''Earth and Air and Rain'' is a
song cycle
A song cycle (german: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online''
The songs are either for solo voice ...
for baritone and piano by
Gerald Finzi
Gerald Raphael Finzi (14 July 1901 – 27 September 1956) was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata '' Dies natalis'' for solo voice and ...
(190156). It was composed between 1928 and 1935, and published in 1936 as his
Op. 15. It consists of settings of ten poems by
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...
(18401928).
It was premiered on 2 July 1945 at the
National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director o ...
, London by
Keith Falkner
Sir Donald Keith Falkner (1 March 1900 – 17 May 1994), known simply as Keith Falkner, was a distinguished English bass-baritone singer especially associated with oratorio and concert recital, who later became Director of the Royal College of M ...
(baritone) and
Howard Ferguson
George Howard Ferguson, PC (June 18, 1870 – February 21, 1946) was the ninth premier of Ontario, from 1923 to 1930. He was a Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1905 to 1930 who represented the eastern provincia ...
(piano).
A typical performance takes 30 minutes. The songs are:
# "Summer Schemes"
# "When I Set Out for
Lyonnesse
Lyonesse is a kingdom which, according to legend, consisted of a long strand of land stretching from Land's End at the southwestern tip of Cornwall, England, to what is now the Isles of Scilly in the Celtic Sea portion of the Atlantic Ocean. I ...
"
# "Waiting Both"
# "The Phantom"
# "So I Have Fared"
# "Rollicum-Rorum"
# "To Lizbie Browne"
# "The Clock of the Years"
# "In a Churchyard"
# "Proud Songsters"
The title of the cycle is taken from "Proud Songsters":'
The music critic
Stephen Banfield
Stephen David Banfield (born 1951) is a musicologist, music historian and retired academic. He was Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham from 1992 to 2003, and then Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Br ...
has written, "in some ways this is Finzi’s richest score". The cycle contains two of Finzi's best-known songs in "Rollicum-Rorum" and "To Lizbie Browne"; which the composer himself described as "the two worst in the set" - "an opinion which says more about Finzi’s introvert character than his artistic judgement".
Footnotes
References
External links
*
Song cycles by Gerald Finzi
1936 compositions
Classical song cycles in English
Musical settings of poems by Thomas Hardy
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