1RF2 O Sprite Heroic
The Trinty Consort sing the words of Philip Sidney set to music by Byrd, Mundy, Ferrabosco, Pilkington, Vautor, Ward and Youll.

read the liner notes by Gavin Alexander

Although no longer availabe on disc you can download the tracks for only £0.79 each or £7.99 for the whole disc from [iTunes Plus]

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was perhaps the single most important writer of the golden age of English Literature. Despite, and perhaps because of. his premature death in 1586 his influence was felt across the range of prose fiction, poetry, and drama for many years. A key patron of scholars, poets, musicians, and artists when alive, he became after his death the central figure in the English writer's modern pantheon, the founding father of the great outburst of activity which produced the writing of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne. Sidney introduced many techniques, forms, and genres not seen before in English writing. His poetry was at the time revolutionary in its successful attempt to modernise the style and language of English verse by serious engagement with the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and of modern Spain, France, and Italy. Not at the time the world language it now is, English had lagged behind its European rivals in undergoing a needful renaissance. Sidney more than any other writer made the difference. His popularity as a source and a subject of English song is witness to this.

Sidney was born in 1554, in the reign of Queen Mary. With political astuteness he was named after his godfather Philip II, King of Spain and the new husband of "Bloody Mary". His father Henry Sidney had been one of Edward VI's closest friends. His mother Mary was the daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who had tried to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. Philip was always a pawn in the efforts of his family to capture the Queen, Catholic or Protestant. When Elizabeth came to the throne, her close relationship with Sidney's uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, meant that Sidney and his father stayed close to the centre of power. Although one of the most brilliant men of his age he never achieved the recognition he deserved from his Queen. In part the clamour of the many foreign dignitaries and princes impressed by Sidney is likely to have irritated her. Philip suffered when his family made him the mouthpiece for its objections to Elizabeth's proposals to marry the French Duke of Alençon. The rusticated Sidney made the most of his leisure and, staying at the Wiltshire estates of his sister, newly married to the Earl of Pembroke, began work around 1580 on a body of stories and poems written for her as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. He later revised and extended the prose narrative, but the work already contained some 77 poems in an unprecedented variety of forms and moods. Later too came Sidney's celebrated sonnet sequence, the first in English, Astrophil and Stella. Cast as a narrative of love acknowledged but doomed, the 108 sonnets are interspersed with 11 songs, in which we hear the voices of Stella"star" and her lover Astrophil "star-lover". The work seems to have had some autobiographical basis. Sidney puns unrelentingly on the word "rich", and the 108 sonnets match the number of unsuccessful suitors for Homer's Penelope in the absence of her Odysseus/Ulysses. Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, beautiful, talented, and charming, would seem the natural candidate without this evidence if we were to look for an unattainable woman who might have captured Sidney's heart. For 15 years after his death she remained the muse for a generation of poets and musicians, but the ill-fated rebellion of her brother the Earl of Essex, and her subsequent divorce from Lord Rich and remarriage to her acknowledged lover Lord Mountjoy, seem to have dented her popularity.

Sidney's works circulated only in manuscript during his lifetime. It was not uncommon for writers who planned a career of public service to keep their literary efforts somewhat hidden in this way. But after Sidney's death a pressure to print his works built up and was recognised by his closest friend, the poet Fulke Greville, who was responsible for the first printing of the Arcadia in 1590. Sidney's sister then took control of his works and, in part chivvied by printers who issued pirate editions, she produced a series of authorised texts culminating in a 1598 volume of the Arcadia which contained in addition Astrophil and Stella, the Defence of Poesy, and other occasional pieces including an important collection of musical verse, the "Certain Sonnets". With Sidney's collected works finally in print his myth was complete, and his influence on the younger generation of writers sudden and immense. The composers who set his poems did so partly in recognition of their popularity, but also because they offered what was needed. Though the music of the 1570s and 1580s was of a different, though rapidly developing, style to that of the 1590s and 1600s, the verse Sidney imagined, or heard, sung, was perfect for the new madrigalian part songs and solo lute songs.

William Byrd (1543-1623) is a figure who brings together many of Sidney's interests and contradictions. Byrd also bridges the period of Sidney's life and "afterlife". Sidney died fighting for the Protestant cause in the Netherlands and yet recent scholarship has shown us that this key Protestant politician sought out friendships with Catholics in his personal life. The greatest of English musicians would have been of interest to Sidney the musical poet. Sidney studied speculative music, the science of the music of the spheres, in Venice as part of his "grand tour" in the 1570s. He seems to have been involved in the preparations for at least one concert in Salisbury, close to his sister's estates at Wilton, and we have letters in which he encourages his brother Robert in his musical studies and tells a young friend "with your good voice to sing my songs, for they will one well become another". Family accounts detail expenditure on singing lessons and lutes for his brother and sister, and while we have no concrete evidence that Sidney was a performer, we have the evidence of his poems that he wrote words for music. In this activity Sidney was striving for a Renaissance ideal of the harmonious marriage of poetry and music in song, but it was also a practical matter of providing material for entertainment amongst family and friends. Most importantly, the writing of verse appropriate to music provided material for the next generation of composers, as this recording demonstrates. Virtually all of the songs from Astrophil and Stella were seized by Elizabethan and Jacobean composers and set to music. Sidney also used songs as models, writing English words to the tunes of Italian, Spanish, and Dutch songs, a demanding discipline central to the development of Sidney's skill as a poet, and to the rapidly developing rules of English verse. Sidney writes the first feminine endings in English poetry, and he writes them because they are demanded by the Italian madrigal he is writing his words for. In Sidney's brilliant Defence of Poesy he offers a telling definition of poetry, "words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music". It is highly likely that Byrd would have come to the attention of Sidney, for they had friends and interests in common. A manuscript setting by Byrd of the lyric "O Lord, how vain are all our frail delights" (a song for voice and viol consort not included in the present recording ) preserves a late poem by Sidney which is found nowhere else and helps perhaps to explain why it is Byrd who is the first great English artist to mourn Sidney in published work. Byrd's setting of Sidney's songs from Astrophil and Stella predate the first printing (in 1591) of a work which because of its subject matter had a tightly controlled circulation in manuscript. And Byrd's texts are very good, with few of the mistakes and misreadings common elsewhere. He is clearly at this point very close to the Sidney circle.

Sidney's fictions are full of music. As we shall see, Stella sings, and the Arcadia is punctuated by moments where love-lorn characters sing to the lute or viol, fitting their words to popular tunes as Sidney had done. Penelope's voice seems to have been a fine one. Sidney writes about it, and in 1597 the French lutenist Charles Tessier attempted to win the patronage of her brother by writing his volume of Airs de Cour for her. When her second husband died, the composer Coprario published a volume of mourning songs, Funeral Tears (1606), explicitly for her to sing. If Sidney did love Penelope Rich, and if that love was returned, then it is in song that we should expect it to be commemorated.

The two Byrd publications used in this recording are at the start of a period of great activity in the musical printing shops. Musical book buyers of the 1570s and 1580s collected volumes printed in Italy, or copied collections of songs into manuscript partbooks, sometimes replacing the words with English texts. There had always been popular ballads and songs, but a market was developing for English secular art song, and this market was addressed by Byrd as the composer of several volumes and the encourager of others (Byrd alone held the patent for music publishing between 1585 and 1596). Byrd is typical in his range of experimentation with new and old elements, developing his style with techniques from traditional polyphony and from the less formal madrigalian style already popular with English amateur musicians. Many of Byrd's secular songs belong to a more English category which has recently been christened consort song, being written for solo voice and viol consort. But the boundaries are permeable: some of Byrd's part songs have inner parts which can be played or sung, and remain accompanied solo songs. This widespread devotion to consort song is evidenced also in what manuscript partbooks (often with words only in the top line) tell us about the performance of Italian madrigals in England, and in the printing of lute songs from 1596 on, with the minimal voice and lute parts often supplemented by bass and other lines which could be played or sung. There was much fluidity between the different genres and unpredictable influences result. Styles and techniques from a variety of origins will collaborate in single songs. Elements manipulated range from the mathematical sort of polyphony to the homophony (all voices in rhythmic unison) of popular part songs. Often simpler material, perhaps of popular derivation, will be restricted to one line with the others dancing around it, a manner seen in much Byrd. Points of imitation are used between parts with motifs in the top line echoed or predicted in the other parts or the accompaniment.

Two central issues of ideology fertilise English secular song in the period. Both concern the relationship between words and music. Firstly, a fundamental Reformist zeal towards attention to words and against musical embellishment meant that English (or Protestant) song was more apt to listen to its words than Italian (or Catholic). Secondly, the Greek ideal of poetry as music was being constantly reinterpreted. In the madrigal music paints individual words and the mood of the whole. In the Italian new music of the 1600s, in French experiments in the 1570s and 1580s, and in the English lute song, music allows the words to speak with a more natural, rhetorical, intonation and rhythm. One Byrd song, "Constant Penelope", witnesses this climate in a most interesting fashion. Another important issue was the possibility of setting, as in ballads and popular songs, the successive stanzas of a long poem. Musical complexity will make this difficult, and the challenge was for composers to match the words of a number of stanzas. In return, the desire for strophic song texts actually had a key influence on poetic procedure, as words were written in the sort of parallel structures which would enable the same music to interact significantly with different words in successive stanzas.

Byrd perhaps recognised that with the death of Philip Sidney England had lost a major contributor to this development. Sidney's funeral in early 1587 was one of the most elaborate non-royal funerals ever seen. Hundreds of people were given their place in a complex and symbolic procession through the streets of London, which was depicted in an elaborate frame by frame engraving on sale soon after. The Universities printed anthologies of commemorative verse in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and popular broadside accounts of the funeral and of the new national hero's life and death were also printed. Byrd's 1588 volume, Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety, was an early contribution to this hagiographical vogue and predates the serious efforts of English poets, witnessed in the collection The Phoenix Nest (1593) and in Edmund Spenser's Complaints (1591) and Astrophel (1595). For Byrd's volume is a commemoration of Sidney, mimicking areas of Sidney's life as a poet who translated Psalms and wrote sonnets and songs in its title and in its four sections, Psalms; Sonnets and Songs (including "O you that hear this voice" and "Constant Penelope"); Songs of Sadness and Piety; and The Funeral Songs of Sir Philip Sidney. The two "funeral songs" which close the volume may have been written by Sidney's friend Edward Dyer, or by Thomas Watson as if in Dyer's voice: in one early manuscript version, the line "thy friend here living dieth" reads "thy dier living dieth". This commemorative design of a musical volume is, as is so much in the story of Sidney's life and death, both unprecedented and the source of much imitation.

"O that most rare breast" is an unrhymed sonnet which Byrd sets in four sections as if it were rhymed on the English pattern, lines 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, and 13-14. Although this song exists in a manuscript form, probably prior to its printing, as a solo song with consort accompaniment, it seems clearly envisaged as a full part song. To a lesser extent this is true also of "Come to me grief for ever", which is given a simpler treatment befitting its plainer lyric. A repeated musical rhythm for each phrase in the top part, a formally quantitative treatment of the Aristophanic metre of the words, enables six stanzas (the last repeating the first) to be set to the same music. This approach is likely to represent the sort of musical setting Sidney would have favoured. The metre is one used by Sidney in "Certain Sonnets" 25, and an overt tribute to his poetry seems to be intended. © GAVIN ALEXANDER (from the liner notes for Beulah 1RF2 O SPRITE HEROIC)