Listening to Herbert Howells’ setting of the Walter de la Mare poem ‘King David’ (BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics ‘Song of the Day’ – 14/03/2024), beautifully sung by Dame Sarah Connolly, reaffirmed its position as my favourite English song. This in turn got me thinking: why is this the case?
To begin with, de la Mare’s poem is exquisite:
King David was a sorrowful man
No cause for his sorrow had he;
And he called for the music of a hundred harps,
To ease his melancholy.
They played till they all fell silent:
Played and play sweet did they;
But the sorrow that haunted the heart of King David
They could not charm away.
He rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone,
A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree,
Jargoned on and on.
King David lifted his sad eyes
Into the dark-boughed tree --
"Tell me, thou little bird that singest,
Who taught my grief to thee?"
But the bird in no-wise heeded;
And the king in the cool of the moon
Hearkened to the nightingale's sorrowfulness,
Till all his own was gone.
No one has expressed the irrational nature of melancholy better than John Keats and the remedy he proposes has much in common with that which cures King David:
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
Crucially, King David has no cause for his sorrow: this is stated unequivocally by the narrator; in this he might be said to differ from Antonio in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ who says ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’ but whose main cause for sorrow is self-evident: he loves someone, Bassanio, who does not love him. It is futile, and wrong-headed, to look for the cause of King David’s sorrow – it is not because of the death of Absolom, for example – he is simply sad, melancholic to be precise, this fit perhaps having fallen ‘Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud.’
Howells captures this melancholy perfectly, with slow moving, slow, moving piano chords portraying King David’s slow, sad footsteps.
This melancholy atmosphere is intensified by the melismatic setting of ‘sorrowful’ and the downward movement of the vocal line on ‘melancholy’. The mood lightens momentarily as the ‘hundred harps’ play sweetly, but they fall silent: they are unable to ‘charm away’ ‘the sorrow that haunted King David’. De la Mare is very much the poet of quiet hauntings and gentle ghosts, his preferred twilight world never far away from touches of magic. Howells provides his own magic with the voice lifting on the phrase ‘he rose’, lifting the tonality into the major, foreshadowing King David’s change of mood. I heard Fiona Kimm sing this tiny phrase to magical effect in the Kathleen Ferrier Singing Competition c. 1977.
Walking alone by the light of the moon King David hears a nightingale singing, more precisely, the nightingale ‘jargoned on and on’ so it was twittering, singing without thought; the nightingale did not mean anything when it sang, its song was sufficient in itself.
But King David imagines the bird is expressing his own grief: the music becomes far more impassioned, even declamatory, ‘Tell me, thou little bird that singest/Who taught my grief to thee?’ The bird of course is oblivious, ‘But the bird in no wise heedeth’ – bird song patterns in the piano part appear to be mocking the King for imagining the bird somehow shares his sorrow, but by focussing on something beautiful in nature, as Keats suggests in his Ode, King David forgets his own sorrow in music of sublime calm and acceptance:
And the king in the cool of the moon
Hearkened to the nightingale's sorrowfulness,
Till all his own was gone.
Of course, the nightingale has no ‘sorrowfulness’, this is a transferred epithet, the only sorrowfulness is the King’s, he merely projects it onto something beyond himself, which allows him to be freed from melancholy’s hold.
Taken on its own, de la Mare’s poem, while beautiful, is essentially objective – King David’s sorrow is described to us but we do not feel it, we are not part of it. The miracle of Howells’ setting is that we become King David, and his journey from melancholy to calm contentment is ours also.
There are several fine versions of this peerless song: a young Janet Baker, accompanied by Martin Isepp, is exquisite, and there are other beautifully sung versions from Sarah Connolly and Kitty Whately. Recordings by baritones Benjamin Luxon, Roderick Williams, Ashley Riches and Will Liverman are less successful to my ears (this song has to be sung by a lower voice in my opinion, so I have not listened to any tenor or soprano).
My preparations for this Blog revealed a large number of Howells songs’ previously unknown to me. I shall consider some of these in the near future.