3 Belloc Songs (1927)

Ha’nacker Mill

The Night

My own country

Although the three Belloc songs Warlock wrote in 1927 were intended as a set, thanks to less than ideally cooperative publishers they were first issued separately and then, four years later, under the same cover but in the wrong order. Performed as the composer intended them, they make a well balanced, attractively varied group. The economically presented but intense dissonances in the piano part reflect the desolate scene at the abandoned Ha’nacker Mill – a painful experience of the kind that the poet, in a vocal line flowering out of the opening chant in Warlock’s setting, prays to escape from in The Night. Beginning in all pastoral innocence, My own country is deflected by dissonances at the end of the second stanza into a symbolic countryside which, as the unreal piano harmonies confirm, is not of this world.