A lost Warlock song by John Mitchell

“Which one?” may well be asked by those who have noted the two dozen or so titles listed in Fred Tomlinson’s Peter Warlock Handbook Volume I! The one that has caught my attention specifically is seemingly the last to have been penned by Warlock in that ‘casualty list’.

I have recently been exploring (courtesy of Fred Tomlinson) E Arnold Dowbiggin’s collection of press cuttings connected with Warlock. One of these (i) is headed Peter Warlock’s Lost Works - Appeal for return and it was clearly placed there by Bernard van Dieren, who up till then had tried advertising for these missing items in various papers and musical periodicals without success. The works listed are the Chinese Ballet (the full score(ii), no less!), The Old Codger and (to quote BvD)…another little treasure which is still missing is a song entitled ‘An Old Song’ [not to be confused here with the short orchestral piece of the same title that Warlock composed in 1917]. Van Dieren then goes on to describe - inaccurately on at least two counts! - that it was… one of a set of four songs written during the last month of Mr. Warlock’s life. Three of these, The Fox, After Two Years, and The Frost-bound Wood have been posthumously published, and I should like to find the fourth and complete the set. I know exactly which works are missing, for Mr. Warlock was the most methodical of men, and kept a list of everything he wrote.

Whether this appeal was directly responsible for what occurred next is probably debatable, but another cutting (this time from the Daily Mail, dated 16th January 1932) is headed Peter Warlock’s Missing Work - Chinese Ballet Find. The report simply states the work …had been found. The ballet (c. 1916/17) had been a collaborative effort with Adrian Allinson, who according to the report ….remembered playing it over about two years ago and then it vanished. The Old Codger also turned up later on, of course, but what of the documented An Old Song? One assumes it has disappeared without trace, despite van Dieren’s efforts to locate it.

Also recorded in the Handbook entry is that the song was a setting of I synge of a mayden, which Warlock had set for a capella voices in 1918 as As dew in Aprylle. It is tempting to wonder whether this lost song was an entirely new one, or could it be another “recycled” piece? During his last months Warlock had re-vamped As ever I saw as The Fairest May, and recast Bethlehem Down in a new version for voice and organ. The latter is perhaps more significant here in that Warlock was able to take an a capella piece and transform it into something with a completely different feel to it for voice and keyboard (some might argue it made for virtually a new work). It’s perhaps hard to imagine the material of As dew in Aprylle in voice and piano guise, but noting Warlock’s genius for such things in Bethlehem Down, I believe it’s well within the realms of possibility.

So what more can be said of the song and its possible whereabouts? To begin with, van Dieren seems to imply it was on Warlock’s own list of extant compositions (in contrast to some of the two dozen or so listed missing songs in the Handbook which one imagines Warlock may have destroyed). Revealing too is the comment about it being a “little treasure” - surely this implies van Dieren had either seen the score, or maybe had heard Warlock play it, i.e., having some sort of personal knowledge of it? An intriguing possibility is in a report of Warlock’s death that appeared in the Daily Mail on 18th December 1930 which has the following: “…On the grand piano at which he did his composing was the manuscript of an unfinished song.” Several other press reports of the time have variations on this (for example, the Daily Express [18th December 1930] refers to “…manuscripts of new works littered on the floor.” and The Star [17th December 1930] describes “…music manuscripts lying on the open piano”), and it is possible to speculate whether any such manuscript might have been An Old Song. A long letter(iii), dated 27th December 1930, from Robert Nichols to Henry and Ruth Head gives an account of how Nichols went, with Bernard van Dieren, to Warlock’s flat on the afternoon following the inquest, and …“bundled two suitcases of M.S.S. …into the cab …depositing (them) at Bloomfield Terrace(iv).” Later on in the same letter(v) Nichols recounts how he was trying to arrange for van Dieren to come and pick up the suitcases, which presumably he did at some point. One assumes An Old Song was not amongst the enclosures of the two cases, otherwise van Dieren would not have been hunting for it a year later!

It seems likely that had reporters seen any such manuscript items in the flat they probably would have been those removed subsequently by van Dieren and Nichols. However, another possibility exists in that one music manuscript was known definitely to have been there, as it was taken possession of by the police (with a few other artefacts) following Warlock’s death. This was the score of Moeran’s Sonata for two violins (which was returned to the composer after the inquest). Had a reporter seen this on the piano, perhaps he/she, being ignorant in musical matters, simply assumed, mistakenly, it was a song-in-progress because Warlock was known as a song composer!

Another explanation is provided by Ian Copley(vi) who suggests the song was lost by a publisher. The source of this line of thought would seem to have been an extract from Moeran’s reminiscences(vii) of his old friend. Here Moeran (via Gerald Cockshott) records that of Warlock’s three serious [then] unpublished songs “…two(viii) were lost by a careless publisher - irretrievably, since the composer never kept rough copies.” Whether An Old Song was one of those two is open to question. The sense of the wording suggests the two songs were mislaid by the same publisher, and possibly on the same occasion. It prompts the question “If An Old Song were one of them, what was the other?” Was Moeran’s recollection more likely to have been of something that had happened during the 1925-28 Eynsford Period, when he probably would have been well acquainted with any such incidents relating to Warlock’s output? (by contrast, from van Dieren’s description we are considering here a song written near the end of Warlock’s life, i.e., post-Eynsford).

(continued...)

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