Three Tennyson Songs (2011)

Jonathan Dove

THREE TENNYSON SONGS

Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I wrote Three Tennyson Songs for the Canadian bass-baritone Philippe Sly in early 2011, and he gave the premiere in April of that year.  I had met him two years earlier, during a summer residency in Banff: he was then only 19, but already his voice was mature, although it has grown in scale since then.  He is a remarkable musician, and it was a great pleasure to accompany him singing lieder and improvising.  A few years later, I wrote him a longer cycle, Who Wrote the Book of Love? accompanied by string quartet. Philippe recorded Three Tennyson Songs for his album ‘In Dreams.’ 

I keep a collection, to which I am always adding, of poems that, at one time or another, have caught my imagination as potential songs.  Tennyson’s ‘O Swallow, Swallow’ was in this collection.  I looked for more Tennyson lyrics to make a set.  ‘Dark House’ is the seventh poem of In Memoriam.  (I later set several more poems from this huge elegy, in Under Alter’d Skies, for the tenor James Gilchrist.)  This suggested a sombre slow movement after the swallow’s animated fluttering.   Finally, ‘The Sailor-Boy’ offered the swagger of a fearless adventurer: this would make a rousing finale.

The poems are not thematically linked, but their different moods provide three agreeably contrasting movements, perhaps like those of a sonata.