New titles, altered words, axed stanzas – composers from Elgar to Vaughan Williams brutally reworked the verse they set, and made it immortal
The composer Charles Wilfred Orr once said of AE Housman that “he wrote verse that was (a) beautiful, (b) scanned, (c) rhymed, and (d) made sense. He is, I think, to English songwriters very much what Heine was to German and Verlaine to French composers.” Heine is one of the most – and most successfully – set of all German poets, and Verlaine has inspired some of the greatest songs in the history of the mélodie. Housman, like Heine, suffered from unrequited love, and developed a simple, direct poetic style, writing lyrically about nature and ironically about humankind. There are more than 160 song cycles based on A Shropshire Lad, and while Housman was unmusical, he always gave permission to composers to use his poems “in the hope of becoming immortal somehow”.
Directness of utterance in a poem is almost a prerequisite for a song composer – and explains why Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Burns, Byron, Housman and De la Mare have been set so often; and why composers have tended to be put off by Donne’s metaphysical conceits, Browning’s convoluted syntax and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s overly rich and cloying style. Rossetti could have learned a thing or two from his sister Christina, whose short lines and subtly varied rhythms have proved more popular with composers; and Tennyson’s remark about Browning’s Sordello was naughty but telling: he claimed that of its many thousands of lines, he could understand only two – the first (“Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told”) and the last (“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told”) – and that both were lies.
A composer has to destroy a poem's natural rhythm, to recreate its atmosphere and feeling in the language of music
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