Songs of Travel (1902-4)

The Vagabond

Let Beauty Awake

The Roadside Fire

Youth and Love

In Dreams

The Infinite Shining Heavens

Whither must I Wander

Bright is the Ring of Words

I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

“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 Songs of Travel, gets that sentiment absolutely 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 at the same time to reflect the vagabond spirit in the defiant little fanfare echoing in the right hand and in the vocal line itself.

After a moment of contemplation in Let Beauty Awake, the vocal line floating on a gentle ripple of arpeggios, he is on the move again in The Roadside Fire, where the playful tune of the first two stanzas broadens into a “fine song for singing” in the third. In Youth and Love he is tempted to linger but there is an early if discreet echo of the fanfare motif in the first stanza and a more insistent reminder as “he to his nobler fate fares” and leaves his beloved at the garden gate while the piano romantically recalls the once playful love song from The Roadside Fire. It is not without intense regret that he finds himself alone, however, as the nagging syncopations and dissonant harmonies of In Dreams so eloquently confirm. Consolation is in The Infinite Shining Heavens, another contemplative piece, where the desolate minor harmonies finally achieve a radiant resolution in the major.

Since Stevenson had a Scots ballad tune in mind as he wrote Whither Must I Wander, Vaughan Williams’s tuneful setting is appropriate enough, even though the comparatively unsophisticated piano part betrays the fact that it was written two years earlier than the rest of the cycle. The beginning of Bright is the Ring of Words is not entirely subtle either but the bluff opening chord on the piano and the hymn-like first phrase in the vocal part supply a secure harmonic and thematic base for imaginative diversions into elegy and fond regret.

When the Songs of Travel were first performed, by the baritone Walter Creighton with Hamilton Harty at the piano, in this hall in December 1904 the collection did not include I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope, the manuscript of which was discovered only after the composer’s death. Long thought to have been withdrawn before that occasion, the last song in what is now known as the “complete edition” is more likely to have been written after the performance, which had no doubt suggested to the composer that the work needed a reflective epilogue to complete the cycle. When Boosey & Hawkes insisted on splitting the collection into two parts, however, there would have been no point in publishing it. Certainly, the main theme of Bright is the Ring of Words is twice recalled in the piano postlude of I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope which, beginning with allusions to the fanfare motif of The Vagabond and ending with a distant memory of its marching rhythm, most effectively completes the cycle.

The Vagabond

Let Beauty Awake

The Roadside Fire

Youth and Love

In Dreams

The Infinite Shining Heavens

Whither must I Wander

Bright is the Ring of Words

I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

When the Songs of Travel were first performed in this very hall a hundred years ago today - by the baritone Walter Creighton with Hamilton Harty at the piano - there were only eight songs in the set. The ninth and last song of what is now known as the “complete edition” was withheld on that occasion and was neither published nor performed during Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. Why he withdrew I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope is a baffling question. Although there are other thematic cross-references, it is the backward allusions of that last song that make a collection of Stevenson settings a cycle. While he had little hope at this early stage in his career of having the songs published as a cycle, he could surely have presented the whole thing on at least that occasion. Anyway, I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope was discovered by Michael Kennedy and Roy Douglas among the composer’s papers in 1960 and was heard for the first time in a BBC broadcast in the same year.

“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 Songs of Travel, gets that sentiment absolutely 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 at the same time to reflect the vagabond spirit in the defiant little fanfare echoing in the right hand and in the vocal line itself.

After a moment of contemplation in Let Beauty Awake, the vocal line floating on a gentle ripple of arpeggios, he is on the move again in The Roadside Fire, where the playful tune of the first two stanzas broadens into a “fine song for singing” in the third. In Youth and Love he is tempted to linger but there is an early if discreet echo of the fanfare motif in the first stanza and a more insistent reminder as “he to his nobler fate fares” and leaves his beloved at the garden gate while the piano romantically recalls the once playful love song from The Roadside Fire. It is not without intense regret that he finds himself alone, however, as the nagging syncopations and dissonant harmonies of In Dreams so eloquently confirm. Consolation is in The Infinite Shining Heavens, another contemplative piece, where the desolate minor harmonies finally achieve a radiant resolution in the major.

Since Stevenson had a Scots ballad tune in mind as he wrote Whither Must I Wander, Vaughan Williams’s tuneful setting is appropriate enough, even though the comparatively unsophisticated piano part betrays the fact that it was written two years earlier than the rest of the cycle. The beginning of Bright is the Ring of Words is not entirely subtle either but the bluff opening chord on the piano and the hymn-like first phrase in the vocal part supply a secure harmonic and thematic base for imaginative diversions into elegy and fond regret. In the complete edition the main theme of Bright is the Ring of Words is twice recalled in the piano postlude of I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope which, beginning with allusions to the fanfare motif of The Vagabond and ending with a distant memory of its marching rhythm, most effectively completes the cycle.