The Penguin Book of English Song: Seven Centuries of Poetry from Chaucer to Auden ed. by Richard Stokes (review)

What a surprising and delightful book! Surprising, in that no one would have expected Penguin to devote such a doorstopper to what cannot be claimed as more than a connoisseur's corner within all that might be construed as 'song', or even 'English song' (more on that later). Delightful, in the richness of its contents, fruit of an expert labour of love by its trusty editor that presents what in literary terms is still thought of as a great tradition in a new and rewarding perspective.

It is not an easy book to define and describe. Essentially a selection of the poetic texts drawn from English literature that have been favoured by composers, it serves above all as a source anthology for the poetry of the English art song. Yet not all of the composers are British, not all of the settings are for solo voice, and not all of them would normally be considered art music. The principle of selection has been to choose 100 British poets whose verse has appealed to composers, arrange them in chronological order—strictly speaking, not from Chaucer to Auden, as the subtitle has it, but from Chaucer to Sidney Keyes—and present such of their verse as has been prominently (though also on occasions obscurely) set to music, amounting, I would guess, to around 900 poems, with a particular view to the ways in which composers sometimes grouped it. Thus, for example, in the twenty-one-page section on William Blake, after three pages of editorial introduction, four separate poems are printed, those of Parry's 'Jerusalem', one of Havergal Brian's Three Songs, 'The sick rose' from Britten's Serenade, and 'A cradle song' from the same composer's A Charm of Lullabies, and then we get all ten poems that comprise Vaughan Williams's Ten Blake Songs, in the order in which the composer's cycle presents them. 'Holy Thursday' from Walton's A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table follows. Next we have all of the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake by Britten, except those that have already been printed as part of the Vaughan Williams work, to which the reader is referred back. Finally comes 'The little vagabond' as set in the American William Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, a large-scale work accorded nearly a whole page of introduction, most of it in the form of the composer's own commentary taken from the commercial recording. This last treatment is exceptional, however: sets or cycles of songs normally have only a brief introduction (one sentence) as part of the main text, whereas a work from which only one poem is being presented at a particular point, or a single setting of a single poem, is glossed in a footnote often longer than a main-text introduction. The way this all works takes some getting used to, but is more or less consistent and was probably the best solution to the conundrum of a book grounded in music, which nevertheless consists entirely of poetry.

We remain very much in the hands of the editor. There is no statistical justification for who or what has been included along the lines of the attempt to establish a core repertory found in some other spheres (such as jazz standards). Yet what feels like a lifetime's experience of the corpus of professional art song in particular, an attachment which lies at the heart of the volume, produces the right results in most cases, and it is surprising how little has had to be omitted and how little may be contentious. Stokes has already produced The Book of Lieder for Faber, A French Song Companion with Graham Johnson, and The Spanish Song Companion with Johnson and Jacqueline Cockburn, and knows what will make the book work. It is difficult...