Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  He had returned to Housman for inspiration for the first of his Three Pastels of 1941 for solo piano, ‘A Grecian Lad’, which was prefaced with lines from ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’. Housman, who had refused Ireland permission to print the whole of ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ at the head of the score of The Land of Lost Content, was no longer around to object, and one wonders what he would have made of this appropriation, especially given that the other two Pastels were archly titled ‘The Boy Bishop’ and ‘Puck’s Birthday’.

  While it seems clear what it was about Housman’s poetry that so appealed to the tortured and repressed John Ireland, Charles Wilfred Orr was an obsessive of a different order. He wrote only thirty-five songs (and little else), twenty-four of which set poems from A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems. Like Gurney, he was a Gloucestershire lad, born in Cheltenham in 1893, the son of a captain in the Indian army who had died of tuberculosis shortly before his son’s birth. Orr suffered from poor health, which interrupted his education (he left school at fifteen) and kept him from serving abroad in the First World War, despite his having gained a commission in the Coldstream Guards. Encouraged by Frederick Delius, whom he had boldly approached in a Lyons Corner House after a concert, he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in 1917 to study composition, but he found his tutor’s lack of appreciation of contemporary music stifling and left in 1919 to spend a summer studying counterpoint with E.J. Dent. Through Delius he met Philip Heseltine (otherwise the composer Peter Warlock), who introduced him to musical circles in London and arranged for the publication of his earliest songs.

  Orr’s first encounter with Housman was when he heard Graham Peel’s ‘In summertime on Bredon’. He bought a 1914 edition of A Shropshire Lad, which he kept all his life: ‘I carried [it] about with me everywhere, learning almost all of the poems by heart, and hoping against hope that one day I might be able to set some of them in a way that Wolf or Schubert might have approved’. Like Willa Cather and E.M. Forster before him, he made a tour of Shropshire, photographing the places named in the poems. He even managed to slip into one of Housman’s lectures at Cambridge, though the two men never met. Orr made his first Housman setting, ‘When the lad for longing sighs’, in 1921, and in 1923 published Two Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (‘Loveliest of Trees’ and ‘’Tis Time, I Think, by Wenlock Town’). He followed these with nine further individual settings, five of which were collected in 1927 as Five Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’. His Cycle of Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ (1934) set seven poems and was followed by Three Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1940, and individual settings of ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’, ‘The Isle of Portland’, ‘Soldier from the wars returning’ and ‘In valleys green and still’.

  When Orr could not find a British publisher for his settings he had the idea of getting them published in Germany or Austria. He therefore applied for permission to have the poems translated into German, a written request across the corner of which Housman wrote ‘Refuse. A.E.H.’ before returning it to Richards. After the Second World War, Orr and his wife ran a bookshop in Stroud, not far from where they lived at Painswick in Gloucestershire. Increasingly deaf and feeling himself neglected, he had more or less given up composing; after ‘In valleys green and still’, written in 1952, he produced only five more songs, the last of them in 1957. He spent part of his remaining years compiling a list of all the musical settings of Housman he could find, a task that remained incomplete at his death in 1976.

  Orr had his distinguished admirers, including Delius, Warlock, Bax, Eugene Goossens and Walter Legge, but he felt that he was insufficiently appreciated and could be spiky – he was, for example, generally dismissive of Butterworth’s Housman settings and declared Vaughan Williams’s ‘Silent Noon’ (a poem he had himself set) ‘too much like a church voluntary’. In rejecting the folk-music influence that is apparent in many Housman settings for something more harmonically sophisticated, Orr was admirably ambitious, but somehow the music rarely coheres. His settings often start out well enough but they soon lose direction, being inclined merely to ramble, and have been not unfairly described by one expert in English song as ‘indigestible’. ‘If a composer were to take into account all the implications that can be read into Housman’s verses, or indeed any other great lyric poet, I doubt he would ever set anything at all!’ Orr wrote in 1973. ‘For that matter, how exactly is irony to be conveyed in terms of melancholy and harmony?’ This is a reasonable point, but most composers, with varying degrees of success, have relied upon the voice to do the work in attempting to capture the tone of the poems. Orr’s setting of ‘Is my team ploughing’ suggests a ploughman having to turn some very heavy clods indeed; it livens up somewhat inappropriately when the friend describes the sweetheart lying down lightly; and its resolution conveys the irony of the fact that the girl is now sleeping with the dead man’s friend by discordancy in the piano part, which itself stumbles on for a few inconclusive bars after the vocal part has ended. Although some of the songs are effective, Orr’s musical choices, such as a determinedly unlyrical ‘Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry’ and the distinctly Highland flavour to his setting of ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’, can seem perverse.

