Though often described as song cycles, the two sets of Peterisms are nothing so ambitious but haphazard collections. This is particularly true of the First Set, whose three songs not only have no musical or subject connection, but are stylistically quite different. Composed in 1922 at Cefn Bryntalch, the family estate in Wales—whither Warlock repaired after the provoked fiasco overtaking his editorship of The Sackbut left him face down in a Paris gutter—they were, as the composer confided to Delius, "imbecile enough" to score a little cash. The title, according to Ian Copley, in The Music of Peter Warlock: A Critical Survey (London, 1979), is a spinoff of contemporary advertising: "A well-known firm of brewers had created an errand-boy character named Peter, who, from time to time, gave tongue to amusingly perky sayings (in their advertisements) which were headed Peterisms. These appealed to Warlock's sense of fun, and he adopted the title as a suitable collective noun to cover some of his more frivolous items." Chopcherry, the first song, is a reworking of Whenas the rye from 1918, setting a poem by George Peele (1556-1596), whose play, The Old Wives Tale, in the character Huanebango, lent Warlock one of the favorites among his several pseudonyms, Huanebango Z. Palimpsest. The revision, while still joyously leaping, mutes the ecstasy of the initial setting, compounding the air of arrière pensée in its string quartet arrangement, though Warlock thought it "fresher and altogether nearer the spirit of the words." To a poem attributed to Peele's contemporary, John Fletcher, "A Sad Song"—of which a string quartet version was also made—plumbs no depths, hardly straying from a tone of wistful regret: "Lay a garland on my hearse Of the dismal yew; Maidens, willow branches bear; Say I died true." Rutterkin seems cast in the mold of Warlock's several other drinking songs, though its unsteady rhythm—Copley noted the Bartókian quality of the rhythmic deployment—and polymodal clashes lend the derelict toper a sinister cast as piercing cries of "Hoyda, hoyda, hoyda! Like a Rutterkin, hoyda!" seal each of its three stanzas. The anonymous 16th century poem tells how "Rutterkin is come unto our town In a cloak without a coat or gown Save ragged hood to cover his crown...." The riot of Away to Twiver is surpassed while this Rutterkin looms as a most unpleasant drinking companion. The Oxford English Dictionary notes Rutterkin as "A swaggering gallant or bully."

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi

1.Chopcherry

Writing to his friend and confidant, Colin Taylor, of the recently published Whenas the rye reach to the chin, Warlock remarked, "Don't let that song get too popular, for I have done a much better setting of the same delightful poem—this is altogether fresher and nearer the spirit of the words." Prone to dismiss his productions as "rubbish," "drivel," "potboilers," and the like, this is one of the composer's few enthusiastic responses to his own work—and one with which the listener acquainted with both may well disagree. The later, 1922, setting, titled Chopcherry, published as No. 1 of the first set of Peterisms (with A Sad Song and Rutterkin)—especially in the version with string quartet made the same year—mutes the ecstatic, exclamatory rush of the initial 1918 setting with a sentimental flutter which places it very close in ambience to Candlelight: A Cycle of Nursery Jingles composed the following year. Among Candlelight's dozen miniatures several evoke the world of childhood with exquisite charm, while others skirt the maudlin—not always successfully. The overall effect is, therefore, equivocal, a response which Chopcherry may provoke. One's ambivalence originates with the composer, who seems never to have to terms with it. Cecil Gray, his boon companion and first biographer, quoted "a little fragment scribbled on a piece of paper which was found among his things..." after his suicide in 1930, aged 36—"When I see, and smell, a crowd of Battersea children swarming round the door of Stephenson's bakery, I am minded with disgust of a swarm of obscene flies hovering over a clot of dung in the roadway. But when I turn away there sweeps over me the unspeakable poignancy of the Good Shepherd and His Lambs." During the period when Chopcherry and Candlelight were composed, Warlock—after losing editorship of The Sackbut—returned to Cefn Bryntalch, the family estate in Wales, where his mother cared for his putative son, Nigel Heseltine, whose own account of the matter, Capriol for Mother: a memoir of Philip Heseltine (London: Thames Publishing, 1992), raises more questions than it answers. The story of living in the same house and dining daily with the remote stranger he claimed as father accords chillingly with other oddments of the Warlock biography. The little boy largely ignored by Philip Heseltine and never acknowledged as kin casts into lurid relief the obsessive evocations of childhood which are such an affecting—and ambiguous—strand of the Warlock oeuvre.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi