Biographies of Philip Heseltine—known to all lovers of English song as Peter Warlock—inordinately dwell upon the uncertainties and unhappiness of a prolonged adolescence in which the sole brightness is the discovery of Delius' music and the unfolding of their guru-disciple relationship. The surviving correspondence bulks large and the biographer is obligated to air it, though the stations by which the wavering Philip Heseltine became the accomplished Peter Warlock are something of a trial. Indeed, his entire brief life remained a morass of self-doubt and complaints of creative impotence upended by classic manic-depressive behaviors so that the sudden crystallization of his unique genius toward the end of 1917 or the beginning of 1918, around the time of his return from Ireland where he spent a year in exile to avoid conscription, is startling and seemingly unexplainable by anything that had gone before. "I remember well my astonishment and delight at seeing those first published songs on my return from Italy in 1920," Cecil Gray, his boon companion and first biographer, noted, "—astonishment, not because I had ever doubted his potentialities or their ultimate efflorescence, but because they represented such a sudden and decisive advance on anything of his that I had hitherto seen." Of the songs Gray singles out—As ever I saw, Lullaby, Take, oh Take, My gostly fader, and The Bayley Berith the bell away—the last two seem to emanate from some enchanted demesne, remote but vivid. The original setting of Corpus Christi (for soprano, tenor, and mixed chorus a cappella) following in 1919 belongs with this group; Gray notes it as "one of the finest things he ever achieved." Constant Lambert, another intimate, left it on record that The Curlew and Corpus Christi were Warlock's favorites among his works. The composer's arrangement for soprano, baritone, and string quartet, made in 1927, is but a pale echo of the original, the wordless choral croon, which the quartet wanly replaces, being essential to its effect. The anonymous early 16th century poem leads us into a mysterious chamber richly hung in which, as the vocalists tell, a knight lies, "His woundes bleeding day and night. By the bedside there kneeleth a may, And she weepeth night and day." At the climax the altos and basses intone "By that bedside there standeth a stone: CORPUS CHRISTI written thereon" revealing the Passion as a medieval allegory mingled with a suggestion of the Philosophers' Stone to an eerily otherworldly fiat.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi