At Home with 'America’s Song King,' 1843-1882
I breathed a song into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where.
–The Arrow and the Song, 1845
Only, perhaps, by right divine of song
It may to me belong;
Only because the spreading chestnut tree
Of old was sung by me.
–My Arm Chair, 1879
In Victorian-era poetry, the word 'song' is synonymous with 'poem.' This is especially true of the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After his first volume of 'songs' appeared in 1839, Voices of the Night, musicians—famous and obscure—throughout the world literally began to turn Longfellow poems into music. Many of these musicians sent their compositions directly to Longfellow in his legendary Brattle Street home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I can picture the poet, seated by what he called the "hearthstone" in his study, opening one of the following letters, which typically conveyed the musician's personal inspiration and sense of excitement found in setting a Longfellow poem to music:
“Dear Mr. Longfellow, pray excuse the great liberty I take in addressing you, but I am only a little boy who believes in your love of children, and that you would not willingly refuse a request made by one. I ask you to kindly favour me by writing some words to set to music. I send you a Ballad of mine just published. It has met with much praise, but as I am now 12 years old, I look forward to doing much better if you are so very kind as to give me the words," (Sir) Frederic Hymen Cowen, 1852-1935, London, England (unknown song, 1864).
“Excelsior! is the motto of poetry and music, the exaltation of the human heart to be sung perpetually across the centuries and to the heavens,” Franz Liszt, 1881-1886, Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy (translation, Excelsior Prelude, 1874).
“Were I really of a medium size I would roll myself inside this cover and give you the sounds of it myself. Were I of magic powers I would inspire the wind of the instruments, the many voices of the singers,” Faustina Hasse Hodges, 1823-1895, Troy Female Seminary, Troy, New York (A Psalm of Life, 1850).
“I thought that you would be willing to let me have a photograph of America’s Song King sitting in the Ebon Throne. Would that be asking too much?” Thomas Lorenza Jephson, 1808-1897, St. Charles, Minnesota (My Arm Chair, 1879).
One dozen of the songs and choruses presented during this afternoon’s concert are copies of the very scores Longfellow or his family received, opened and reviewed here between 1843 and 1910. Others were found in the extensive Longfellow Music Collection of Bowdoin College, and still others through the generous help of Eileen Hooper-Bargery, a dealer of old sheet music in Cornwall, England.
The Composers and their Music
As editor of the London-based music publisher Novello, Anglo-Dutch composer Berthold Tours, 1838-1897, had a hand in shaping musical culture throughout the Victorian world.
French composer Charles Gounod, 1818-1893, lived in England between 1871 and 1875, where he conducted the Royal Choral Society and composed four of his five Longfellow songs. The fifth, The Arrow and the Song, was published in 1886.
Born in Tipperary, Ireland, organist and composer Thomas Lorenzo Jephson, 1808-1897, escaped the Potato Famine by immigrating to New York in 1846. He eventually settled as “professor of music” in St. Charles, Minnesota. In August, 1879, for the cover of his setting of Longfellow's poem, My Arm Chair, 71-year-old Jephson requested a photo of 72-year-old Longfellow seated in the 'ebon throne' fashioned from the wood of the Brattle Street horse-chestnut tree made famous in the poem The Village Blacksmith. The tree had been removed for roadwork in 1876, and the chair made from its wood was presented as a seventy-second birthday present to Longfellow by the schoolchildren of Cambridge. “I can send you a photo of the chair," replied Longfellow to Jephson from Portland on August 17, 1879, "but it will be empty; I think it will be a little too ostentatious to have myself seated in it.”
On June 15, 1868, English composer, organist, opera orchestra conductor, theater director and Shakespearean actor John Liptrot Hatton, 1809-1886, discovered that Longfellow and his daughters, Alice, Anne Allegra and Edith, had arrived in England:
"My dear Sir," he wrote, "I see by the newspapers that you have honored the Old Country with another visit. I shall be much annoyed if it should so chance that you pass thro' Old England & I not take you by the hand. – Pray write a line to yours faithfully." Two of Hatton's numerous Longfellow settings will be heard this afternoon: The Village Blacksmith, 1870, and Ho! Watchman, Ho!, a trio for female voices "composed for the Misses Longfellow, London, July 7, 1868."
Longfellow's first published poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond, appeared in the Portland Gazette, November 21, 1820, when he was 13. Throughout his life, he was ever-ready to help nurture talent he saw in young artists. From 1860 into the 20th century, verse of the 'poet of children' inspired the first published compositions of at least several young musicians who later would become prominent composers: Amy Marcy Cheney (Beach), 1867-1944, age 13; (Sir) Frederic Hymen Cowen, 1852-1935, age 12; (Sir) Benjamin Britten, 1913-1978, age 11.
In 1880, Longfellow listened to the playing of a 13-year-old child prodigy pianist from Boston, Amy Marcy Cheney, 1867-1944, a student of his friend Johann Ernst Perabo, 1845-1920, (himself the composer of Longfellow settings found in Longfellow National Historic Site archives). Longfellow wrote a letter of introduction for the young Miss Cheney to use in seeking musical instruction in Europe: "she certainly has a wonderful gift, and shows promise of great excellence. Indeed, one knows not what heights she may reach in her profession." A few years later, Cheney's setting of The Rainy Day became the first published song of the composer, who would be known for most of the 20th century as "Mrs. H. H. H. Beach." (Longfellow's poem, The Rainy Day, 1841, written in Portland, was immensely popular with composers during the Victorian era; in fact, so many Rainy Day settings by various composers exist that The Longfellow Chorus will present a full-length concert of them in November, 2007.)
The poem Beware, written by Longfellow in 1839 during his long and often discouraging courtship of Frances Appleton, 1825-1861, seems an unlikely musical subject for preteen Benjamin Britten, 1913-1978, son of a dentist in East Suffolk, England. There was a piano at home, and a mother who loved to sing and believed her son would become the "fourth 'B' after Brahms, Beethoven and Bach." As in the Longfellow family homes in Portland and Cambridge, the Britten parlor was the scene of plenty of family music making.
Britten's interest in Longfellow duplicated that of an earlier young British composer, Frederic Hymen Cowen, 1852-1935, an important musical figure in Victorian England. The letter and music sent to Longfellow by 12-year-old Cowen in February 1864, prompted the following reply from Longfellow in April: "My Dear Musician, I have had the pleasure of receiving the song of your own composing, and have listened to it with great pleasure, and no little astonishment that it should come from so young a heart and hand!" As an adult, Cowen visited Longfellow at his home on Brattle Street in June of 1878. Perhaps Cowen recalled viewing "the weather cock on the neighboring church...a flame of fire,"—the spire of nearby First Church in Cambridge—when he later set the poem Sundown music.
In March 1850, Faustina Hasse Hodges, 1823-1895, a student at Troy Female Seminary, Troy, New York, sent Longfellow the manuscript of A Psalm of Life used in today's performance. Her manuscript had been rejected for publication by a Boston publishing house, and in her letter to Longfellow she quoted from the rejection letter: "It is not the character to cause us to realize profit from it. It may be a clever production – but we respectfully decline the undertaking." She then lamented to the famous poet, "It is a bitter feeling when what to you is ardent enthusiasm and something above this world is brought down to dollar and cents, and machine thoughts and feelings." She offered Longfellow the following description of the music: "The organ, of course, is as deep and distant as that one in heaven – wind instruments: only ophicleides, trombones, trumpets – horns – and about twenty-five voices in unison to speak the words. Fancy it!" According to Hodges, Longfellow's answer to her, now lost, referred to the prophetess Sibyl burning the "leaves" of her prophecies in order to increase their value.
In the poem Footsteps of Angels, Longfellow calls forth spectral parlor fireside forms of past friends, loves and family, "and with them the Being Beauteous," his first wife, Mary Potter, 1812-1835. Longfellow's use of personal feelings in his poems became the key to his popular success: almost any Longfellow fan in the Victorian era had their own 'Being Beauteous' to conjure out of the text. Miss Davis's version was printed sometime between 1860 and 1884 by Ashdown & Parry, a firm with offices in London and Toronto. The identity of Miss Davis is a mystery; the name may have been a pseudonym.
When English pianist Clara Angela Macirone, 1821-1895, sent or gave her ca. 1850 setting of Footsteps of Angels to Longfellow, she wrote at the top of the score, "To Professor Longfellow, from the composer with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year."
Benjamin Franklin Baker, 1811-1889, made his mark as founder of the Boston Music School and as vice-president and vocal soloist for the Handel & Haydn Society. A Serenade, from Longfellow's 1840 play, The Spanish Student, was a popular Longfellow poem; it was set to music numerous times during the Victorian era. Baker's 1844 setting imitates The Hutchinson Family's vocal style (see below), which would lead to the barbershop quartet genre of the 1890's.
The daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alice, Anne Allegra and Edith, had a life-long love of vocal music encouraged by their father, mother and musical friends of the family; they, in turn, passed on the tradition to their nieces, daughters and grand-daughters. In 1919, undergraduate Randall Thompson, 1899-1984, won Harvard's Francis Boote Prize in composition with The Light of Stars. Anne Allegra's daughter, Priscilla Thorpe, as a member of the Radcliffe Chorale Society, sang the premiere of the work on May 27, 1919. The Thorpes lived in the nearby yellow house at 155 Brattle Street, where, according to Anne Allegra's granddaughter, Mary Smith—former executive director of the Berkshire Choral Institute—"Randall Thompson spent a lot of time when he was a Harvard student. There were five girls there; he used to play my grandmother's piano. She gave him a lot of free food." Although the manuscript score used in today's performance is not in Thompson's hand, he signed the title page, "for Miss Longfellow from Randall Thompson, May 1919," and gave the music to Longfellow's eldest daughter Alice, 1850-1928, a lifelong resident of Craigie House.
Brighton, Massachusetts-born Edward Rice, 1849-1924, became one of the first successful Broadway producers, bridging the gap between 19th century American burlesque and the 20th-century musical. The premiere two-week run at the Globe Theater in Boston of the immensely successful Evangeline Opera Bouffe ended in July, 1874. A June 29, 1874 note from Rice to the ailing Longfellow begins, "Your favor first received I should be very glad to have you see the piece before it is withdrawn, and feel assured if you are able to come you will enjoy a hearty laugh notwithstanding your present attack of Neuralgia – which will perhaps be driven away for the nonce."
The choral song Evangéline sounds as if it could be the Acadian national anthem. It was composed in 1910 by André Thadée Bourque, an important figure in the late 19th- and early 20th-century nationalist reawakening known as the Acadian Renaissance, inspired, in part, by Longfellow's 1847 epic poem. The score was printed by la Société l'Assomption, an Acadian mutual aid society founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1903 and relocated to Moncton, New Brunswick, ten years later.
I began composing Snow-Flakes during a blizzard in January, 2006, not long after a friend had taken me to a concert by Women in Harmony, a Portland-based women's chorus, and finished the current version during a stifling August afternoon. The poem, with its personalized, moody, snowy New England landscape, looks ahead to the style of Robert Frost, 1874-1973, whose first volume of poetry, A Boy's Will, 1915, would take its title from a refrain in My Lost Youth, 1858, Longfellow's poem about his childhood in Portland, Maine.
Franz Liszt, 1811-1886, met Longfellow in 1868 in Italy at Santa Francesca Roma. The meeting is preserved in a painting by George Healy, 1814-1899, which depicts Liszt holding a candle while he opens the door to greet Longfellow, and in the Excelsior Prelude, 1871, from The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral. When Liszt sent the score to Longfellow in Cambridge in November, 1874, he wrote: Permettez-moi de continuer ce sympathique rapprochement en vous dédiant la composition musicale de votre poème "les cloches de la cathédrale de Strasbourg" avec le prélude inspiré aussi par une de vos poésies "Excelsior" ! ("Permit me to continue our sympathetic understanding by dedicating to you the musical composition of your poem 'The Bells of Strasbourg,' along with the prelude also inspired by one of your poems, 'Excelsior!'").
When the "much improved" Hutchinson Family, Abby, Judson, John and Asa, of Milford, New Hampshire, performed their brother Jesse's version of Excelsior in Portland, Maine, City Hall, on September 23, 1844, they "drew forth repeated and enthusiastic applause" from "one of the most fashionable houses ever gotten together in this city," according to a local newspaper. The extraordinarily successful Hutchinsons were advocates of a number of social reform causes, such as temperance and abolition. Longfellow enjoyed attending several of their performances. In November, 1855, as their singing careers waned, Judson, John and Asa migrated west and founded Hutchinson, Minnesota. The "articles of agreement" for their new town declared that "Hutchinson women would have equal rights to Hutchinson men."
Founder and president of the Bengal Music School, and author of many musicological works, Rajah Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1840-1914, is recognized for his significant contribution to the understanding of traditional forms of Hindu music, and for his melding of Western and Eastern classical forms. Excelsior!—appearing in both Sanskrit and English notation—is part of Tagore's 1875 collection, English Verses set to Hindu Music in Honour of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. This afternoon's music was taken from a presentation volume sent by Tagore to Longfellow, and inscribed, "H W Longfellow, from Sorindro Mohun Tagore, Calcutta, May 6, 1878."
Born to parents of English and Sierra-Leone heritage, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912, was named after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, thus forever condemning both to a confusion of identity: Coleridge-Taylor did not write poetry; Taylor Coleridge did not compose music. Coleridge-Taylor's best known work, the three-part, three hour oratorio Hiawatha, composed between 1898-1900, became a yearly staple of the summer schedule of Royal Albert Hall and numerous community choruses throughout Great Britain until the Second World War. After a few early 20th century performances in the United States—in Washington D. C., by the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society, for example, and in Boston, by Boston Cecilia Society, 1900-1902—and despite recent revivals by, among others, the Cambridge Community Chorus and the Milwaukee Symphony, the work remains largely unknown here. With this Wagnerian-scale Ring cycle, Coleridge-Taylor succeeded where Antonín Dvořák, 1841-1904, failed: the Czech composer abandoned his plans to turn the favorite Longfellow poem of his childhood, The Song of Hiawatha, into an opera; instead, he reused his abandoned Hiawatha themes in creating the New World Symphony.
–Charles Kaufmann