  Towards the end of his life Orr complained that he had ‘never found any English singer manifest the slightest interest in my song efforts’, which were rarely performed and even more rarely broadcast. Writing to Orr in 1935 to thank him for sending him the cycle of seven Housman songs, the conductor Eugene Goossens perhaps put his finger on why the composer was not more popular. Goossens had played violin at the first performance of Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, and told Orr: ‘I must confess that for a long time I have considered it impossible for any other composer to realize the particular colour of Housman until your songs came along, for I consider all other settings of these poems by other composers are tawdry and unmeaning.’ That said, he warned: ‘There is so much in them which at first glance is lost to the reader, musically speaking I mean, of course. In other words, there are many subtleties which are not immediately apparent.’ In addition he felt that

  the piano writing is terribly involved for the average, even though passably good, accompanist. I don’t know what the critics have said about them, but I imagine that the difficulties offered by the piano accompaniments of the songs were, by some, severely criticised. As you know I do not approve of reducing things to the essence of simplicity and there is no earthly reason why an accompaniment should not be as complicated and involved as you have made yours in certain of these songs. But I am afraid you must resign yourself to many bad criticisms of performances lacking the brio and accuracy called for in the accompaniments of the seven songs you sent me.

  He wondered whether Orr would consider orchestrating some of the songs. Orr never did, and it is only recently that his Housman settings have begun to come back into the repertoire. A recording of his complete songs was issued in 2012 by the baritone Mark Stone on his own independent label and required the combined forces of the Three Choirs Festival, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, the Finzi Friends, the Housman Society and the Gloucestershire-based Langtree Trust to provide financial support for its production.

  Another setting of Housman that has never quite secured its place in the repertoire is Vaughan Williams’s Along the Field for the unusual combination of voice and solo violin. In April 1927 seven of the original nine settings were performed by the soprano Joan Elwes and the violinist Dettman Dressel in a Sunday concert of the Philharmonia Society in Bradford. Elwes repeated the performance with Marie Wilson, for whom Vaughan Williams had written The Lark Ascending, in October of that year. One of the songs was subsequently destroyed, and the published version consists of eight settings of poems from both A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems. Vaughan Williams’s writing here is as spare as his earlier cycle is rich, and this starkness suits the mood of Housman’s poems, notably in the last song, ‘With rue my heart is laden
’, but Along the Field is rarely performed or recorded.

  Among the better-known composers in the inter-war period, Arnold Bax published settings of ‘Far in a western brookland’ and ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ in 1920 as components of his Three Songs for voice and piano. Gerald Finzi, perhaps inspired by his time in Painswick, wrote a number of Housman settings but completed none of them (fragments of ten remain). Herbert Howells also wrote several settings, but lost heart after an unfortunate encounter with Housman at High Table in Trinity:

  After regaling us for the first half of the meal with a lecture on suicide, he turned to me, knowing I was a composer, and said he hoped I’d never set any of his poems. I said I hadn’t, although only that week I’d set ‘Far in a Western Brookland’. There followed a vituperative dismissal of all that Vaughan Williams and Butterworth had done for all his verse in ‘On Wenlock Edge’ and the ‘Shropshire Lad’ songs and orchestral rhapsody which I did not have the courage to counter; but resolved that Housman should never see any of my settings during his lifetime, and later I destroyed them.

