Concert programme — Stanford, Haydn, Finzi & Sullivan

Five Shakespeare songs

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

O Mistress mine Op65 No1 (1896)

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

She never told her love (1795)

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)

Fear no more the heat o’the sun (1929)

Arthur Sullivan (1832-1900)

Orpheus with his lute (1863-4)

Finzi

Who is Silvia? (1929)

After folk song, the one most important factor in giving English song its true voice must be Shakespeare. Certainly, four hundred years of inspiration to innumerable composers of every intervening generation can only have been a formative influence, even if it has done no more than impart a respect for the words and a conscience for clarity in their setting. It has done more than that, of course, not least in begetting some of our best tunes and, through an unbroken tradition going back to Thomas Morely, preserving in English song a freshness it might have lost in an era when solemnity seemed a preferable virtue.

True, it was well into the English musical renaissance before a British composer could equal Morley’s It was a lover and his lass but Finzi surely achieved that distinction in his Let us Garlands Bring collection, which also includes a definitive O Mistress mine alongside three other Shakespearean classics. Stanford’s O Mistress mine, one of his three Clown’s Songs from Twelfth Night, is not as nimble in its rhythms as Finzi’s and its harmonies might seems a little self-conscious for Feste’s appeal to immediacy but, in its late-nineteenth-century context, it is a model of modesty and melodic charm.

Shakespeare has long been an inspiration not only to British composers of course. Although the choice of She never told her love (also from Twelfth Night) was probably made for Haydn by Anne Hunter, the author of the texts of the first set of his English Canzonettas, his setting is the most original song in the second set. Known in London as “the Shakespeare of music,” Haydn clearly took his responsibility seriously here, creating a miniature dramatic scena in which the changing directions of the vocal line seem to be taken on impulse while they are, in fact, carefully prepared in the eloquent (Largo assai e con espressione) piano introduction.

Perhaps the most beautiful of Finzi’s Shakespeare settings is Fear no more the heat o’ the sun (from Cymbeline) which, while it is not quite a chaconne, puts both the structural implications and the dignified step of that stately dance form to uncommonly inspired use. Far from acting as a restraint, the recurring B flat major theme intensifies the effect of the harmonic diversions, above all on the change to B flat minor for the near-monotone invocation “No exorciser harm thee!” and the change back to the major on the very last “grave.”

More than thirty years before Stanford wrote his O Mistress mine

Sullivan included a lively setting of the same words in his Five Shakespeare Songs, all of which are refreshingly different from the sentimental ballads by which he was rather better known in the Victorian drawing room. Orpheus with his lute (from Henry VIII) is frequently compared to a Schubert song, which does neither composer a favour. The lute-like motif which recurs in the piano part and which lends the song much of its attraction needed no Schubertian precedent for Sullivan to think of it, while the modulations in the two episodes that exclude it cannot fairly be attributed to Schubert’s influence.

Finzi’s friend were none too keen on the Let us Garlands bring title he attached to his Shakespeare collection. Those words occur most appositely however at the end of Who is Silvia? (from Two Gentlemen of Verona), releasing a piano postlude that is the climax of a skilfully modulated accumulation of rhythmic energy and convivial exhilaration.