Vaughan Williams’s “On Wenlock Edge”
Notes by TŌN cellist Alfred Western
Although poet Alfred Edward Houseman was not himself a Shropshire Lad (“I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time,” he wrote to a friend years after the publication of A Shropshire Lad), his collection of poems filled with evocative descriptions of the landscape and the story spun of its young proved comforting to generations of Britain’s youth. Faced with the challenges of adolescence and the terrors of early 20th-century warfare, countless turned to Houseman’s pack of 63 writings to explain the tragedies of their time. Perhaps one such lad might be tempted to set a few to music?
Enter Ralph Vaughan Willams. After first composing a six-poem cycle for tenor and piano quintet in 1909, he orchestrated it in 1924. Despite being another Shropshire neighbour—shoot!—Vaughan Willams knew the landscape. The River Severn, which features heavily in the opening eponymous song, wound through his home county of Gloucestershire. In any case, Houseman’s rolling hills are never far from wherever one finds oneself on the Isle.
Speaking of British clichés, it’s time to talk about the weather. We start trapped in a gale atop Wenlock Edge as an inner turmoil enraptures the subject. As rain lashes trees and sapling’s boughs creak, listen for the sul ponticello (on the bridge) strings emulating the wind whistling through the branches. As the weather clears and the winds announce daybreak we move to “From far, from eve and morning”. Here our protagonist contemplates whether to pry open the feelings of his beloved, or to “take my endless way”. Distant horns open “Is my team ploughing?” before work begins, hurried along by chugging flutes and clarinets and swooping strings. Back and forth we go, as the lad drifts into daydreams of his girl interrupted by streaks of paranoia and forbidden loves.
A short tongue-in-cheek interlude, “Oh, when I was in love with you”, is followed by “Bredon Hill”, with hopeful, shimmering strings. But alas, our lad is an unlucky one, as orchestra wedding bells are broken by ominous tolls of the funeral procession of his beloved. Finally, on to “Clun”, where a now London-based lad longs for the simple life again. We’re taken up and up by solo strings, past London, Knighton, and Clun, to high, pure, heavenly harmonics to close.