A short introduction to this article.

One of the most outstanding features of the human mind, is its strange  incapability to accept - or even to recognize - the most obvious facts. That is to say: inconve-nient facts.

Such an ostrich-like attitude is in general no help to improve knowledge. But this seems not always to be a disadvantage. As demonstrated in the case of that re-nowned ancient historian, who once upon a time had to judge the truth in certain court gossip about the ancestry of his sovereign. It was only a couple of gene-rations before his own time that some sceptical courtiers had suggested a young nobleman as the more likely father for the newborn Heir Apparent than the elderly King, who was senior to his Queen by quite a lot of decades. In the end this histo-rian was able to produce two undeniable facts to disprove this rumour beyond any doubt.

-    Fact One: the courtier in question was to the Queen a lifelong friend, from the
     day of her arrival at court onward.
-    Fact Two: the heir developed during childhood an everlasting hatred towards
     this same gentleman.

And as the historian brilliantly pointed out: things would have been exactly the other way round if this gentleman indeed had saved the dynasty from extinction. A conclusion that reveals a mind both working with scientific logic, and blessed with a deep insight in human psychology. This was in that age a rare combination of vir-tues, and therefore it was a remarkable achievement to combine these two uncon-nected observations to a single piece of evidence on the heir’s legitimacy. But once it was done, it appeared, as all sparks of genius, to be the summit of simplicity.

It learns the truth at first sight, just by taking facts at face value: To begin with; people cannot but love their natural parents. So, who would imagine an absolute king, his power and glory based solely on his descent, to be capable of hating the guts of the man supposed to have broken the chain of succession, if it had been true? And wouldn’t it be downright ridiculous to expect a man and a woman to remain friends for life if they indeed ever had produced a child together?

Even after centuries it is difficult to find some flaw in this line of reasoning, explai-ning why nobody doubted the heir’s legitimacy ever after. His descendands conti-nued to rule their country without a worry in the world, and if their dynasty is not extinct or overthrown, they still do this very day.

At least this historian had achieved that his findings could never be abused to cause a grave constitutional crisis.

Time has long since turned this powder keg into a harmless anecdote, fitting perfectly to the central theme of this article. But never ask me to reveal who was who. What can be gained from blackening a great queen’s reputation? As a rule, however, it is to a disastrous effect when experts submerge their heads in sand. Take for instance all those admiring comments on the short Elizabethan love-song O Mistress Mine. The author being William Shakespeare himself is apparently all it takes to leave a dramatic collapse of quality - in only twelve lines - unmentioned. There is in fact as little poetry in the final triplet as there is clothing on an emperor in a certain tale by Andersen.

Yet, the title of OMM should be written in capitals. Its final chord might sound a little disappointing at first, but for those willing to accept this, there is a host of hidden extra’s in this song. Turning it into a box where sweets compacted lie.

The courage to bring Shakespeare down to one’s own level, is of course only to be found in another genius. As a result I had my own first taste of these sweets on a September evening in 2001, when the conductor of a Dutch chamber choir handed out twelve pages with choral music by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958):

In 1913 Ralph Vaughan Williams published a small collection of short but charming pieces for mixed choir as:

'Three Elizabethan Part Songs’

This music never attracted too much attention, which is well illustrated by the fact there is, as far as I know, only one CD-recording of it available. The little impact of these songs’ release was not only because the Great War followed shortly after, they also seem to be nothing but a few unrelated pieces from the shelf, and very long stored pieces for that. The most recent composition, Sweet Day, is from 1896, the other two are dated 1891.

The website of the RVW Society (www.rvwsociety.com) dates the partsongs 1898. I therefore can’t rely on the dates 1891 & 1896 in my cd-booklet to originate from  RVW himself. And without his co-operation my research is partly based on quicksand. Who can help me out?

In 1896 Vaughan Williams was (almost) 24 and yet the music in this three pieces points allready clearly towards the mature composer, a strong indication that at least two of them have been antedated. One of the purposes of this article is the-refore to present all evidence that this collection of Elizabethan partsongs is in fact not so much Victorian as Edwardian. Redating this music however, is only a side-step. More important dates are hiding under its humble appearance. The songs might be modest in scale and number, and they might lack unity, yet the ‘cycle’ es-tablished by following three little songs deserves far better as to be regarded as a footnote in a composer’s life:

Sweet Day

The Willow Song

O Mistress Mine

Almost every single word in their scores needs a carefull look, if only to recognize the remarkable fact that in some cases even the shape of their letters is tale-telling. Such a look demands to reproduce at this spot the complete wordsequence. Which, as it happens, occurs to be less easy as one should expect; in spite of leaving out nothing but a few irrelevancies, this transcription from the 1995 Galliard-edition is all but complete:
 
 

Being of very different moods these texts are apparently an haphazard grasp from the highlights of English Literature. This makes them of course not very suitable to combine in a cycle, and the composer avoids in a very peculiar way to do so: the mid-section is published by a different company as the cornerparts. This outer pair sharing their publisher must of course not implicate any relation whatsoever, hence these parts differ not only in textwriter, but in copyright as well.

Such a strange reversal of the usual habits from authors, who normally place their different titles at the same publisher, and have no reason at all to tamper with their copyrights, strongly denies what a common title should stand for: unity. But the particular one heading all title-pages is merely invented for the very purpose of a combined release. So Vaughan Williams now contradicts himself, or formulated by the letter: ‘the small-print underneath each song reveals an extremely difficult way of doing things, achieving nothing in the process but a contradiction of what is writ-ten in capitals above.’ And if these minor additions to the original words are telling such a funny story, what will a close examination of the poems themselves reveal?

The prelude is written by George Herbert (1593-1633), and this fact is a first hint that the dating of this song might be unreliable. There is little reason to regard ‘Elizabethan’ as a proper time-indication to a text whose author was still looking forward to his tenth birthday when the immortal queen died. Apart from this, there is nothing strange about its appearance in a cycle of songs, for Sweet Day says halfway down:

A few paragraphs ago a reversion contradicted the unity heading each song in capi-tals, and now a reversion contradicts the text-expression that is written in capitals in every detail of the music. It makes one wonder. Especially as the second song al-so deals with the theme of approaching death. Leaving only the last piece, a light-footed love song, on itself:

Sweet Day
The Willow Song
O Mistress Mine

Death is not the only connection between the rev. Herbert’s short(ened) sermon and one of the most famous tearjerkers in world literature. For The Song of Willow as it is immortalized by William Shakespeare suffered the loss of a few lines as well. The score’s source-indication emphasises strongly its origin as a folk song, in which quality it is still in existence; there is (or was) almost certainly a manuscript in RVW’s own hand in the composer’s private collection of traditional music. Still, this shortened and even incomplete version must be far better stuff as the original, for Vaughan Williams, chooses to use the
 

Again the score is in three-quarters and this time the words are cut down to size even twice. The song in which Desdemona unwittingly foretells her untimely end, peters out in confusion as she doesn’t remember it very well. This leaves Vaughan Williams little choise but to ignore the final four of Shakespeare’s 13 lines. Meanwhile Desdemona’s faulty memory in this rather long play is to be regarded as a blessing in disguise to both au-dience and pocket-calculator; where the original version demands to sing 54 lines, the 1623 edition (the first complete works-edition, based on the lost original manuscripts) manages to have it printed in sixteen, some inserted dialogue included. This dialogue turns every single word in these sixteen lines into an integrated part of ‘Othello’s story, which is very much contrary to the original song; being refrain almost throughout. Leaving it to a modest twelve lines to cover the story it’s telling. Because of this increase of the story-lines to sixteen, one might say that in reducing Virtue Vaughan Williams exactly reverses the way Shakespeare deals with the Song of Willow.

Pointing at the weeping willow’s roots as ‘words from Othello’ also brings the words to attention RVW omitted. The final lines reveal why the poor soul is flowing fresh tears by the stream. And as causes are always pre-ceding results, we are facing a reversion once again; of chronology this time. The cause, by the way, is love. So a common main subject now unites both Shakespeare-texts against Herbert’s view on mortality:

Sweet Day
The Willow Song
O Mistress Mine

The postlude is measured as its two predecessors, but this time the number of lines offers no visible reason for it; with twelve O Mistress Mine is in itself complete. The only thing missing in the score is a proper source-indication. If this is a hint, it is an enigmatic one, for ‘William Shakespeare’ is simply insufficient to find out this text is absolutely not in itself; it is in the play ‘Twelfth-Night, or; what you will’. And this mere fact is enough to alter the numbers:

By good fortune the song’s original theatre-music has survived. Interestingly, its most striking feature is the way it spoils things. There is only one explanation why Shakespeare should have allowed his composer Thomas Morley (1557-1603), to ruin the poems’ superb structure by repeating four of its lines: it informed the audience the play features sixteen of them.

There is no hard evidence to link Morley’s music to the play’s first performance, but it is a plausible option. Its modest instrumental accompaniment points at the small band of musicians one should expect on a theatre company’s payroll. Judged by the score, the singer has apart from the period’s usual independency of his line no great technical challenges to face. Which is consistent with a performance by an actor with good singing qualities like Robert Armin: the song’s original performer. And then there is the matter of dating: Morley incorperated his setting in his 1599 First Book of Consort Lessons. Published at a time when Twelfth-Night was still under construction, and his only means to get access to OMM was the author taking the trouble of writing him a copy.
Against Morley as Twelfth-Night’s composer speaks the almost complete loss of the play’s other music - Only final song The Winde and The Raine survived in an anony-mous contemporary setting. - OMM was its only song to make it into this consort book. Especially the omission of Come away, death is disappointing. Perhaps its text was written as late as 1600, but if Morley had been Shakespeare’s composer, the song should be expected to have entered the book’s second edition (1616), as its poetry is of the same exceptional class as OMM.

The new music on OMM is written without a single repeated line, a shortcoming well suited to explain yet another choise for a 3/4-measure. As mentioned; Vaughan Williams follows the text in every detail: on the word ‘trip’ the song even turns into a dance, and the forwarded begin of the melody in the top voice on ‘yourneys’ paints the loneliness before the lovers find each other. Details making his peculiar way to deal with the first line to seem even more inapt:
 

Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
  Every wise man’s son doth know.

The singer, who happens to be the play’s clown (in the dialogue consistently pronounced as ‘fool’), has got only twelve different lines to express his love. But he not only dedicates one to provide her with information everybody knows, he subse-quently informs her in yet another line about that particular fact as well: just to bring the message home to her. Because the limited size of the poem does not allow to waste a single word, logic says this mistress must really be in need of the information. Which implicates she must still be unaware of the fact that the search for a lover is finished at the very moment the spark jumps over.

To the fool’s misfortune there is only one way to find out her ignorance, turning his song into a great fooling of the audience. It now appears the true love is not troubled because she is hard to win, but because it is far too easy!  So the singer does not ask her where she is, but what she is dóing there. A reproach sounding like this:
 

Sweet Day
The Willow Song
O Mistress Mine

Amazing, isn’t it? three stand-alone poems that are interlocking like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. But was this achieved according some plan or just by blind chance? If such a complicated interaction requires planning in advance, the unavoidable conclusion must be that the most recent one:

Virtue is especially designed for the purpose.

This in turn would implicate that Vaughan Williams was the first to assemble from different times, sources and authors, an existing cycle of poe-try. Doing so according a never revealed but rather complicated procedure dating from over two-and-a-half centuries before he was born.

It seems a ridiculous thought, but on this level of interaction a co-incidence seems no better option. So, without giving the matter a further thought,  this article was originally based on the presupposition that Vaughan Williams did some excellent research. A lack of judgement causing me a very unpleasant moment when, long af-ter I had completed my analysis, I had the misfortune to attend a life performance of Copland’s ‘Old American Songs’.

While listening, I realised to my horror these five independent traditionals are pla-ced in the only possible order that makes them almost as close-knit as the three partsongs. In respect of unity the somewhat lower level of interaction is roughly compensated by the almost double number of lucky winners. Resulting in a serious threath to the very foundation of my reasoning; the certainty of Virtue to be reduced in precise accordance of its author’s intentions.

To provide the sequel of this article with a sound base, the slightest whiff of a co-incidence has to be ruled out. Which brings us in the end back to my first intro-duction of these partsongs. Stranger things might have happened as Herbert un-wittingly enabling Virtue to be reduced in a distant future, creating in the process this perfect combination with two independent poems, written two decades earlier and years apart. But such a chance to occur twice is all it needs to make pigs fly:

Most sources agree on the three partsongs as to be composed ind-pendently from each other, two decades before they were first combined. Yet the texts were placed on music in their original chronology, with a five years interval between both Shakespeare settings and the Herbert.

Five years is half (1/2) a decade; the reversal of two (2/1) decades. Because the closing part of this article will show the musical composition to copy this rather unique regrouping from three stand-alone songtexts to an unity - via a couple preceding a single, followed by a single preceding a couple - one should better not dice for money against Ralph Vaughan Williams. But we can at least rely on what he has written in capitals over three songtitles. In reversed order that is:

ELIZABETHAN SONG (in) THREE PARTS

A challenge to the reader

Turning this music into an ‘Elizabethan Song in Three Parts’ is only a dull but necessary procedure to prepare the ground for the second part of this triplet which is headed: ‘Adults Only’. All puzzle-enthousiasts amongst my audience are invited to explain this title from the structure of O Mistress Mine. Please keep in mind that ‘structure’ is about the poem’s construction; so study the design rather as the text. There is no reward but the challenge of testing your analytic powers on the visual crack in the most tricky crossword from four centuries.

Please send me your solution, supplemented with at least two of the tale-telling words Shakespeare wrote for adults only.

As a preparation, less difficult alternative, or maybe just as a hint, I recommend you to find out what exactly unites Copland’s ‘Old American Songs’. E-mails answering this question are very welcome as well, but why should you bother? There is no reward.

Klaas Alberts
©1991

Please leave your critical remarks on the discussion page

The only traced CD-recording of ‘Three Elizabethan Part Songs’ is Hyperion
CDA 66777:

Vaughan Williams
Over hill, over dale.
Holst Singers; Stephen Layton, conductor.

Five Old American Songs; a cycle by Aaron Copland