  At a somewhat safer distance from Trinity College, the American composer Samuel Barber set ‘With rue my heart is laden’ in 1928 while still a student. It was published in 1934 as one of his Three Songs for Voice and Piano, Op. 2. Intentionally or otherwise, the opening piano chords are curiously reminiscent of Butterworth’s ‘Loveliest of trees’. Another renowned American composer, Bernard Herrmann, composed a piece in which the English musical idiom is deliberately evoked. A Shropshire Lad (1935) is one of Herrmann’s five ‘melodrams’ for narrator and full orchestra written for the Columbia Workshop, an experimental series of radio dramas broadcast by CBS, of which Herrmann was musical director. Although unusual, this is not the first Housman setting for accompanied speaker: as early as 1915 a British composer called Kingsford Shortland composed ‘Bredon Hill’ for piano and reciter. Herrmann’s piece is built around three poems – ‘Reveille’, ‘When I was one-and-twenty’ and ‘With rue my heart is laden’ – selected by the speaker, David Ross. Herrmann ‘combined these three into one melodram, which expresses the life of a man from his adolescence, through his youth, to his old age’. The music is ‘based on the tone-scales of the English folk tune, and no attempt is made to follow specifically, word for word, the action of the verse’. Herrmann was born a very long way from Shropshire, in New York into a Jewish family of Russian origins, and was wholly urban. He had, however, studied music at New York University with Percy Grainger, the Australian composer who became a leading exponent of the English folk-song revival. This may explain why Herrmann’s music for the melodram does indeed sound ‘English’. From the same period comes John Woods Duke’s rather sentimental ‘Loveliest of trees’, published in 1934, which is not only the best known of the American composer’s many songs but remains one of the most popular of all Housman settings.

  The same year that Duke’s song was published, the composer Constant Lambert would declare in Music Ho!, his provocative and entertaining ‘Study of Music in Decline’, that ‘since the Shropshire Lad himself published his last poem ten years ago it may without impertinence be suggested that it is high time his musical followers published their last songs. The ground might then be left clear for something less nostalgically consoling but more vital.’ There was in fact a distinct decline in Housman settings from this period onwards. The most interesting of those few that were made were the Five Housman Songs for voice and piano composed by Lennox Berkeley in 1939 and 1940. Berkeley had fallen unrequitedly in love with Benjamin Britten and for some time lived with him in Suffolk. When Britten went to America in April 1939, Berkeley was left to pack up the house they had shared, and he began setting poems that reflected his own feelings about Britten, rather as John Ireland before him had written settings inspired by his own thwarted passions. Two of the poems were, appropriately, among those Housman had written about his parting from Moses Jackson, ‘Because I liked you better’ and ‘He would not stay for me’. The first song in the cycle set ‘The half-moon westers low, my love’, a poem about two people separated by geographical distance, as both Housman and Jackson and Berkeley and Britten had been, and the two other poems had a homosexual subtext: ‘The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread’ and ‘Look not in my eyes, for fear’.

  Berkeley sent four of the settings to Britten in America, ostensibly in the hope that the composer’s new partner, the tenor Peter Pears, would perform them, but also perhaps to make Britten, who had treated him shabbily, realise what unhappiness he had caused. In the event, the songs remained unperformed and unpublished until after Berkeley’s death, possibly because they were simply too personal or because the theme that ran through them was all too apparent. Berkeley had decided to dedicate them not to Britten, but to a promiscuous and highly unsatisfactory young airman called Peter Fraser, with whom he fell in love towards the end of 1940 and subsequently set up house. This troubled relationship lasted until Berkeley married in 1946, when the songs were put aside along with his homosexual past.

