The Passionate Shepherd, for voice & piano (from Seven Songs of Summer)

"As for me, I am at rock bottom—unable either to write anything or to sell the trash and drivel I have managed to knock up during the past few months," Warlock wrote his new friend and collaborator, poet Bruce Blunt, on September 12, 1928. "There is a frightful slump in the music-publishing business—even the Oxford Press has lost too heavily in the past twelve months to be able to pursue their spendthrift policy." Well before the Wall Street crash of October 1929 spread worldwide financial ruin, the English economy had entered dire straits, making Warlock's vie de Bohème impossible. Small oases of relief highlighted overarching catastrophe. In May 1928 Warlock broke an ankle alighting from a train at Eynsford, obliging him to remain in bed and sober—a fortnight spent fulfilling a commission from his friend and boon companion of former years, Cecil Gray, transcribing the prolix score of Gray's first opera, Deirdre, in vocal score with accompaniment arranged for two pianos. By autumn the Eynsford idyll became too expensive to maintain. "As soon as I can pay off the hundred quid I owe this place... I shall clear out and go to London in the hope of finding some menial job that will enable me to drink, occasionally, a few pints of beer." When he returned to London the following year he brought, among other things, a sheaf of Seven Songs of Summer for voice and piano, composed in a burst through July 1928—a collection, not a cycle—intended to be performed together in score order, the Passionate Shepherd, followed by The Contented Lover, Youth, The Sweet o' the Year, Tom Tyler, Eloré Lo, and The Droll Lover. As no publisher would take them together, they were sold piecemeal to several for whatever cash Warlock could squeeze out of them. Hand-in-hand with financial distress loomed a sense of artistic bankruptcy. Passing By is a new version of the 1919 setting of There is a Lady Sweet and Kind; to 1928 we owe the full orchestra version of the Capriol Suite, composed in 1926; from 1928, too, come the duet version of The Bailey Berith the Bell Away and choral arrangements of the early songs Lullaby and Mourn No Moe. Set to Marlowe's familiar "Come live with me, and be my love," The Passionate Shepherd is Warlock rechauffée in his closest approach to the Elizabethan swaggerer that this Faust for the jazz age almost resembles a surprising disappointment.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi