English tenor Gervase Elwes

You may have enjoyed the singing of Gervase Elwes on the last blog, so here is a little about him:

Gervase Henry Cary-Elwes (15 November 1866 – 12 January 1921), always known as Gervase Elwes, was an English tenor of great distinction, who exercised a powerful influence over the development of English music. His career was cut short in 1921 when he was involved in fatal railroad accident in Boston, Massachusetts.

There is a great Wiki page about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gervase_Elwes

I qoute from that page:


Background to his career

He was born in Billing, Northampton, the son of Alice Geraldine (née Ward) and Valentine Dudley Henry Cary-Elwe.Of the Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire county gentry, he attended The Oratory School (a Roman Catholic school) and moved to Woburn School, Weybridge in 1885, leaving for Christ Church, Oxford in 1885, where he was active as a cricketer and violinist. At the age of 22 he married Lady Winifride Feilding. He first trained as a lawyer and diplomat, spending some years in Brussels. It was there that he began formal singing lessons at the age of 28. However he had to overcome a social convention of resistance to one of his class his making a professional career as a singer, and not until the early 1900s, in his late thirties, did he gave his first professional performances in London. His principal teachers were Jacques Bouhy in Paris (1901–1903), and in London Henry Russell and Victor Biegel, who remained his friend and teacher throughout his life. Bouhy asked him to decide between a baritone career in opera or a tenor career in oratorio and concert (and he chose the latter).

His first professional appearance in London was opposite Agnes Nicholls, in Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar by Engelbert Humperdinck at the St James's Hall, with the Handel Society under J. S. Liddle in late April 1903, and immediately afterwards he appeared at the Westmorland Festival. In June 1903 he was auditioned at the Royal College of Music in London by Charles Villiers Stanford, who left the room and brought Hubert Parry in to hear him as well. The violinist Professor Kruse, who was then attempting to revive the Saturday 'Pops' at the St James's Hall jumped out of his chair and promptly engaged him, and it was Kruse who arranged for his first appearance in Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius early in 1904 as an addition to his Beethoven Festival. Harry Plunket Greene, who had encouraged Elwes through this audition, also remained his lifelong friend.


The character of his voice

Elwes had a voice entirely in the English colouring, but with an unusual quality of sincerity and passion, and of considerable power. His diction and intonation were very secure, his delivery somewhat ‘gentlemanly’ but his phrasing long in conception and serving intense melodic inflections. His singing possessed a spiritual fervour deriving from the religious disposition of his parents, who had taken the unusual step (for their class) of conversion to Catholicism when he was five years old.
Victor Biegel, a 'little round, bald Viennese', was for some time accompanist to the celebrated German lieder singer Raimund von zur-Mühlen and had a special understanding of the songs of Johannes Brahms, which he imparted to Elwes. There was a great rapport, and his teaching, especially during his six-month residence at Billing Hall (an Elwes estate) in 1903, completely freed and relaxed Elwes' voice, opening the way for the sustained power and brilliance of his upper register, and the vocal stamina which enabled him to maintain great oratorio roles (for which he was much in demand) with absolute conviction through a singing career of nearly two decades.


But it was as singer of English art-song, and the friend of many leading English composers, that he left his most permanent legacy. He was the dedicatee and first performer of (and the first person to record) Ralph Vaughan Williams cycle On Wenlock Edge and many of the finest songs of Roger Quilter (including the cycle To Julia), both of whom wrote with his voice in mind In 1912 he gave the first performance of Thomas Dunhill's song-cycle The wind among the reeds for the Philharmonic Society. He had the wholehearted admiration of every generation from Charles Villiers Stanford to Frank Bridge, and their successors still acknowledge the authority of his influence. He was also a wonderful inspiration to leading British singers of his time, as their many private and published memorials of him testify.

His death

Elwes died aged 55, at the height of his powers, in a horrific accident at Back Bay railway station in Boston, Massachusetts, in the midst of a high-profile recital tour of the United States. Elwes and his wife had alighted on the platform when the singer attempted to return to the conductor an overcoat which had fallen off the train. He leaned over too far and was hit by the train, falling between the train and the platform. He died of his injuries a few hours later. The tremendous loss felt by the musical establishment, the churches, and the population in general left the impression not merely of a great singer, but of a great man, whom many who never met him felt they knew personally through his singing. In short, he was loved. A week after the event, Edward Elgar wrote to Percy Hull, 'my personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing - or I must call it so - compared to the general artistic loss - a gap impossible to fill - in the musical world.'


Here are some more tracks by him!

That is the land of lost content

I have been struck by the following poem form Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and inspired to express some thoughts.


XL
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows.
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
(A.E. Housman)


I love this poem. There is a nostalgia and melancholy in the style that reminds us of a simpler time in life. It is a nostalgia borne from the English countryside along with the dark, brooding weather. Set in Shropshire (the land of lost content), A Shropshire Lad is a set of sixty- three poems of which the one above is number 40. The overall theme is of the inevitability of death (especially of young soldiers) and of religion’s inability to console. Better then, to live life to the full, for we never know when we may die.

Written in 1896, the poems start by charting the Shropshire lads who had died in the service of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (1887) but it wasn’t until the Second Boer War (1899–1902), or World War I (1914-1918) that the poems become particularly popular. A whole host of British composers were inspired to set the them to music: Arthur Somervell, George Butterworth and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, John Ireland and Ernest John Moeran.

There is a simple song-like quality to the words that lends them easily to music. At first glance, the poem is quite simple, “plain” even, but there is a deeper level which helps to draw us in:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

The air that blows is the wind blowing like a song, an air, sighing, blowing, touching the heart.

What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

The Blue melancholy hills- the depiction of emotion with nature is juxtaposed with the spiritual realm of the church spire and the farm as a symbol of toiling with the land.

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,

Such a strange land of no content, we are led to a shining plain- the plain of simplicity and the plain plateau. Perhaps this is the line which struck me the most. As usual, seeking to determine my place and the land I live on, the changing tide of landscape renders everywhere strange and of no content.

The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

The happy highways which once celebrated the passage between locations, perhaps to visit loved ones who will never be seen again.

I too have travelled happy highways where I went and cannot come again. Sometimes I can hardly bear that thought and wonder if all my happiness is behind me.

Here is Housman reading three other poems from A Shropshire Lad including the most famous: On Wenlock Edge.

Listen to him read and follow along below!



IV - REVEILLE

Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
`Who'll beyond the hills away?'

Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.

XXXI

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.



XXXII

From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.

Now -- for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart --
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way.


Or if you like, you can listen to the follow recording and read the previous 2 poems!

English tenor Gervase Elwes (1866-1921) / On Wenlock Edge (Vaughan Williams; A. E. Housman) / with the London String Quartet ~ Frederick B. Kiddle - piano / (a) On Wenlock Edge; (b) From far, from eve and morning, (c) Is my team plowing? / Recorded: 1917 --