Maud

Five songs for tenor and orchestra with words by Tennyson

DCW 58
RT III/3
DCE 16

Composer: Frederick Delius
Author: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Maud, Delius's setting of sections from Tennyson's 1855 poem of the same name for tenor and orchestra, presents some difficulties for categorisation as a work. In Delius's autograph, no order is indicated for the separate songs. Delius never had them published together and rejected Heseltine's proposal for a performance in 1929. Nevertheless, the individual songs, lacking a performance history in the composer's lifetime, have subsequently been treated as a composite work, and therefore are assigned a single work number here. Detailed descriptions of the autograph score is given under sources; the ordering now given in the Collected Edition was determined by Beecham. British Library MS Mus. 1745/1/39 contains an incomplete draft of another setting of Tennyson's Maud, 'I shall have had my day', so Delius possibly contemplated a larger selection at some point, or never conceived of a single work comprising his songs.

Composition: 1891.

Instrumentation:

Orchestra : picc.fl., 2 fl., 2 ob., cor.ingl., 2 cl., cl.b., 2 fg., 4 cor., 2 tr., 3 trb., tb., timp., arp., str.

Soloist: T.

Sources

Sketch material

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, short score, sketch, fragment]

Sketch for a section of 'Go not, happy day', matching material on p. 40 of the Collected Edition.

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1745/2/10. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Autograph scores

[Classification: notated music, manuscript, autograph, score, fair copy]

This manuscript contains the manuscripts of the individual songs bound into the volume in the order of the published work (Beecham's), though not ordered that way by Delius: i) 'Birds in the high Hall-garden', no title page; ii) 'I was walking a mile', no title page; iii) Go not happy day, with title page reading "Maud"|"Go not happy day"|Fritz Delius|1891; iv) 'Rivulet crossing my ground', title page reading "Maud"|"Rivulet crossing my stream"|Fritz Delius|1891; v) 'Come into the garden, Maud', title page reading "Come into the garden, Maud"|Fritz Delius|1891. Threlfall notes that the last item is less complete in editing than the previous four, with some details in the original pencil not inked over (see Threlfall's preface to vol. 16 of the Collected Edition).

GB-Lbl (British Library, London) MS Mus. 1745/1/4. Link to external resource

British Library source record

Collected Edition

[Classification: notated music, print, score, first edition, complete]

Editor: Robert Threlfall

Boosey & Hawkes, London 1990.

Last changed 2020-10-26T14:17:01+00:00