So, Peter Warlock (1894-1930) - here's someone you might call a 'character'. Composer, musicologist, critic, friend, champion then enemy of D.H.Lawrence, a man who enjoyed riding around naked on a motorbike, student of the occult and fan of the black magic of Aleister Crowley (he changed his name from Heseltine to Warlock), and, to quote Alan Partridge, part of a circle who were 'sex people'.
It's the latter which shows him up as being a bit on the vile side, especially if he happened to be your father. In the 1980s, years after pestering his elderly mother, former Christie's art expert turned gobby commentator Brian Sewell discovered that the father he never knew was Peter Warlock. Sewell, in his own words, was an illegitimate bastard, whose mother had been given a fiver by Warlock to have him aborted. Because he was one of those 'sex people', it seems as though Warlock handed out fivers quite frequently, and to the women who didn't spend the grubby note on a back street abortion, he just disowned them.
Sewell is justifiably angry and perfectly in his rights to tear Warlock's reputation to shreds. But as obnoxious as some of Warlock's actions may have been, Sewell is wrong to say that his old man was a 'minor composer', as in this interview. Having committed suicide aged 36, Peter Warlock almost certainly didn't reach his peak, but the originality of the music he did write has secured him a top spot in the development of British music in the early 20th century.
The five songs that make up The Curlew were written between 1916 and 1922, using poems by W.B.Yeats from two volumes of his poetry written at the turn of the 20th century - In the Seven Woods and The Wind Among the Reeds. Yeats grew up in County Sligo, where Curlews would have been a constant background sound, although very sadly not in the 21st century. When Warlock wrote the songs he was living in the middle of Wales, and again he would have been hearing Curlews all day long. Throughout the music you'll hear the instruments playing the cries of Curlews and Lapwings (peewits), and there's an unsettling and desolate bleakness to this whole musical texture evoking the wind-battered, barren uplands of Curlew territory.
For Yeats the poems were all about the melancholy of a young man trying to fall in love (God only knows what Warlock was thinking), you know, allegory and so on. Everything in art usually is about stuff like that. But who cares about that? Not me. I wish all these artists would just cheer up, for Christ's sake. It's not as though they have to go to work or anything.
It's the latter which shows him up as being a bit on the vile side, especially if he happened to be your father. In the 1980s, years after pestering his elderly mother, former Christie's art expert turned gobby commentator Brian Sewell discovered that the father he never knew was Peter Warlock. Sewell, in his own words, was an illegitimate bastard, whose mother had been given a fiver by Warlock to have him aborted. Because he was one of those 'sex people', it seems as though Warlock handed out fivers quite frequently, and to the women who didn't spend the grubby note on a back street abortion, he just disowned them.
Sewell is justifiably angry and perfectly in his rights to tear Warlock's reputation to shreds. But as obnoxious as some of Warlock's actions may have been, Sewell is wrong to say that his old man was a 'minor composer', as in this interview. Having committed suicide aged 36, Peter Warlock almost certainly didn't reach his peak, but the originality of the music he did write has secured him a top spot in the development of British music in the early 20th century.
The five songs that make up The Curlew were written between 1916 and 1922, using poems by W.B.Yeats from two volumes of his poetry written at the turn of the 20th century - In the Seven Woods and The Wind Among the Reeds. Yeats grew up in County Sligo, where Curlews would have been a constant background sound, although very sadly not in the 21st century. When Warlock wrote the songs he was living in the middle of Wales, and again he would have been hearing Curlews all day long. Throughout the music you'll hear the instruments playing the cries of Curlews and Lapwings (peewits), and there's an unsettling and desolate bleakness to this whole musical texture evoking the wind-battered, barren uplands of Curlew territory.
For Yeats the poems were all about the melancholy of a young man trying to fall in love (God only knows what Warlock was thinking), you know, allegory and so on. Everything in art usually is about stuff like that. But who cares about that? Not me. I wish all these artists would just cheer up, for Christ's sake. It's not as though they have to go to work or anything.
I. He reproves of the Curlew
O Curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters in the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimm'd eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of wind.
II. The lover mourns for the loss of love
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.
III. The withering of the boughs
I cried when the moon was murmuring to the birds:
'Let peewit call and curlew cry where they will,
I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words,
For the roads are unending, and there is no place to my mind.'
The honey-pale moon lay low on the sleepy hill,
And I fell asleep upon lonely Echtge or streams.
[Refrain]
No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.
I know of the leafy paths the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake;
I know where a dim moon drifts,
where the Danaan kind
Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool
On the island lawns, their feet where the pale foam gleams.
[Refrain]
I know of the sleepy country, where swans fly round
Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.
A king and a queen are wandering there,
and the sound
Has made them so happy and hopeless, so deaf and so blind
With wisdom, they wander till all the years have gone by;
I know, and the curlew and peewit on Echtge of streams.
[Refrain]
V. He hears the cry of the sedge
I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round,
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West,
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep.
*
Bleak, bleak, bleak
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