The Singer (1922)

Late Summer (1921-2)

The Fox (1930)

Captain Stratton’s Fancy (1921)

In June 1910 Roger Quilter took part in a concert at Eton College, his old school, acccompanying a performance of his Three Shakespeare Songs Op.6. In the audience was the 15-year-old Philip Heseltime, who was so moved by what he heard that the event had a profound influence on the composing career that was eventually to flourish, and tragically wither, under the pseudonym of Peter Warlock. “To R.Q. without whom there could have been no P.W.” he wrote in dedicating Late Summer to Quilter in 1922. There were other influences on his development, of course, not least his friendship with Delius, whom he met at about the same time as he got to know Quilter, and his enthusiasm for Elizabethan and Jacobean song.

Considering how deeply Warlock was absorbed in Delius in the early 1920s – having been relieved of the editorship of The Sackbut, he had taken refuge in the family home in Wales to write on a book on his friend and mentor – The Singer shows surprisingly little evidence of his influence. Warlock responds to the challenge set by Edward Shanks’s enchanted observation of the singer’s art not by any extravagance in harmony or line but by means of the equivocally “merry or plaintive” piano melody that introduces the first and third stanzas. In spite of its dedication to Quilter, Late Summer, another Shanks setting from much the same time, owes more to Delius, not least in the chromatic harmonies of a piano part extended into a modest but eloquent postlude.

The other two songs in this group represent contrasting sides of Warlock’s creative personality. The Fox, the words and music of which were written within a few hours of an evening spent by Warlock and his drinking companion Bruce Blunt in the Fox Inn in Bramdean, was Warlock’s last work. Echoing with sinister hunting-horn calls, it is a chilling anticipation of the death Warlock was to meet in a gas-filled room in Chelsea a few months later. Publishers who had done so well out of Warlock’s popular successes, like the robustly cheerful drinking song Captain Stratton’s Fancy, were unwilling to accept The Fox until the publicity arising from the composer’s death made it an attractive commercial proposition.