient ritual, the melody rising on flute and repeated on horn: these are some of the sounds that set the magical scene in the first half of the piece. The second half, beginning with rumbling lower strings and an expressive oboe is more animated and, with the entry of the violins, rises to an impassioned and resourcefully sustained climax. As it subsides, with a string line drawn over rippling harp, material from the first half is recalled, the horns now sounding even more prominent than before. The Rite ends with a distant memory of the flute melody picked out on glockenspiel.

Gerad Larner ©2006