Last week, I mentioned a few recently published albums, all of which were characterized by an unpublished or almost unpublished repertoire. Among them, a recording with songs by Charles Villiers Stanford, and we'll listen to one of them this week.
Songs of Faith, Op. 97 is one of the almost unpublished works; there is at least one partial recording but this one with Roderick Williams and Andrew West is the first complete recording. Stanford composed the cycle between May and December 1906, and published it in two parts: the first one, with the three songs with poems by Alfred Tennyson, and the second one, with the three with poems by Walt Whitman. Although both poets are contemporary, Tennyson lived between 1809 and 1892 and Whitman, ten years younger, died the same year as him, much more than an ocean separate the Englishman and the American, and I'm referring to their style or their life. However, the cycle maintains a thematic unit, the reflection on faith, suffering, death, and hereafter.
The song we're listening this week is Tears, the fifth one, with a poem by Whitman included in Leaves of Grass. As we saw a while ago, this collection had twelve poems in the first edition of 1855, and it grew in the next six editions to more than four hundred. Tears is the third out of eleven poems in the collection Sea-Drift, included in the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass, from 1881. It tells us about tears at night, in solitude, an image we also found in Stille Tränen, a great lied by Robert Schumann with a poem by Justinus Kerner. In Whitman's poem, the mourning soul is on the beach, on the ocean shore, that soaks the tears; Stanford's begins in a contemplative mood, and the song reflects the movement of this powerful ocean as it progresses.
Tears is Charles Villiers Stanford's first song on Liederabend. I will present him as he deserves at a later date (there will be at least one more of his songs,, very different, during this year), but tradition says that the post during the Holy Week is shorter; tradition also says that the song has an spiritual nature, that's why I chose Tears (which also is a song I particularly like).
I hope you enjoy this song and your Easter week!
Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears,
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand,
Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate,
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head;
O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind – O howling and desperate!
O shade so sedate by day, with calm countenance and steady pace,
But away at night as you fly, none looking – O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!
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