Songs of ALL TIME

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 32, 20 January 1939, Page 11

Songs of ALL TIME

_ Famous songs refiect their age, perhaps, but have as well the universal touch that makes them live on beyond their time. In this new feature, the "Record" wiil give some of these deathiess songs of all languages, and tell their stories, ABOUT the time of the Norman Conquest,. there lived in Persia, a poet-scholar-mathe-matician-astronomer named Oraar Khayyam. A piece of this poet’s manuscript was seen by a middle-aged author named Ridward Fitzgerald. This Englishman, who was a college chum of the Tennyson brothers in their Cambridge days, was greatly interested in Persian poetry, and the sight of the manuscript in the Bodelian Library at Oxford led him to render such a translation of it into English, that his name and the poet’s will remain for ever indissolubly linked together, Here Fitzgerald’s genius as a iranslator appears at its height. He possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of reproducing on his reader the effect of the original. In his ‘‘Omar Khayyam’’ this is remarkably true. Published in 1859, the little book lay for months neglected, even by the translator’s own friends, until Rossetti discovered it in the fourpenny box of a sccond-hand bookseller, und Swinburne proclaimed its eenius to the world. The poem, after a while, uwltimately attracted very wide attention, but it was nat until thirtyseven years after its original publication that a composer, Liga Lehmann, turned her attention to it, and made a song cycle of some thirty of its quatrains, under the title "In a Persian Garden." The gem of this work for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass is unquestionably the tenor solo, "Ah! Moon of My Delight." At the first production of the work, at a private house, this solo was sung by the great Welsh tenor, Ben Davies. The other soloists were Mesdames Albani and Hilda Wilson, and David Bispham. In the intervening forty-odd years tenors of ali kinds have made this song their special fayourite. The verses have been transformed by the composer’s art into one of the most idyllic Jove songs in modern music. _. fhe words, together with the rhvitative verse, are: Ah, Love, could you and I with Fate conspire "To grasp the sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not scatter it in bits -and then ‘Remould it nearer to the heart's desire! Ah, moon of my delight, that knows no wane, The moon of heav'n is rising once agqainHow oft hereafier rising shall she lool Through this same garden after me-in vain. And when thyself with shining foot: shali pass Among the guests star-scatter'é on the grass, "And In thy. Joyous errand reach '. the spot . Where I made one-turn down an empty glass! ' Liza Lehmann’s "Ah, Moon of My Delight’ Is one of the features in "Music at Your’ Fire-' gise"? which wil be heard at 3YA on Tuesday, January 24.