Скачать или смотреть Vaughan Williams: Dreamland, song for voice and piano (1898) with score

Performers: Sarah Fox (voice), Iain Burnside (piano)

Programme notes by Robert Cummings for AllMusic:
This early song by Vaughan Williams, while not striking out any new compositional path, was still rather adventurous for its day. The vocal works of the Victorian-era composers Stanford and Parry, who undeniably exerted influence on the young Vaughan Williams, were comparatively prim and emotionally cool alongside this somewhat sensual outpouring. The text here comes from the poem of the same title by Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894). Vaughan Williams had shown considerable admiration for the Rossetti family of poets: in 1903 he would set six poems of Christina's better-known brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882), under the collective title House of Life.

Dreamland is scored for voice and piano accompaniment. The text is elegiac in mood, lamenting the premature passing of a young woman, who rests "a perfect rest." After a brief introduction on piano, a ravishingly beautiful melody appears in the vocal line, in a lush post-Romantic, vaguely Rachmaninovian vein. The theme soars in its slow, mostly upward trajectory, auguring the long-breathed melodic style Vaughan Williams would exhibit in his Symphony No. 1, The Sea Symphony (1903 - 1909; rev. 1923). The song develops some tension, becoming more passionate and yearning towards the middle, and also sounding less fluent. The theme itself transforms as the music progresses, the accruing passions yielding several moments of ecstatic beauty. It is ironic that Christina Rossetti, a rather typical Victorian woman in her stringent religious and moral views, should have her poetry set to such sensually arresting music. Clearly, this is one of Vaughan Williams' earliest vocal successes.