5 Songs of Travel (1902-4)

The Vagabond

Youth and Love

The infinite shining heavens

Whither must I wander

Bright is the ring of words

“I travel for travel’s sake,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “The great affair is to move.” Vaughan Williams’s setting of The Vagabond, the first poem in Stevenson’s collection of Songs of Travel, gets that sentiment just about right. When he wrote the poem Stevenson actually had “an air by Schubert” in mind - he didn’t say which - but Vaughan Williams also makes it his affair to move, in the steady tread in the pianist’s left hand, and to reflect the vagabond spirit in the defiant little fanfare echoing in the right hand and in the vocal line itself. The fanfare is heard again (with other cross-references) in the accompaniment to the fourth song in the cycle Youth and Love. It is recalled discreetly at first at “passing for ever he fares” and then resolutely as, turning away from the pleasures that assail him, “he to his nobler fate fares.”

The Songs of Travel were first performed by Walter Creighton with the composer at the piano at the Bechstein (later Wigmore) Hall in December 1904. It is an indication of how quickly Vaughan Williams was developing at this time, in his early thirties, that the harmonies of The infinite shining heaven, with its blissful resolution on D major, are so much more subtle than those of Wither must I wander, which was written (and published separately) only two years earlier. Engagingly melodious though it is, Wither must I wander is outshone too by Bright is the ring of words which, after its deceptively bluff C major opening, proves to be so artfully flexible in expression.

(14/10/02 Wigmore/BBC)