This recording pairs a work by one composer—Kenneth Leighton—who was in the first flush of his creative career with a work by the senior figure in English music—Ralph Vaughan Williams—who was approaching the end of his life. The two pieces are linked by the circumstances of their first performance and by their connections to Oxford and to The Queen’s College. The works both received their premieres at Queen’s, in the college music society’s summer concerts of 1951 and 1952 respectively. One—the cantata Veris gratia—was composed by Leighton when he was still an undergraduate student at the college, while the other—An Oxford Elegy—belongs to the last period of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s long career: he was 79 when he attended the première. Although both are evocations of the pastoral and the bucolic, Leighton’s work celebrates young love in spring and summer through the hedonistic poetry of the medieval Carmina Burana (Leighton studied Classics at Queen’s), while Vaughan Williams’s is filled with nostalgia for an idyllic past, evoked through the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Stylistic threads nevertheless link the works, since Leighton at this early stage in his creative life was strongly influenced by the school of English composition within which Vaughan Williams was a seminal figure.

Leighton, born in Wakefield in 1929, went up to The Queen’s College—which had long-established Northern connections—in 1947. From his second year he combined his study of Classics with work for the BMus degree in Music. Bernard Rose, the College’s Organist (director of music) and conductor of the Eglesfield Musical Society, was his tutor for composition, although it is worth noting that Leighton was already a published composer. Rose and Leighton were to become close friends, and it was Rose who introduced Leighton to Vaughan Williams and to Gerald Finzi, with the latter of whom Leighton likewise developed a strong connection. Writing about his cantata Veris gratia and the suite of the same title (Op 9) for oboe, cello and strings written at the same period, Leighton emphasised the inspiration and encouragement that he received from Finzi at the time of their composition (he dedicated the suite to Finzi), and declared the deep influence which the ‘pure lyricism’ of Finzi’s songs had upon him. Comparisons have also been drawn between the Veris gratia suite and Vaughan Williams’s Flos campi (for solo viola, wordless chorus, and orchestra) of 1925, in which each movement is headed by a verse from the Song of Songs, evoking ideas of the return of spring and love, as in Leighton’s work. Flos campi received its first Oxford performance in 1948, during Leighton’s time at Queen’s and just two years before he wrote the two Veris gratia works. Leighton likewise preceded the movements of his suite with text, in this case from medieval Latin lyrics.

The Veris gratia cantata was completed in December 1950, and dedicated to Rose and the Eglesfield Musical Society, who gave the first performance at Queen’s on 14 June 1951, at the end of Leighton’s last term in Oxford. The solo flautist, Delia Ruhm, and tenor, David Galliver, were both at the beginnings of their successful careers. (Galliver had completed his undergraduate studies at New College in 1950.) The reviewers of the première in the Oxford Mail and Oxford Magazine admired the work’s ‘freshness and vitality’ and Leighton’s vibrant responses to the ‘vivid pictures and evocations of springtime’ in the texts, while the writer in the Oxford Magazine commented that the ‘exuberant melodic invention which has stamped Leighton’s early works’ was ‘coupled, now, with a more mature sense of the unity and development of the whole’. Leighton derived the texts—preserved in the Carmina Burana manuscript of the monastery of Benedicteuern, and most familiar now from Carl Orff’s settings of 1936—from a then well known anthology edited by Helen Waddell, Mediæval Latin Lyrics (published in 1929). The exception is the Lament, which is Catullus’s famous epitaph for his mistress Lesbia’s pet sparrow. As a postscript to the original score of the cantata Leighton added a stanza from the anonymous poem ‘Levis exurgit Zephyrus’, from which his title ‘Veris gratia’—which has the dual meaning (as Leighton may have intended) ‘grace/beauty of spring’ and ‘For the sake of spring’—derives. Leighton incorporated and adapted a good deal of existing music in creating the cantata: the Eclogue is a reworking of perhaps his best known work, Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child, which seems to have been first performed at a carol service for Leighton’s old school in Wakefield Cathedral in December 1947, at the end of his first term as a student at Queen’s. The setting of Catullus’s Lament for solo tenor, flute, and strings dates from August 1950, and he also drew in some places upon the orchestral Veris gratia suite composed earlier that year. The work received one further performance in 1952, where it was paired with Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, but it then fell into obscurity until a performance in Edinburgh in 2011. This is its first recording.

The music of Veris gratia is luxuriantly rich and varied in melodic invention, harmonic and tonal colour, and texture, including displays of the composer’s enduring love of counterpoint.

The cantata is framed by dawn and dusk. Leighton entitled the second movement Aubade, a morning love song or a song greeting the sunrise, and the strings’ hushed opening of the Prelude might suggest pre-dawn calm, broken by the song of the solo flute which heralds a brilliant sunrise. The harmonically uncanny stasis with which the Prelude ends is dramatically dispelled by the spring festivities of the Aubade. Leighton bound these movements together thematically: the motive from the sombre beginning of the Prelude becomes the rousing string introduction to Aubade, and the flute’s melody from the Prelude punctuates the celebratory dawn song and recurs later in the Elegy. Another flute theme links the Elegy with the brooding and impassioned orchestral Nocturne towards the end of the cantata. In the concluding Epilogue the rapt stillness of the choir’s entry evokes the quietude of a twilight landscape illuminated by ‘Diana’s crystal lamp’, the moon. Leighton ends this movement—and the work—tellingly with an unaccompanied choral peroration (‘Applaudamus igitur …’), echoing the orchestra’s stately introduction to the movement, which is the only extended passage of the cantata found also in the orchestral Veris gratia suite, where likewise it occurs in the final Epilogue. Here the singers contrast those blessed with Venus’s gift of love and those who labour without reward or hope.

The solo flute used throughout Veris gratia evokes birdsong at various points, and takes on a directly pictorial role in two of the existing pieces imported into the cantata or recomposed for it. In Catullus’s Lament it portrays Lesbia’s pet sparrow, as it hops chirping on Lesbia’s lap. Leighton’s inspired reworking of his setting of the Coventry Carol, Lully, lulla, thou little tiny child, as the Eclogue fits its new text and bucolic context so well that one would never guess that the music was originally conceived with such a contrasting text. Here the soprano soloist from the carol is transformed into the Muse who enters with a song, ‘a sweet melody’, with which the chorus join, and in the middle verses the flute—absent from the carol—joins in to represent the singing of the lark, nightingale, swallow, swan (at the moment of death), and finally the cuckoo: for the last of these Leighton draws on the falling-third motive which reccurs in the solo part of the original carol, and transfigures it into the cuckoo’s calls of the solo flute, and these calls echo the soprano throughout the concluding section of the piece.

The falling thirds of these calls then appear—in radically different guise—within the muscular opening string theme of the following Paean, a link which is typical of Leighton’s concern to bind his cantata into a whole. This hedonistic song of love, with its rousing refrain ‘Io, Io, totus floreo …’, is the most earthy and energetic movement: the pounding ostinato string chords with off-beat accents at ‘Tua mecum laudit virginitas’ are an obvious reference—fittingly given the text here—to ‘The Augurs of Spring: Dances of the Young Girls’ from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Carl Orff’s setting of this same Carmina Burana poem (albeit with a different selection of stanzas) likewise uses heavy ostinato rhythms and syncopated accents. Although Orff’s piece, composed in the 1930s, received its UK première—in the summer of 1951, at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Festival of Britain—after Leighton composed Veris gratia, Leighton may have known it through the published score.

In contrast, Hymn to Cypris evokes a sylvan idyll, the speaker beholding a choir of maidens—the movement is scored for sopranos and altos—and finding rest in a ‘valley of flowers’, listening to the songs of blackbird and nightingale, the latter again portrayed by the flute. The tenor soloist then dispels this arcadian dream with the restless Erotikon, bitterly lamenting the pains of unrequited love.

Vaughan Williams enjoyed long and close associations with Oxford, of which An Oxford Elegy was one of the most important manifestations. Among those in Oxford who promoted his music were three successive Organists (that is, directors of music) at Queen’s: Maurice Besly in the 1920s, Reginald Jacques in the '30s, and Bernard Rose, who arranged for An Oxford Elegy to receive its première at Queen’s and conducted the performance. As a student in the '30s Rose had come to know Vaughan Williams when attending conducting courses at the house of Sir Adrian Boult. A lover of Matthew Arnold’s poetry, Vaughan Williams harboured for decades the idea of composing an opera inspired by Arnold’s The Scholar Gipsy, the poem which he eventually used as the main text of An Oxford Elegy, combining it with elements from Arnold’s companion-piece, Thyrsis, an elegy for his friend and fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Arnold became a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1845, and was elected Professor of Poetry at the University (a largely honorary position) in 1857. The Scholar Gipsy, published in 1853, was inspired by a story in Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmitising (published in the 1660s), in which a poor Oxford student abandons his studies to join a group of gypsies and to absorb their wisdom. Arnold wrote to his brother that his poem was ‘meant to fix the remembrance of those delightful wanderings of ours in the Cumner hills before they were quite effaced’. This poem and its later companion-piece Thyrsis take us on such wanderings, in deeply nostalgic and romantic celebrations of the unspoilt pastoral landscapes of the hills overlooking Oxford, and of the views they afford down to ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’. The speaker wanders in search of the scholar gipsy, as he recalls the tales that he ‘travels yet the loved hillside’ despite the passage of two centuries, and whom he believes once to have encountered himself ‘in winter, on the causeway chill … wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow’. The pathos of the poetry springs in part from its oscillations between faith—in the endurance of both the beloved landscapes and the scholar gypsy who haunts them—and doubt, despair, and the sadness of a lost idyll and of lost companionship. Vaughan Williams’s melodrama captures exquisitely both the finely drawn nature pictures and the shifting emotional landscapes of Arnold’s texts, vacillating between melancholy and rapture. An anecdote of Vaughan Williams’s friend Henry Ley (Organist of Christ Church) has been linked to the germination of the composer’s project to set The Scholar Gipsy: after Vaughan Williams had spent a day in Oxford trying out the draft score of his Hugh the Drover, with his friends Hugh Percy Allen (Organist of New College), the composer George Butterworth (then teaching at Radley College), and Ley, the companions decided to undertake an all-night walk through the Oxfordshire countryside, returning after dawn the next day. Some four decades later, on 20 June 1952, The Times reviewed the first public performance of An Oxford Elegy the previous evening: ‘Where but in Oxford could any setting of Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar Gipsy” and “Thyrsis” have its first performance? Here in the hall of Queen’s College to-night the Eglesfield Musical Society introduced Vaughan Williams’s latest work … essentially a musical distillation of Arnold’s retrospect and of his evocation of the tree-crowned hill, the vale, and the three lone weirs’. Ursula Vaughan Williams, the composer’s wife, said of the performance that ‘the effect of the Elegy was extraordinary; Steuart Wilson [the narrator] … had tears running down his cheeks: he was mildly outraged that he should be weeping over a poem about Oxford. But they were enjoyable tears, luxuriously nostalgic.’ Wilson had already performed an early version of the work in a private ‘try through’ (as the composer put it) at Vaughan Williams’s house in 1949, and by July 1951 at the latest (shortly after the première of Leighton’s Veris gratia) Bernard Rose was in correspondence with the composer about performing the finalised work at Queen’s.

Vaughan Williams gave the delivery of Arnold’s poetry principally to the ‘reciter’ (as he termed it in early correspondence about the piece) supported by orchestra and/or wordless chorus, but he highlighted certain passages by having the singers repeat them after the narrator has spoken them, including—most tellingly and movingly—the final quatrain: ‘Why faintest thou? I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Our tree yet crowns the hill, our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.’ Vaughan Williams’s autograph score, presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford after his death by his widow Ursula, shows the great care he took over the coordination of music and narration (given the issue that the narration could not be precisely timed), and in particular his efforts to avoid ‘empty’ passages in performance where the narrator reached the end of a section well before the orchestra: he reduced the length of the music in several passages, presumably reflecting the experience of trying the piece out at his home with Steuart Wilson, and perhaps also in the performance at Queen’s. Other passages were left for the choir alone to present, including the memorable homage to the beauty of Oxford’s ‘dreaming spires’ and the haunting evocation of ‘the full moon and the white evening star’. The piece’s emotional journey is in places turbulent and passionate, as in the outbursts of lament at the loss of Thyrsis, and it bears in many places a world-weariness which is the antithesis of Leighton’s exuberant offering. But overall it is infused with qualities of timelessness reflecting the poetry’s concerns with human endurance and the enduring cycles of nature, evoked not least in the echoing of the work’s poignant opening theme at its very end.

Owen Rees © 2024