Songs by Pepys

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 11

Songs by Pepys

VASTLY entertaining programme headed "And So To Music" (Pepys) came from 4YA recently. I fancy I have heard it before, from a northern station, but it bears repetition, being a nice admixture of excerpts from the’ famous Diary, and interludes of music as it might have been performed in Pepys’s own day. The music was appropriate and charming, but I would have liked a little more Pepys in the programme. Being rather short, it had to omit any interesting passages from the Diary dealing with

that subject which was one of those dearest to the writer’s heart ("Music and women I cannot but give way to"). Only once in the programme was Pepys mentioned as a composer, but in fact he wrote half-a-dozen or so songs ("Beauty Retire"; "Gaze Not on Swans"; "Great, Good and Just," etc.), and the original manuscripts of some of them are preserved in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College. It is fairly evident that, as well as being interested heart and soul in music-making and music-listen-ing, Pepys rather fancied himself as a composer. He must have begun taking lessons in composition with great ambitions, for he says "Mr. Berkenshaw .. .. who staid with me a great while talking of musique, and I am resolved to begin to learn of him to compose, and to begin to-morrow, he giving of me so great hopes that I shall soon do it." He seems to have proved an apt pupil, for later we find him "pricking down some things, and trying some conclusions upon my viall in order to the inventing a better theory of musique than hath yet been abroad; and I think verily I shall do it." Although one editor of the Diary says "There was always a bombastic quality about Pepys’s songs," it does seem that there is a case for resurrecting these songs, even if merely as musical curiosities. :