An early draft of Love Verses from The Song of Solomon was among a handful of works—Bush Music and Train Music were others—which prompted Cyril Scott to remark, "At an age when Wagner was writing offensively like Meyerbeer, Grainger was already writing like himself... " Scott, with Norman O'Neill, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, and Grainger were among the English-speaking contingent at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in the late 1890s—Grainger's tenure lasted from 1895 to 1899. More for convenience than for any marked affinity they were lumped together as "the Frankfurt Gang." Grainger was sixteen when he made Scott's acquaintance and the difference in ages—Scott was 19—placed Scott in the position of a perpetually startled would-be mentor, though both, with their friend Gardiner, were possessed of an independence prompting a loathing for the Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven fare which was a staple of conservatory teaching in composition and performance. Scott and Grainger were both gifted pianists. Looking back, Scott recalled Grainger "Swerving away from his Handelian tendencies he began to show a harmonic modernism which was astounding in so young a boy, and at times excruciating to our pre-Debussyan ears; and, strange to say, he began writing in a whole-tone scale without knowing of Debussy's existence." Love Verses, however, uses the pentatonic scale and modal writing to achieve a distanced exoticism levitated with melodic effusiveness to ravishing effect. Grainger despised religion and regarded the Bible with virulent scorn, but was moved by hearing Quilter reading parts of The Song of Solomon and was at least as taken with its irregular rhythms as with its lush eroticism. Whitman's poetry was also an enthusiasm of the moment, and in both he found expressive possibilities in freedom from the metric steadiness which had guided poets from Homer to Tennyson, a freedom which the new century would call vers libre, and which he was eager to adapt to music. Shifting time signatures suggest the tyro—John Bird, Grainger's biographer, notes," Percy's works were the object of much scorn and derision among his fellows and mentors" at the Hoch—while the rhythmic fluency and eerie coloring of an harmonium blending with the chamber orchestra proclaim an ear alive to the most entrancing possibilities. Composed over 1899 and 1901, just after Grainger left the Hoch Conservatory, the work's felicities belie the difficult circumstances of its composition, as Grainger struggled to establish himself as a pianist in London to support his invalid mother.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide