Program note
This song cycle came about because I discovered Walter de la Mare’s ‘John Mouldy’ and wanted to put it to music. I felt it needed a context and Sleep Tight – a mix of lullabies and something like the opposite – provides it.
In 1939, in the introduction to his edited collection, Animal Stories, de la Mare wrote the following memory of his son:
‘Many young and imaginative children are afraid of being alone in the dark – a cupboard ajar, a creaking staircase, an owl or a bat at the window, hobgoblins, nightmares. A small boy with tears rolling down his cheeks sat up on his pillow confessed to me once that he couldn’t sleep for terror because there was a bear under his bed. To console him I assured him on my honour that there wasn’t a real bear and certainly not an uncaged bear for miles and miles around. “But you see, Daddie,” he replied, “this isn’t a ‘real‘ bear!”‘
The text of ‘Owls: an epitaph’ was written by the composer, Edward Elgar, for a part song in 1907. His friend, August Jaeger (the ‘Nimrod’ of the Enigma Variations) decribed the poem as ‘frankly nihilistic’. My setting of Thomas Dekker’s ‘Golden Slumbers’ was composed in 2008 and is unaltered here, save for being transposed into a key that makes better sense in its new context.
A.F.