27th August 2007

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71 and Ben Jonson’s Echo’s lament for Narcissus (c.1895–6) are here published for the first time, and present a fascinating insight into the early development of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century composers.

Written when Vaughan Williams was at the Royal College of Music, studying under Charles Stanford, the two songs are an excellent and contrasted pair – the first addressing genuine mourning; the second a delightful madrigalian parody – and both make important and exciting additions to the choral repertory. Vaughan Williams’s Two Partsongs were published to celebrate the 50th anniversary ofthe composer’s death (1872–1958).

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FOREWORD BY HUGH COBBE
In all likelihood Ralph Vaughan Williams composed the two songs, now published for the first time, during his second stint at the Royal College of Music in 1895–6, after his graduation in history at Cambridge. They may well have been exercises set by his teacher, Charles Stanford, since in the autograph scores the composer uses the alto and tenor clefs for those voices, a practice otherwise unusual by this time.

The first song is a straight setting of Sonnet 71 by William Shakespeare for SSATBB. Vaughan Williams adds a motto to his title, based on a phrase in As you like it: ‘A poor thing but mine own’. The second, a madrigal for double chorus, sets Ben Jonson’s poem Echo’s lament for Narcissus taken from Act I of Jonson’s satirical comedy Cynthia's Revels. The two songs make an excellent pair, the first addressing genuine mourning while the second by contrast is, with its wry final line, rather tongue-in-cheek in character!

The autograph manuscripts of the two settings are preserved in Add. MS 57270, ff.39–42, in the British Library. Unfortunately the score of Echo’s Lament is missing a final page with an (almost certainly) two-bar conclusion, setting the poem’s final word ‘daffodil’. These missing bars have been reconstructed for the purposes of this edition by David Matthews, to whom the Vaughan Williams Estate would like to express its gratitude. These songs will now be the earliest of Vaughan Williams’s compositions to have been published and we hope that they will provide an interesting facet of his oeuvre in the approach to the 50th anniversary of his death.

Hugh Cobbe
July 2007