After the protracted genesis of The Curlew, which occupied Warlock on and off from 1915 to 1922, the composition of Lillygay over July and August of the latter year is no less startling than the cycle's fluently subtle mastery in which the changes wrung upon its predominantly bimodal language deepen the import, song by song, of these vignettes of love gone tragically wrong and render the whole rather more than the sum of its parts. Drawn from an anthology of verse in Scots dialect compiled by his friend, poet, and critic Victor Neuberg (1883-1940), four of the poems are anonymous, though the fifth is acknowledged to be by Neuberg, and all are so neatly turned, with refrains (e.g., "A fal a falladdie fallee" or "With a double laddy double and for the double dow") suggesting parodies of authentic material, that one suspects a practiced hand rather than the vagaries of genuine folk song and puts one in mind of Cecil Gray's disarming remark that the settings "... are built on melodies which one would imagine had come straight out of folk-song collections, were it not for the fact that they are almost too suspiciously good to be authentic." Performed separately, the first number, "The Distracted Maid," is perhaps the most moving, as a girl in Bedlam croons again and again, "For I love my love because I know my love loves me" about a boy whose parents have sent him to sea, presumably to separate him from her. "Johnnie wi'the Tye" is the rolling stone which gathers no moss, of whom the abandoned girl protests "O, as he kittl'd me! But I forgot to cry." In "The Shoemaker," that artisan takes the maid who has come for a pair of shoes behind his bench "And there he has fitted his own pretty wench" to music in which Brian Collins discerned "a huge knowing wink that acknowledges the double entendre...," which he finds a "far more effective conclusion to the tale than the seven more verses of predictable content the poem provides." In "Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane" the abandoned mother utters a curse on the father, gone to sea, as she rocks her babe to a keening lament in which Warlock's bimodalism takes an acerbic turn. The lighthearted Rantum Tantum, celebrating a May morning with the hope "And may my love be true," seems an incongruous summing up, though its harmonic language suggests full closure to what has gone before.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

1.The Distracted Maid

Though each of the five songs in Lillygay may be performed separately, their cumulative impact—when performed as the composer intended, complete and without transpositions—renders their performance as a cycle preferable. Nevertheless, "The Distracted Maid, No. 1," looms as the most powerfully moving of them, if only because the lament of the Bedlamite maiden is unusual among the other all-too-predictable situations limned in the remaining songs (the abandoned mother, the shoemaker-seducer, etc.) while the drama of her wavering delusion and the sudden brief presentiment of her tragic reality ("But ah, unhappy maiden, that love you ne'er shall see") is heartwrenching. Cecil Gray, Warlock's boon companion and first biographer, noted, "...he achieves what so many composers of the folk-song school have so persistently attempted to achieve, but without success: namely, a style based upon folk-song, yet at the same time wholly original and personal, and also belonging to its own time—even in the fine work of Vaughan Williams, who has certainly achieved a personal art based upon folk-song, one feels a certain archaism, self-consciousness, and lack of inner vitality." It is probably coincidental that Bartók, whom Warlock befriended in Budapest the year before, paid a call at Cefn Bryntalch, the Heseltine estate in the Welsh countryside, in March 1922, after a concert appearance at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. There are similarities in the creative turns each composer visited upon the folk traditions of his respective nation. Of "The Distracted Maid," composed with the other Lillygay songs over July and August 1922, Gray remarked, "In all the volumes of actual folk-songs that have been published you will not find a more authentic folk-song melody, or a more beautiful one, with its lovely last clause rising up to F, on which it hovers for a moment like a bird, with wings extended, and then drops gently down to the ground. If the composer had been anonymous instead of pseudonymous, this melody would undoubtedly be accounted one of the finest pearls of English folk-song. But it is not only a lovely tune; it is also exquisitely wedded to the words and lends itself, moreover, to most effective contrapuntal, and particularly canonic, treatment. The accompaniment is beautifully wrought, and in the last verse, where the reality of her position breaks in momentarily around the fantasies that the poor girl has been weaving around her lover and herself there is a stroke of sheer imaginative genius worthy of Schubert himself."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi