Francisco G. de Guzman Jr.

Modern British Composers

Vocal Literature IV

Frederick Theodore Albert Delius (29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934)

Frederick Delius was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous
mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the
United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. There he soon neglected his managerial
duties, and in 1886 returned to Europe. Having been influenced by African-American music
during his short stay in Florida, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical
study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris
and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived for the rest of their lives,
except during the First World War.

Delius's first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors
promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius's native Britain, it was 1907 before his music
made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham
conducted the full premiere of A Mass of Life in London in 1909 (he had premiered Part II in
Germany in 1908); he staged the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910;
and he mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone
recordings of many of Delius's works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis,
contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some
late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.

The lyricism in Delius's early compositions reflected the music he had heard in America
and the influences of European composers such as Edvard Grieg and Richard Wagner. As his
skills matured, he developed a style uniquely his own, characterised by his individual
orchestration and his uses of chromatic harmony. Delius's music has been only intermittently
popular, and often subject to critical attacks. The Delius Society, formed in 1962 by his more
dedicated followers, continues to promote knowledge of the composer's life and works, and
sponsors the annual Delius Prize competition for young musicians.

Notable Vocal Works:

 Sakuntala (1889)
 Maud (1891)
 Seven Danish Songs (1897)
Graham Whettam (7 September 1927 – 17 August 2007)

Though he never formally studied at a music school and was largely self-taught, several
of Graham Whettam’s compositions had already been performed by major orchestras and
soloists by his twenties. These include the Sinfonietta for Strings in 1951 at Kensington Palace;
the Symphony No. 1 in the early 1950s by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by
Charles Groves; the Concertino for oboe and string orchestra at the 1953 Proms performed by
oboist Léon Goossens; and the Viola Concerto in 1954 at the Cheltentham Festival by violist
Harry Danks and conductor Sir John Barbirolli. Other of his works had already been performed
with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra by
conductors Basil Cameron, Meredith Davies, Sir Eugene Goossens, Willem van Otterloo, and Sir
Malcolm Sargent, and by oboist Janet Craxton, clarinettist Jack Brymer, and horn player Dennis
Brain. In 1959, the premiere of his first clarinet concerto was performed by Raymond Carpenter
and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves; this he considered
his first mature work.

He was married to Rosemary Atkinson from 1948 until their divorce in 1958, at which
time he moved to Coventry. While there, he married Janet Lawrence in 1959, and later founded
and directed his own publishing company, "Meriden Music". In 1962 he wrote his first work to
be critically considered a "masterpiece", Sinfonia contra timore (Symphony Against Fear), which
was premiered three years later by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and conductor
Hugo Rignold. Though Sinfonietta Stravagante (1964), performed by the Netherlands
Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Herbert Sourdant, and Sinfonia Concertante (1966),
performed by the Northern Sinfonia and conductor Bryden Thomson, followed in rapid
succession, Whettam did not continue to have the success of his youth; several of his works were
premiered/published some time after their composition, and some of his later works (such as the
Promethean Symphony and the Symphony No. 5) still wait for a world premiere.

Regarded as "a natural symphonist" by the Sunday Times, the dozen symphonies he
composed between his mid-twenties and death form the core of Whettam's output. However, he
also contributed some large-scale concertos, several shorter orchestral (both symphonic and
concertante) works, numerous chamber and instrumental works (such as four string quartets and
three solo violin sonatas), as well as vocal and choral works. His music, labelled as "invariably
dramatic" (a characterization reflected in his titles: Sinfonia Drammatica; Concerto Drammatico;
Concerto Ardente; Sinfonia Intrepida), features skillful construction and a deep sense of
poignancy and atmosphere.[citation needed]
 In 1994 Whettam moved with his wife Janet to Woolaston in Gloucestershire where he
continued to compose and where he died on 17 August 2007, aged 79

Notable Vocal Works:

 Three Romantic Songs for medium/high voice and piano (1956; rev. 1998)
 Two Casimir Songs for medium/high voice and piano (1958; rev. 1998).
 Four Yeats Songs (from The Rose) for medium/high voice and piano (2002).
Ralph Vaughan Wiliiams (12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958)

sRalph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets,
chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine
symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-
song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of
the 19th century.

Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a
progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens,
and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for
amateur and student performance. He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice
until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–08 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped
him clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences.

Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide
range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among
the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910)
and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and
large-scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951.
Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for
Dancing (1930) was successful and has been frequently staged.

Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams's personal life. The
First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years
later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a
much younger woman, who later became his second wife. He went on composing through his
seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-
five. His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major
compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded.

Notable Vocal Works:

Between the mid-1890s and the late 1950s Vaughan Williams set more than eighty
poems for voice and piano accompaniment. The earliest to survive is "A Cradle Song", to
Coleridge's words, from about 1894.The songs include many that have entered the repertory,
such as "Linden Lea" (1902), "Silent Noon" (1904) and the song cycles Songs of Travel (1905
and 1907) and On Wenlock Edge. To Vaughan Williams the human voice was "the oldest and
greatest of musical instruments".He described his early songs as "more or less simple and
popular in character", and the musicologist Sophie Fuller describes this simplicity and popularity
as consistent throughout his career. Many composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
wrote sentimental works for female voice; by contrast, songs by Vaughan Williams, such as
"The Vagabond" from Songs of Travel, to words by Robert Louis Stevenson, are "a particularly
masculine breath of fresh air" (Fuller), "virile open-air verses" (Kennedy). Some of Vaughan
Williams's later songs are less well known; Fuller singles out the cycle Three Poems by Walt
Whitman, a largely dark work, as too often overlooked by singers and critics. For some of his
songs the composer expands the accompaniment to include two or more string instruments in
addition to the piano; they include On Wenlock Edge, and the Chaucer cycle Merciless Beauty
(1921), judged by an anonymous contemporary critic as "surely among the best of modern
English songs".
Robert Cuthbert Quilter (1 November 1877 – 21 September 1953)

Born in Hove, Sussex, Quilter was a younger son of Sir William Quilter, 1st Baronet, a
wealthy noted landowner, politician and art collector. Roger Quilter was educated first in the
preparatory school at Farnborough. He then moved to Eton College and later became a fellow-
student of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott and H. Balfour Gardiner at the Hoch Conservatory in
Frankfurt, where he studied for almost five years under the guidance of the German professor of
composition Iwan Knorr. Quilter belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who
studied at the Hoch Conservatory in the late 1890s. His reputation in England rests largely on his
songs and on his light music for orchestra, such as his Children's Overture, with its interwoven
nursery rhyme tunes, and a suite of music for the play Where the Rainbow Ends. He is noted as
an influence on several English composers, including Peter Warlock.

Quilter enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with the tenor Gervase Elwes until the latter's
death in 1921. In November 1936, Quilter's opera Julia was presented at Covent Garden by the
British Music Drama Opera Company under the direction of Vladimir Rosing.

As a homosexual, he found it difficult to cope with some of the pressures which he felt
were imposed upon him, and eventually deteriorated into mental illness after the loss of his
nephew Arnold Guy Vivian during the Second World War.

He died at his home in St John's Wood, London, a few months after celebrations to mark
his 75th birthday, and was buried in the family vault at St Mary's Church, Bawdsey, Suffolk.

Notable Vocal Works:

Roger Quilter's output of songs, more than one hundred in total, added to the canon of English
art song that is still sung today. Among the most popular are "Love's Philosophy", "Fair House
of Joy", "Come Away Death", "Go, Lovely Rose", "Weep You No More", "By the Sea", and his
setting of "O Mistress Mine". Quilter's setting of verses from the Tennyson poem "Now Sleeps
the Crimson Petal" is one of his earliest songs but is nonetheless characteristic of the later,
mature style. He also published the Arnold Book of Old Songs, a collection of 16 folk and
traditional songs to new accompaniments, dedicated to his nephew Arnold Guy Vivian.