Amid the drinking songs, the evocations of mediaeval mysticism, the macabre visions of harrowing "grisliness," the apparitions of an Elizabethan dandy in Modern dress, there is throughout Warlock's oeuvre a Romantic vein in idylls of ideal femininity—for instance, There is a Lady sweet and kind, Passing By, Fair and True, After Two Years, among others—glimpsed, adored, and, as often as not, just out of reach. As ever I saw, composed in 1918, is atypical in ending with the singer's triumphant assertion, "Therefore I dare this boldly say, I shall have the best and fairest may [maid] That ever I saw." The anonymous 16th century poem, nonetheless, calls up a mirage of graces—"She is gentle and also wise, Of all others she beareth the prize... To hear her sing, to see her dance! She will the best herself advance... Nature in her hath wonderly wrought, Christ never such another bought That ever I saw." After a distracted adolescence spent agonizing over whether he might have it in him to compose, and a year spent in Ireland to avoid conscription, Philip Heseltine returned to London in 1918 with a sheaf of songs, including As ever I saw, in which his peculiar genius is manifest at full strength for the first time, and which he offered to the publisher Winthrop Rogers under the pseudonym Peter Warlock. As Philip Heseltine, he had embroiled Rogers in an acrimonious controversy over the merits of Bernard van Dieren's Netherlands Melodies for piano, which Rogers had refused. Van Dieren (1887-1936) was a polymath who numbered composition among his disparate pursuits, a friend of Busoni's (who took a keen interest in van Dieren's music), a charismatic personality who made a deep and lasting impression upon artists as different as Walton, Lambert, Bliss, Epstein, Cecil Gray, and Heseltine—who adopted him as his master after their first meeting in 1916. Gray notes, "Under the influence of van Dieren a sudden complete change took place. [Philip] learnt to purify and organize his harmonic texture by means of contrapuntal discipline, and the thick, muddy chords which characterized the early songs gave place to clear and vigorous part-writing." Though less than immediate, the change, when it came, possessed the character of a sudden crystallization in which a new and winsomely brilliant musical personality stepped forth toward the end of 1917, which Rogers—momentarily deceived by the pseudonym—was the first to recognize, embrace, and publish as songs by Peter Warlock.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi