La belle dame sans merci & other partsongs

£13.50 [In Stock]

Product Details

Artist: The Rodolfus Choir
Conductor: Ralph Allwood
Label: Herald (Released: July 1997)

Sample Audio

Track 2: I know my soul hath power

Track 10: Tell me, O love

Track 1: My soul, there is a country

Track 16: Sorrow and Pain

Critic Reviews

Parry’s final-period unaccompanied choral works culminate in the noble splendour of the Songs of Farewell. This youthful, bright, yet touchingly grave offering is boldly sung and resonantly recorded.
Anthony Payne, BBC Music Magazine

More Information

Charles Hubert Hastings Parry is considered to have been one of the leaders (with Stanford) of the English musical renaissance in the 1880s. In his career as composer, scholar, and teacher, he influenced 'not only his own students but the whole artistic life of his time'. [Frank Howes] Hubert was the second son of Thomas Gambier Parry, of Highnam Court in Gloucestershire. He followed his father to Eton College, taking his Mus.B. while still at school, and subsequently going up to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1870. Then followed three years of work at Lloyd's register of shipping in London, and more lessons on composition, from Edward Dannreuther. Parry came to real public attention for the first time in 1880, with performances of his Piano Concerto in F sharp (played by Dannreuther) at Crystal Palace, and his Scenes from Prometheus Unbound at the Gloucester Three Choirs' Festival. Prometheus was recognised as a new departure in choral music, and the large-scale works for chorus and orchestra, often given their first performances at the `Three Choirs', which followed over many years, have been the most influential of his works, and have inspired a whole generation of English composers.

In 1877 he was invited to contribute to Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, later joining the staff of the new Royal College of Music when it opened in 1883 with Grove as its Director. Parry succeeded Grove as Director of the RCM in 1894, a position he held until his death; and in 1900 he succeeded Sir John Stainer as Professor of Music at Oxford, though he resigned this appointment after eight years. He was made an honorary Mus.Doc. at Cambridge (1883) and at Oxford (1884), knighted in 1898, and created a baronet in 1903; inevitably he was President of many musical societies. Of his several publications the most important are The Art of Music (1893), in which he applies the Darwinian theory of evolution to musical history in the way that Sidgwick had applied it to ethics; a volume for the Oxford History of Music series, The Music of the Seventeenth Century (1902), and a critical biography of J. S. Bach (1909).

Despite such a full career in public and educational life, Parry was a prolific composer. As well as the choral works for which he is most celebrated, he wrote five symphonies, incidental music for three of Aristophanes' plays, significant works of chamber music, more than a hundred songs, and some important works for organ. To quote Frank Howes again-from the New Grove Dictionary-for a summary of the achievements of this remarkable man, '[Parry's] intellectual vigour ... and forceful personality ... helped to restore music to the place in literary, university, and national life that it had lost for more than two centuries.'

Part-songs and Songs of Farewell

As a schoolboy at Eton in the 1860s, Parry was very much alive to the traditions of part-singing-the glee, madrigal and part-song-that had become increasingly popular in Britain since the middle of the eighteenth centuries. Though the popular entertainment genre of the glee had, by his le, run its course as a subject of composition, it was still a style of music that was widely sung by many vocal societies and choral unions. It was, however, the 'madrigal' and the 'part-song' that were emerging as more important foci. The genre of the madrigal, which is most readily associated with the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, never entirely disappeared from view, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it began albeit gradually, to gather momentum alongside the more lightweight ends, catches and canons so beloved of small musical gatherings. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in full vigour, thanks largely to the efforts of Robert Lucas Pearsall, whose antiquarian interests gave rise to some fine examples such as Great God of love, Light of my soul and Lay a land on her hearse. Pearsall went on to help to found the Bristol Madrigal Society in 1837, and this body continued to be a major promoter the madrigal as a genre during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The part-song, on the other hand, largely grew out of the tradition of the glee, but it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century (and particularly its later years) that the genre began to develop a tinctive artistic craftsmanship of its own. Parry was familiar with both fires and during his last years at Eton (1864-6), while working under the supervision of Sir George Elvey (organist and choirmaster at St George's Chapel, Windsor), he produced several compositions, including two part-songs settings of Shakespeare, Tell me where is fancy bred and Take, O take se lips away, and two madrigals, Fair Daffodils (1864) and Oft in the stilly night (1865), both of which were performed at concerts given by the Eton College Musical Society.

However, after this early industry, neither the madrigal nor the part-song d any real interest for him until the late 1890s when he produced three collections in quick succession for Novello, his principal publisher. The main impetus for this burst of creative energy came largely from the Magpie Madrigal Society and their conductor Lionel Benson, who, since their institution in the mid 1880s (then known as The Magpie Minstrels) had established themselves as one of the most important unaccompanied choirs in Britain. The Magpie Madrigal Society (as it became in 1896), began life as a choir of 80 singers but they soon became so popular that their numbers quickly swelled to 200. In 1889 the choir received a prestigious boost when Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne (Queen Victoria's fourth daughter), became President of the Society. Thereafter the annual Charity Concert, which was increasingly well attended, was supplemented by an Invitation Concert. The fundamental repertoire of the Society was taken from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of which was exhumed and edited by Benson with some assistance from Parry and Barclay Squire. A substantial proportion of this music was subsequently published in Arion: A Collection of Madrigals, Glees and Part-Songs (1899). However, Benson was a man of catholic tastes and he was keen to promote contemporary works by Brahms, Cornelius and those of his compatriots. Prizes were offered by the Society to young composers from the RCM and RAM for the best a cappella works (which were performed at the Invitation Concerts) and many works were specially written for the Society by Parry, Stanford, C. H. Lloyd, Alan Gray, Eaton Faning, George Henschel, Jacques Blumenthal, Charles Wood, Vaughan Williams, Maude Valerie White, and Arthur Somervell.

The three sets of part-songs written in 1897 and 1898 reflect the same catholic taste in literature as do Parry's volumes of solo songs (known as English Lyrics). All his life Parry retained a passion far the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the lyrics of men such as Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, Martin Pierson, Sir John Davies, Beaumont and Fletcher, Robert Jones, John Donne, and Sir John Suckling, but he also responded to the work of his nineteenth-century British forebears, such as Shelley, Tennyson, Coleridge, and Thomas Moore, and contemporaries such as Robert Bridges and Arthur Benson, whose emotional world often chimed with his own experiences and perceptions. Parry's approach to the part-song was one of carefully considered equilibrium between text and music. True to the essential spirit of the nineteenth-century part-song genre, the vocal scoring is treble-dominated and the texture predominantly homophonic. But the part-writing, harmonic deftness, and phraseology allow the text a freedom that invariably lends poignant meaning and nuance to the poet's utterance. As Michael Hurd has remarked: `Music thus organised is extremely rewarding to sing. And when it is allied to a rich, Brahmsian harmonic vocabulary, and an instinctive understanding of how vocal textures can be laid out to make the maximum impact, it is small wonder that choirs have found, and still find, a special pleasure in [Parry's] work.'

Knowing the Magpie Madrigal Society's particular penchant for sixteenth-century music, it is not surprising that one of Parry's collections should have been entirely devoted to Elizabethan poetry (Stanford was to do the same with his three sets of Elizabethan Pastorals). His Six Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books (1897) were dedicated to his old Etonian friend, Spencer Lyttelton, a member of the Magpies. Daniel's Love is a sickness [9] (which also appears much later in Moeran's exquisite Songs of Springtime) is a simple modified strophic setting in which Parry injects subtle changes of phrase, scoring and modulation. This can be observed not only in the more forceful animato of the second verse, but in the altered nuance of the question 'Why so?' and the sighing refrain `Heigh-ho!', differences that point up the paradox `More we enjoy it, more it dies!'. Tell me, O Love [10] (the words from an Elizabethan Song-Book) is the most ambitious of the set and was given for the first time by the Magpies on 3 June 1897 at St James's Hall. Cast in six parts, its allusion to the antiquarian style of the madrigal is clear from its antiphony between upper and lower voices, a device also used to symbolise the dialogue between the shepherd and the nymph. The shepherd's anguish (`O let me die') turns to sweetness as all six parts conjoin in a short paragraph of rapt beauty ('Yet stay, sweet love, and sing this song with me'). This moment of great tenderness, however, is dispelled in the final section which recapitulates the opening thematic idea; but this time, the rich substance of Parry's six-part writing, replete with pungent diatonic dissonance, conveys a sense of true resolve.

The Six Modern Lyrics were published in the same year as the Six Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books and were dedicated to the Magpie Madrigal Society. First performed by the Magpies on 17 May 1892, How sweet the answer [12] begins with a portrayal of tranquillity in which a flowing choral texture creates the image of distant nocturnal echoes. In keeping with Moore's gentle lyric, Parry's setting becomes more impassioned as the echo (a metaphor of love) intensifies, though the conclusion (`Breath'd back again') is a delightful foil to the climax reached in the penultimate line of the text. There rolls the deep [7], taken from Tennyson's In Memoriam, stanza CXXIII, was written as a memorial to Lord Leighton who died early in 1896 (and sung by the Magpies on 15 May 1897). From Tennyson's three verses Parry creates an appropriate ternary form. Interesting play is also made of the piece's tonal orientation. Though the song is rooted in G major, the first and third verses begin tangentially with the submediant; and this element is underlined by the cadence into E minor at the end of the second verse, a modulation which itself neatly anticipates the beginning of the final section. Shelley's Music, when soft voices die [17] (sung by the Magpies on 25 May 1897), was probably one of the most popular lyrics among English song composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Parry set it many years earlier in 1873 as part of a set of three songs published by Lamborn Cock. His response then was one of the composer still learning his trade, but his later part-song setting possesses all those features of Parry's mature style-expressive appoggiaturas, multiple suspensions and that quintessential hint of melancholy-which are so appealing. The through-composed structure is framed in a luminous E major, but much of the song is coloured by the minor tonalities of G sharp and C sharp. Only with the interrupted cadence and the salient rising appoggiatura ('Love itself shall slumber on') is the mood of the song lifted Keats's twelve verses. Indeed, it is compelling to observe the composer's expansion of the opening material of Verses II and III; likewise, the forwardmotion of the narrative necessitates subtle changes in Verses V, VI and VII which are all grounded in the relative major. As a contrast to the tonal stability of Verses I-III (F minor) and IV-VII (A flat), the ghastly phantasm of the 'pale kings and princes', with their 'starved lips in the gloam', is couched in passages of tonal dissolution which is only solemnly resolved by a recapitulation of the opening material. This time, however, the reiteration of the words and music has a more sinister and frightening connotation.

During the years immediately before the First World War, Parry produced some of his greatest masterpieces: the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies (1910 and 1912 respectively) and the magnificent setting of Dunbar's Ode on the Nativity (1912). He was also engaged in the composition of a number of organ works which drew the interest of men such as Walford Davies, Harold Darke, Walter Parratt and Douglas Fox. Yet, perhaps spurred on by hearing Stanford rehearse his three English motets Op. 135 at the RCM, and by his admiration for the motets of Brahms, Reger and Cornelius, he cherished the desire to complete a series of a cappella motets of his own. It is unclear exactly when Parry began work on the Songs of Farewell (as they were later called). Some years earlier Parratt had commissioned a motet for a special memorial service at the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on 22 January, 1907. The result was a version of what we now know as There is an old belief. After the performance of the motet at Windsor, it was shelved and exhumed in 1913 for revision. At the same time Parry felt impelled to write at least three other motets, whose genesis Emily Daymond, his amanuensis, remembered hearing at Highnam Court (Parry's Gloucestershire home) in September 1913. These other three were My soul, there is a country, I know my soul bath power and Never weather-beaten sail. Further revisions took place in 1914, but by March 1915 the four motets were complete enough for an informal sing-through by a small choir at the RCM. Hugh Allen also assisted in trying them out in the Chapel of New College, Oxford. In the autumn of 1915 Parry conceived of two further, larger motets. Howells begged him to consider Walter Raleigh's Even such is time (set so memorably by Gurney), but instead he acceded to Dunhill's suggestion of Donne's At the round earth's imagined corners. This, along with a prodigious setting of Psalm 39, Lord let me know mine end, for double choir, concluded the set; both were finished in December 1915. With the exception of the last one, the motets were first performed by Sir Hugh Allen and the Bach Choir at the RCM on 22 May 1916. Lord, let me know mine end was given in the Chapel of New College, Oxford on 17 June 1917. Sadly, perhaps, Parry was never to hear them sung as an entirety. Stricken with blood-poisoning which subsequently prevented him from fighting virulent influenza (caught during the worst European epidemic in living memory), he died on 7 October 1918. All six motets were sung at a memorial concert at Exeter College, Oxford (the composer's Alma Mater) on 23 February 1919 by the combined choirs of New College, Christ Church, and some members of the Oxford Bach Choir, presided over by Allen, who had succeeded him as Director of the RCM.