  It is surprising that Britten himself did not set any Housman poems. One might have thought that their Englishness and their covert homosexuality would have held a particular appeal for him, but he may have thought that too many other composers had got there before him. This did not, however, prevent him from setting poems from the much-mined works of Thomas Hardy or Walter de la Mare. Nor did it prevent him from giving recitals with Peter Pears of Housman settings by Butterworth, Vaughan Williams and his old teacher John Ireland, or from making recordings of On Wenlock Edge and The Land of Lost Content. Of the latter cycle, which he and Pears performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1959, Britten wrote in a programme note: ‘There have been many English composers to set Housman’s poems, and none, to my mind, more sympathetically successful than Ireland. There is much in common between Ireland and Housman, who “in his strange, magical, musical, and at times sentimental way … seems to say good-bye to the vanishing peacefulness of the country, and to the freshness and innocence of its young men”.’* It may well be that the overlap between his and Ireland’s tastes and interests, as much as what he saw as the older composer’s achievement, was precisely what prevented Britten from setting Housman himself.

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  Although settings of Housman’s poetry had tailed off in the 1930s, the approach once more of war focused people’s attention on Englishness. It seemed almost inevitable that once Britain was at war, the search for a piece of music that would evoke an ‘England’ once again under threat should light upon a piece inspired by A Shropshire Lad. Julius Harrison’s Bredon Hill is a ‘Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra’ very much in the tradition of The Lark Ascending. Like Housman, Harrison was a Worcestershire lad, born in 1885 at Stourport-on-Severn, around eleven miles due west of Bromsgrove. Harrison said that he was ‘very much affected by the beauty of our Worcestershire countryside, and by its close association with some of the great events in our national history […] to me, as with many other Worcestershire folk, this county seems to be the very Heart of England, and there is a song and a melody in each one of its lovely hills, valleys, meadows and brooks’. Harrison studied with Granville Bantock at the Birmingham and Midland Institute of Music and seemed destined for a career as a conductor, but wrote several orchestral works as a young man, including a Worcestershire Suite (1918), its movements named using local place-names: ‘The Shawley Round’, ‘Redstone Rock’, ‘Pershore Plums’ and ‘The Ledbury Parson’. Having served as conductor of the Hastings Municipal Orchestra, Harrison returned to Worcestershire in the autumn of 1940 when he was appointed director of music at a local public school, Malvern College.

  There are various stories about how Harrison came to write Bredon Hill, but the composer Elizabeth Poston, who was then director of music for the European Service of the BBC, learned that he was working on the piece and came to Malvern to listen to him playing it on the piano. Afterwards they drove off into the countryside ‘on a per
fect summer afternoon’ to have ‘a picnic tea in sight of Bredon Hill’. Poston realised that Harrison’s composition would be ideal for a radio series titled The Music of Britain, and it received its world premiere on 29 August on the BBC’s Empire Service, reminding those serving abroad of the England they had left behind. A month later it was broadcast to America. Pearl Harbor was still several months away and a campaign of strenuous propaganda had been undertaken in the hope of persuading the United States to join the Allies. Given the popularity of Housman’s poetry in America, it was a canny move to broadcast a piece of music based on A Shropshire Lad in support of the campaign. As Harrison said in the interview with Poston that formed part of the broadcast: ‘we mustn’t forget that this part of Worcestershire speaks of England at its oldest. It is the heart of Mercia, the country of Piers Plowman, and it is the spirit of Elgar’s music too.’ The overseas announcer, who introduced the piece as ‘one of the loveliest works of the year – indeed, I would go so far as to say – of our own time’, went on to make a similar point:

  It is a fact remarkable in itself that such music as this comes out of the present time. That it does, is perhaps the best witness to the eternal spirit of England. Julius Harrison, Worcestershire born of generations of countrymen, lives in sight of Bredon Hill. He has the love of our English countryside in his veins – a sense of it that you will hear in this lovely music, which springs and grows, and rises soaring – a true rhapsody – in expression of the words of Housman’s poem: