Peter Warlock intriguing figure
Peter Warlock intriguing figure
Philip Heseltine was born in London and lost his father as a child. His mother remarried and returned to her native Wales, living at Cefn Bryntalch Hall, Abermule, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire, the family home of her second husband, Walter Buckley Jones. Philip's education was mainly classical, including studies at Eton College, at Christ Church, Oxford (for one year), and at University College London (one term). In music, he was mostly self-taught, studying composition on his own from the works of composers he admired, notably Frederick Delius, Roger Quilter and Bernard van Dieren. Nevertheless, one of the masters at Eton, Colin Taylor, had introduced him to some of the modern masters which made a marked impression on him. He was also strongly influenced by Elizabethan music and poetry as well as by Celtic culture (he studied the Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Manx, and Breton languages). It was the move to Wales, occasioned by his mother's remarriage, that was the spark for this; only the working classes spoke Welsh but Philip, never one to shy away from the unconventional, set about learning it with vigour.
Heseltine wrote his earliest mature compositions, published to critical acclaim under the newly adopted pseudonym Peter Warlock, following his sojourn in Ireland of 1917-1918. They were followed by a period of concentration on musical journalism; for a while, he was the editor of the musical magazine The Sackbut. His most prolific period, both as a composer and author, was in the early 1920s when he withdrew from the financial and social pressures of London to his mother's and stepfather's house, "Cefn Bryntalch", in Montgomeryshire, mid-Wales, where he wrote some of his finest songs, finally completing his song-cycle The Curlew to poems by W. B. Yeats. During this period he also met Bartók, who visited him while returning from a concert in Aberystwyth arranged by Professor Walford Davies, and whose influence can perhaps be seen in The Curlew.
Between 1925 and 1929, following a quiet period, Warlock and his colleague E. J. Moeran led a wild, boozy life in Eynsford, Kent, having to deal with the local police more than once. For Warlock, however, this was one of the most fruitful periods of his life, but by the end of the 1920s his creativity was on the decrease and he had to support himself with music criticism again. He was suffering from severe depression, but whether his death from gas poisoning at the age of 36 was suicide or an accident is not known for certain. His cat had been put out of the room before he died, perhaps to spare it. There is a third possibility: Warlock had made Bernard van Dieren his heir in his will, inspiring claims by Warlock's son Nigel Heseltine that van Dieren had murdered his father.
An intriguing figure, Warlock has served to inspire several characters in English-language literature, among them: Coleman in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay (1923), Roy Hartle in Osbert Sitwell's Those Were the Days (1938), Giles Revelstoke in Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties (1958) and Maclintick in Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) by Anthony Powell. D. H. Lawrence's use of Warlock as the model for Julius Halliday in novel Women in Love (1920) led to a threat of a lawsuit, followed by an out of court settlement. His name is surrounded by rumours of involvement with the occult, an interest which he shared with others in the bohemian world of the early 20th century - for example the novelist Mary Butts asserted that it was Warlock who initially introduced her to these subjects. Other less conventional aspects of Peter Warlock's life include experimentation with cannabis tincture, a gift for the composition of obscene limericks and a marked interest in flagellation.
His life was the basis of a highly fictionalized film entitled Voices From a Locked Room. The film starred Jeremy Northam and depicted Warlock as having multiple personality disorder. His life was also portrayed in the 2005 film Peter Warlock, Some Little Joy.
The Curlew
A song cycle by Peter Warlock on poems by William Butler Yeats. It is generally considered one of the composer's finest works.
It was written between 1920 and 1922 for singer and an unusual accompanying group of flute, cor anglais and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello). Warlock completed the work in Cefn Bryntalch, his family home in Llandyssil, near Montgomery in Wales.
There are four songs, with a short instrumental interlude. The poems they are based on (with the first line in parentheses) are:
"He Reproves the Curlew" ("O Curlew, cry no more in the air")
"The lover mourns for the loss of love" ("Pale brows, still hands and dim hair")
"The Withering of the Boughs" ("I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:")
Interlude
"He Hears the Cry of the Sedge" ("I wander by the edge of this desolate lake")
The first, second and last of these poems were taken from The Wind Among the Reeds (pub. 1899), and "The Withering of the Boughs" from In the Seven Woods (pub. 1904).
There is a lengthy instrumental introduction to the first song, in which the cry of the curlew is represented by the cor anglais and the peewit by the flute. The songs, which concern lost love, are melancholy in mood. A number of motivic elements recur throughout the songs dependent on the point in the text; a structural basis also present in many others of Warlock's songs.
The cycle lasts around twenty-five minutes.
Adam Lay Ybounden
Alternatively titled Deo Gracias, is a 15th Century macaronic English text of unknown authorship, found in the Sloane Manuscript 2593. It is believed by the British Library to have belonged to a wandering minstrel. Thomas Wright's 1836 book Songs and Carols printed from a Manuscript in the Sloane Collection in the British Museum discusses the manuscript, and writes that antiquarian Joseph Ritson suggested the manuscript dates from the reign of Henry V of England. However, Wright suggests that the lyrics within may be earlier: "I think it may be rather earlier, but its greatest antiquity must be included within the fifteenth century."
Wright continues to speculate that due to the dialect, the lyrics probably originate in Warwickshire, and suggests that a number of the songs were intended for use in mystery plays
Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter,
Thought he not too long.
And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkes finden,
Written in their book.
Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie,
Abeen heav'ne queen.
Blessed be the time
That apple taken was,
Therefore we moun singen.
Deo gracias!