Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: America's King of Song
In New England of the late 1700's, and well into the 1800's, music—singing, in particular—was a family activity. When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's maternal grandfather, Revolutionary War General Peleg Wadsworth, 1748-1829, was a young schoolmaster in pre-Revolutionary Plymouth, Massachusetts, he not only paraded his students in military fashion around the schoolroom, he organized them into a choir, and was proud of abilities as vocal instructor.
After the war, music was a Sunday evening activity in the Wadsworth household in Portland. One of Peleg's three daughters, Eliza, 1779-1802, played piano well enough to lead the family in song as they gathered in the parlor. Her sister, Zilpah, records in a letter written in 1797 that all ten Wadsworth children, and their mother—sitting in her lolling chair by the fire—are either singing along to a hymn Eliza is playing, or they are listening, or they are lost in thought.
After Zilpah married Stephen Longfellow in 1804, she continued the tradition in her own family. Her daughter, Elizabeth, 1808-1829, played piano equally as well as her sister Eliza. Among Elizabeth's books in the Maine Historical Society archives are piano books, dances, songs, and vocal instruction methods. When she heard a song somewhere, she jotted down the words in her diary.
Longfellow played the flute as a child, and most likely played the melodies of dances as Elizabeth accompanied. After graduating from Bowdoin college, young Longfellow travelled to Europe, returning in 1829 with a songbook—hand-written by some unknown friend—containing German poems and the melodies to sing them with.
When Longfellow travelled to Scandinavia in 1835—a trip punctuated by the death of his first wife, Portland-born Mary Potter, 1812-1835, who he met at First Parish Church—he brought home a well-worn, handwritten songbook, which, in 1845, became the subject of his poem, "To an Old Danish Songbook." The poem betrays Longfellow's love of singing:
Welcome, my old friend,
Welcome to a foreign fireside,
While the sullen gales of autumn
Shake the windows.
The ungrateful world
Has, it seems, dealt harshly with thee,
Since, beneath the skies of Denmark,
First I met thee.
There are marks of age,
There are thumb-marks on thy margin,
Made by hands that clasped thee rudely,
At the alehouse.
By 1845, Longfellow had undergone a remarkable transformation: the young Harvard language professor who liked to collect songs set to the poetry of others became the poet whose work was being set to music. His first book of published poems, Voices of The Night, 1839, proved to be very popular with musicians writing solo songs and choruses. In turn, these published songs were widely purchased in the United States for family music-making at parlor firesides. The genre became known as "parlor song;" Longfellow poetry would mark the era of the parlor song in ways that are just beginning to be explored by historians, who for too long have focused their sole attention on the North German poets used in the lieder of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann.
Longfellow 'songs' were not only popular in America. From 1840 until the early 20th century, Longfellow poems were among the most popular parlor song texts wherever in the world people were singing in English: across the US—New England, New York, Chicago, the Southern and the Western states; across Europe—England, France, Germany, Sweden; around the world—Australia and India. Hundreds, if not thousands, of musical Longfellow settings were created by some of the most world's most famous—and most obscure—musicians. This prompted Minnesotan composer Thomas Lorenzo Jephson, 1808-1879, to address Longfellow in 1879 as "America's Song King."
Emanuel Abraham Aguilar, 1824-1904, was active as a composer of religious music in the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of London, and a concert pianist. His work as a musician remains overshadowed by the literary successes of his sister, Grace Aguilar, 1816-1847, who has been called "the first Anglo-Jewish novelist."
Like Longfellow, and his first poem, The Battle of Lovell's Pond, published in 1820 when he was thirteen, French musician Charles Gounod, 1818-1893, wrote his first musical composition when he was twelve. A composer of thirteen operas, notably, Faust, 1859, it is for his song based on the C-major prelude from Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier—Ave Maria—that he is most remembered. Gounod lived to England for awhile, conducting the Royal Choral Society between 1870 and 1875. Beware was composed in London in 1871. Other Longfellow settings: The Sea Hath its Pearls,1871, It Is Not Always May, 1871, If Thou Art Sleeping Maiden, 1872 and The Arrow and the Song, 1886.
Anglo-Dutch composer Berthold Tours, 1838-1897, was a violin pedagogue best-known for his method book, The Violin. More than a composer and arranger, as editor of the prestigious London-based music publisher Novello, he edited the music of the best-known composers of the day, preparing, for example, the reduced piano score of Arthur Sullivan's popular Longfellow cantata, The Golden Legend, 1886. To Stay at Home is Best, or Song, is one of Longfellow's later poems, published in Birds of Passage, Flight the Fifth, 1878. Though Tours set this version for women's chorus, and the modern listener might cringe at the implication that women are happiest when they 'stay at home,' the original poem reflected, perhaps, Longfellow's own weariness with life.
At the time of writing these program notes, the true identity of Miss Davis remains a mystery. She could have been a child prodigy, a student in a female seminary, a male composer using a pseudonym—there were examples of each of these in the middle 1800's. The music was published either in London, or in Toronto, by Ashdown & Parry, a firm in existence between 1860 and 1884. In the poem Footsteps of Angels, Longfellow, sitting by the fireside, imagines spectral images of past friends, loves and family, "with them" his first wife, Mary Potter, 1812-1835, "the Being Beauteous" of the poem.
While Miss Davis concealed her identity by leaving out her first name, Clara Angela Macirone, 1821-1895—a pianist of Anglo-Italian heritage—concealed her gender through the use of initials: C. A. Macirone. A common practice for Victorian women composers, the use of initials was nonetheless a tip-off. Her choral version of Footsteps of Angels—labeled in the score as "A Choral Song"—has the homespun feel of an English or Scottish folk melody harmonized in four parts. She sent this version to Longfellow sometime before 1860, writing at the top of the score, "To Professor Longfellow, from the composer with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year."
The Rainy Day is the only music on the concert directly related to Portland. Thirty-four-year-old Longfellow wrote the poem in the family home on Congress Street on a particularly soggy day in 1841, while sitting at his late Aunt Eliza's writing desk and gazing out into the Longfellow Garden. The penultimate line, "Into each life some rain must fall," is a Longfellowism: it has lasted as a cliché into our time, one of numerous Longfellow sayings everyone knows, though almost no one knows Longfellow created it. The Rainy Day was one of the most popular Longfellow poems of the Victorian era.
There are numerous parlor songs using The Rainy Day as text. London composer John Liptrot Hatton, 1809-1886, created his very moving version—dedicated to Scottish composer and musicologist Thomas Oliphant, 1799-1873—in the mid-1850's. Amy Marcy Cheney (Beach), 1867-1944, was a child prodigy pianist who became one of the leading women composers of the first half of the 20th century. She wrote her version when she was just 13, and sang it herself to Longfellow in 1880. Longfellow had a long history of helping young artists—poets, painters, musicians—begin the careers (see Frederic Hymn Cowen). Cheney's moody Rainy Day sounds surprisingly mature. Arthur Sullivan, 1842-1900, whose music has been criticized for its "lack of depth of feeling," composed his amiable, sunny choral version of The Rainy Day when he was 25, the same age composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor began his immensely popular cantata, Hiawatha, [see below].
Faustina Hasse Hodges, 1823-1895, born in England, was named after the Italian mezzo-soprano Faustina Hasse, 1693-1873. She immigrated to the United States with her father, Edward Hodges, 1796-1858, organist of Trinity Church in Manhattan, and younger brother, Johann Sebastian Bach Hodges, 1830-1915. Faustina was sent to the Troy, New York, Female Seminar—today the Emma Willard School—in the late 1840's, where she was both student and instructor of organ, piano and voice. There, Emma Willard advised her that with her musical talent she would be happiest with "her ams around a harp." In March 1850, on a whim, with no previous connection to Longfellow, she sent him the manuscript of The Psalm of Life used in today's performance shortly after the music was rejected for publication by a Boston music publishing house. She quotes the publisher's rejection letter in her letter to Longfellow: "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." Then she laments 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." Faustina goes on to describe to Longfellow the sound of The Psalm of Life: "The organ, of course, is as deep and distant as that one in heaven—wind instruments: only ophicleides, trombones, trumpets—bassoons—horns—and about twenty-five voices in unison to speak the words. Fancy it! ...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 pipes of the organ, the wind of the instruments, the many voices of the singers... ." Longfellow returned her correspondences, lavish with his praise. Unfortunately, these letters appear to have been lost.
Benjamin Franklin Baker, 1811-1889, was an important early music educator in Boston, though he didn't settle into a musical career until after first trying his hand as a young businessman in Bangor. A prominent Bostonian musician, he 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 the 1840 play, The Spanish Student, was one of the most popular Longfellow poems set to music in the Victorian era. In Act I, Scene II of the play, four gypsy musicians are hired by Chispa—servant to student-hero, Victorian—to serenade Preciosa, a gypsy girl turned social debutante. Chispa warns them, "I beseech you, for this once be not loud, but pathetic; for it is a serenade to a damsel in bed and not to the Man in the Moon." Composed by Baker in 1844, Stars of a Summer Night, (A Serenade), is one of the earliest works on the program. This afternoon's music is from the manuscript score Baker sent to Longfellow, along with the letter: "Dear Sir, I have taken the liberty of setting this little bijou of yours to music. With your permission I would like to publish it as inscribed in the accompanying sheet. The music is respectfully submitted to your inspection, and the author would be happy to learn, as soon as convenient, whether its publication would be acceptable to you or not." It is an early model for the much later barbershop style.
The association of Sir Frederic Hymen Cowen, 1852-1935, with Longfellow is a remarkable one. In March, 1864, a letter from a twelve-year-old English boy arrived at Longfellow's Brattle Street home in Cambridge, Massachusetts:
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 for me to set to music. ... I send you with this 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.
I remain yours very kindly,
Federic H. Comwen
Longfellow replied on April 3, 1864:
My Dear Musician,
I have had the pleasure of receiving the Song of your own composing, which you were kind enough to send me, and have listened to it with great pleasure, and no little astonishment, that it should com from so young a heart and hand!
It would certainly give me satisfaction to have any poem of mine set to such music, but I have nothing in manuscript which I wish to print, and which would be suitable for your purpose. Perhaps among my poems already published you may find something which will answer.
Jamaican-born Cowen became one of the prominent English musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, composer of numerous operatic and orchestral works, and conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Ironically, one of his last works was a 1934 piece for orchestral based on the Longfellow translation from German of Johann Ludwig Uhland's poem, The Luck of Edenhall. The haunting parlor song, Sundown, is from Cowen's 9 Longfellow Songs, 1892. The poem, from Longfellow's last published collection, In the Harbor, 1882, with the lines, "O beautiful, awful summer day, What hast thou given, what taken away?" most likely reflects Longfellow's long-standing, personal grief over the sudden death of his second wife, Francis Appleton Longfellow, 1817-1861, on a summer day in July, 1861.
English composer, organist and Shakespearean actor John Liptrot Hatton, 1809-1886, introduced himself to Longfellow by sending presentation copies of his Longfellow settings in the late 1850's. Longfellow gained respect for Hatton over the years, asking his advise on the purchase of a new Chickering piano. Hatton chose Chickering piano, serial number 30,012 for Longfellow's personal use. On June 15, 1868, Hatton discovered that Longfellow and his daughters, Alice, Edith and Anne Allegra had arrived unannounced in England; he quickly penned a note:
My dear Sir,
I see by the newspapers that you have honored the Old Country with another visit. I trust I may be fortunate enough to see you ere you go away again – and if you will favor me with a line to say when you will be in London I will do myself the pleasure of coming to you at once.
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,
J. L. Hatton
The manuscript of this afternoon's performance of Ho! Watchman, Ho! is from the archives of the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It contains the dedication: For the Misses Longfellow, London, July 7, 1868.
Not much is known about W. G. Sired, except that Good-Night Beloved, 1896, represents only one of many settings of this popular Longfellow poem, (from The Spanish Student, Act II Scene X), by various composers. By the late 1890's, the barbershop quartet was becoming a separate genre of vocal music, made popular by African-American quartet singers. The only other known reference to Sired is a listing for a band piece, A Night at the Circus, 1898, in the John Held Band Manuscript Collection of the Utah State Historical Society.
The Light of Stars is the first choral work of Randall Thompson, 1899-1984, composed while a Harvard student, and awarded Havard's Francis Boot Prize for Composition, 1918-1919, an undergraduate award still in existence. During this period in his life, Thompson summered with is family in Vienna, Maine. The future great American choral composer failed his student audition for the Harvard Chorus, but a few years after graduating, Thompson won the prestigious Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. The manuscript used in today's performance is a mimeographed score in Thompson's handwriting used by the Harvard and Radcliff choruses for the original performance, May 27, 1919. Thompson wrote at the top of this particular score, from the archives of the Longfellow National Historic Site, "To Miss Longfellow, May, 1919." Miss Longfellow was most likely Alice Longfellow, 1850-1928, nearly seventy years of age, the youngest daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Thompson waited until 1976 to make professional use of the piece, with almost no revision, to fulfill a commission for the Rocky Ridge Music Center in Colorado. The 1980 E. C. Schirmer published edition of The Light of Stars makes no comment about of the origins of the work.
Brighton, Massachusetts-born Edward Rice, 1849-1924, became one of America's first successful Broadway composers and producers, bridging the gap between 19th century American burlesque and the 20th century musical. Typical of 1870's burlesque, his comic opera, Evangeline Opera Bouffe, 1874, while a good-natured spoof of Longfellow's epic poem, Evangeline, 1847, contains, nonetheless, enough off-color humor to offend just about anyone. In a letter to Longfellow on Globe Theater stationary, June 29, 1875, Rice invites the poet to attend the final engagement of the original two-week run in Boston. Longfellow's "attack of Neuralgia" apparently provided the poet with a convenient excuse:
My Dear Sir,
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 would perhaps be driven away for the nonce... .
Yours very truly
Edward E. Rice
Originally for eight-part women's chorus, Snow-Flakes was begun in during a blizzard in January, 2006, not long after a friend had taken me to a performance by Women in Harmony, a Portland-based women's chorus. The composition was finished during a hot day in August. Snow-Flakes, a poem from Longfellow's final period, with its personalized, moody, snowy New England landscape, looks ahead to the style of Robert Frost, 1874-1963. Frost's first published volume of poems, A Boys Will, 1913, takes its name from a refrain in My Lost Youth, 1858, Longfellow's poem about his Portland childhood: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." Frost's Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, 1923, ("My little horse must think it queer, To stop without out a farmhouse near, Between woods and frozen lake, The darkest evening of the year.") could just as well have been written by Longfellow.
Franz Liszt, 1811-1886, met Longfellow at the Santa Francesca Roma church in Rome, 1868. The meeting is preserved both in a painting at the Longfellow National Site by George Healy, 1814-1899, depicting Liszt—holding a candle—opening the door to greet Longfellow, and in the Excelsior Prelude, 1871. Published as the introduction to a choral and orchestra cantata based on Longfellow's The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral, the Excelsior Prelude is performed both with the choral interjections, "Excelsior!," and as a separate instrumental work. Liszt sent Longfellow the published score in 1874, along with a letter:
Illustre Poète,
... 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» !
Excelsior! c'est la devise de la poésie et de la musique. Elles chantent perpétuellement aux siècles et aux cieux l'exaltation de l'âme humaine, et accompagnent ainsi le "sursum corda" qui retentit chaque jour dans les églises et leurs cloches.
Illustrious Poet,
... 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!'
Excelsior! is the motto of poetry and music, the exaltation of the human heart sung perpetually across the centuries and to the heavens, the "Sursum Corda" resonating each day in churches and their bells.
Like the Wadsworths and the Longfellows of Portland, The Hutchinson Family, of Milford, New Hampshire, enjoyed making music at home. In 1840, four brothers, Jesse, Judson, John and Asa began singing in public, patterning themselves after European family singing groups on tour in the US. Their popularity quickly spread. Jesse became the manager in 1843, and his singing role—the highest vocal part—was given to his sister, Abby. In October, 1842, The Hutchinson Family performed in Portland City Hall. Two years later, they returned for two concerts, September 23 and 24, 1844, when the "much improved" group sang "Excelsior," and, according to local newspaper accounts, "drew forth repeated and enthusiastic applause" from "one of the most fashionable houses ever gotten together in this city." The Hutchinsons were advocates of a number of social causes, including anti-slavery and temperance. Concerning the September, 1844, performances, Asa wrote in his journal, "We had great meetings in Portland... . John Neal was raving ... Wm. Lloyd Garrison was mighty in the truth." The Hutcinson Family enjoyed tremendous popularity in the United States, and toured England, where one aloof music critic noted that a performance by The Hutchinson Family provided evidence of the very low state of musical education in the former British colony. Hutchinson, Minnesota, was founded by several of the Hutchinson brothers as their singing career began to fade.
Founder and president of the Bengal Music School, and the 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 Sanskit 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."
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912, born to parents of English and Sierra-Leone heritage, 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. His works have been largely overlooked in the United States since the early 20th century, when The Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington D.C. numbered 200 African-American singers. In England, his prolificacy inspired such labels as the "Mozart," the "Mendelssohn," the "Handel" of the Victorian Era. Coleridge-Taylor's best known work, Hiawatha, 1898-1900, written in his mid-twenties, became a yearly staple of the summer schedule of Royal Albert Hall, and was sung annually by community choruses throughout England until World War Two. In Coleridge-Taylor's hands, the three-hour, three-part setting of Longfellow's familiar 1855 epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, becomes a moving requiem for the death American Indian culture. Longfellow was bold to create the original poem in the midst of the long-standing, often brutal displacement of Native Americans. His views became clear in a later poem about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face, 1876:
Whose was the right and the wrong?
Sing it, O funeral song,
With a voice that is full of tears,
And say that our broken faith
Wrought all this ruin and scathe,
In the Year of a Hundred Years.