Songs of Travel

Songs of Travel is a song cycle of nine songs originally written for baritone voice composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with poems selected from the Robert Louis Stevenson collection of the same name. A complete performance of the entire cycle lasts between 20 and 24 minutes.

Originally written for voice and piano, Vaughan Williams orchestrated the first, third, and eighth movements while his assistant, Roy Douglas, later orchestrated the remaining songs using the same instrumentation. The orchestral version has often been recorded, but not always with Douglas acknowledged as its orchestrator.

Notable performers of this cycle include Bryn Terfel, Sir Thomas Allen and John Shirley-Quirk.

ong Listing

#The Vagabond
#Let Beauty Awake
#The Roadside Fire
#Youth and Love
#In Dreams
#The Infinite Shining Heavens
#Whither Must I Wander?
#Bright is the Ring of Words
#I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope (only to be performed in public after the eight other songs)

All of the songs in the cycle exist in at least two keys, as all of the songs were transposed upwards to create a version for tenor voice.

About the Songs

The "Songs of Travel," written between 1901 and 1904, represent Vaughan Williams's first major foray into song-writing. Drawn from a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson poems of the same name, the cycle offers a quintessentially British take on the "wayfarer cycle." A world-weary yet resolute individual, Stevenson’s and Vaughan Williams’s traveler shows neither the naivety of Schubert’s miller in "Die Schöne Müllerin" nor the destructive impulses of the heroes of Schubert’s "Winterreise" and Mahler’s "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen."

"The Vagabond" introduces the traveler, with heavy "trudging" chords in the piano depicting a rough journey through the English countryside. The vocal line in "Let Beauty Awake" unfolds over long arabesques in the piano, lending a Gallic flavor to the song, even though Vaughan Williams would not study in France until 1908. The kaleidoscopic shifts in mood continues in "The Roadside Fire," with a lively accompaniment in the piano leading to a playful atmosphere for the first part of the song. The latter half of the song turns more serious as the traveler recalls private moments with his love, until the sunny music of the opening returns.

"Youth and Love" depicts a determined youth leaving his beloved as he ventures into the world; particularly notable is the exotic accompaniment of the second stanza, revealing bird songs, waterfalls, and trumpet fanfares. The fifth song, "In Dreams," is very much the dark center of the cycle—the midnight hour of sorcery in this nocturnal cycle. The anguish in the vocal line, heard in its chromaticism and in its awkward modulations, is doubled in the piano and reinforced by the tolling of low bells heard throughout. The mood brightens in the succeeding song, "The Infinite Shining Heavens," offering yet another view of the immutability of nature.

"Whither must I wander" offers the first of Vaughan Williams's many "big tunes"; the essentially strophic song recalls happy days of the past and reminds us that while the world will be renewed, our traveler cannot relive his past. However, consolation is offered in "Bright is the ring of words": we are reminded that while all wanderers (and artists) must eventually die, the beauty of their work shall remain as a testament to those who remain. The final song, "I have trod the upward and the downward slope," was discovered among VW's papers after his death and was added to the cycle only in 1960. The whole cycle is recapitulated in just four phrases—a miniature scena of recitative and arioso, quoting four of the previous songs in the cycle before ending with the opening chords, suggesting that the traveler's journey has just begun.

References

* [http://artsongcentral.com/2007/songs-of-travel/ Sheet music for the first eight songs]