The Songs of Farewell offer numerous biographical interpretations of the last years of Parry's life. Though begun in earnest at least five years before his death in 1918, it has always been tempting to hear the motets as a valedictory statement of a man haunted by the war and by the fall from grace of Germany, the nation whose musical Weltanschauung he had worshipped all his life. And yet one must also understand them from the perspective of Parry the Darwinist, the utilitarian rationalist, the adherent of Ruskin, and the agnostic. Rejecting organised religion, he fashioned his own form of heterodoxy, yet he readily drew on traditional Biblical sources, partly in appreciation of their literary merit but also as an expression of his cultural heritage with which he felt a profound artistic bond. The Songs of Farewell may well impart a sense of leave-taking, but more affecting is the impression of mystery and alienation, of life's transitoriness, and of passing into the unknown.

The first motet, My soul, there is a country [1], is undoubtedly the most famous of the set. Accessible to amateur choral societies, its simple four-part texture belies its taut motivic construction, organic development and metrical flexibility. The memorable opening progression (`My soul'), tonally tangential, is extended to form the three phrases of the final affirmation (`Thy God, thy life. thy cure') which is itself anticipated in the inner voices of the previous polyphonic section (`One who never changes'). Only this motet ends with sense of elation; all the others conclude quietly, in pensive mood, as if awe-struck in the face of life's final mystery. Sir John Davies's I know my soul hath power to know all things [2], taken from the poet's lengthy didactic poem Nosce Teipsum, contemplates the miracle of man's existence, yet confronts his ignorance and struggle through the finite span of life. Uniformly homophonic in texture, the motet achieves an extraordinary intensity in its fertile tonal fluidity, vividly exemplified in the closing bars (I know myself a Man, /Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing') which touch momentarily on the Neapolitan through a succession of descending thirds in the bass. In keeping with Thomas Campion's euphonious lute-song, Never weather-beaten sail [3], Parry's interpretation is poignantly lyrical, and the wonderful refrain (`O come quickly, sweetest Lord') must stand as one of the composer's most yearning utterances. Having increased the number of voices to five for this motet, the forces enlarge still further for There is an old belief [4], a six-part setting of John Gibson Lockhart's eschatological meditation. Full of sumptuous diatonic dissonances, the motet recalls the anguish of Sorrow and Pain. The central statement rises in confidence to quote the plainsong intonation (`That creed I fain would keep'), but subsides to meditate introspectively on the eternity of man's final sleep. Sung at Parry's funeral in St Paul's Cathedral in October 1918, this piece must have seemed especially serene, particularly in its visionary final bars. The last two motets expand yet further in sonority and scope. Parry excelled when working in a multi-voiced idiom such as one finds in the exhilarating pages of Blest Pair of Sirens, De Profundis (a twelve-voice tour de force), and the outstanding final stanza of the Ode on the Nativity. At the round earth's imagined corners [5] (â7), a setting of the seventh sonnet of John Donne's Divine Meditations and the double-choir Lord, let me know mine end [6] (Psalm 39), rise to new transcendental heights in their rich manipulation of vocal texture. In these two motets, episodic in construction, Parry seeks to create a powerful, cumulative architectural design in which the sense of spiritual longing becomes all-consuming in the closing paragraph of each motet. One feels this most profoundly in Donne's final couplet ('Teach me how to repent; for that's as good /As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood), where a combination of impeccable counterpoint and harmonic richness builds to the most passionate of climaxes. The cadence, too, is breathtaking, not only in its unexpected flat submediant shift, but also in its final hushed expression of personal humility. Similarly, in his setting of the psalm text, Parry reserves his most intimate utterances for the close. Perhaps most affecting, and at the same time most autobiographical, is the fervent entreaty 'Hear my prayer, O Lord'. Here it is as if Parry confesses his ownsense of personal isolation in `For I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were', a wonderful, emotionally-charged passage whose release is in the final supplication (`O spare me a little before I go hence'). In these few pages Parry expressed something of his innermost self and at the same time produced some of the finest and most moving pages in Romantic a cappella music.

© 1998 Jeremy Dibble

Full Track Listing