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War music by Elgar and Stanford

Submarines (Elgar - Kipling)

4th February 1915

The German government proclaims a war zone about the British Isles and declares its intention of sinking without warning any enemy merchant ships found in this zone.

1st May 1915

The "Lusitania" is sunk.

Writer Rudyard Kipling is commissioned to write a small book about the Royal Navy, The Fringes of the Fleet. It contains a section called Submarines, including one poem.

27th September 1915

Lieut. John Kipling, 18-year-old son of Rudyard Kipling, is reported missing at the Battles of Loos. His body is not discovered during his father's lifetime.

1st February 1917

The German Government announced it would "put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean". Immediately, friendly relations were broken off and on 6th April 1917, the United States declared war.

June 1917

Elgar conducts the first performance of his new song cycle The Fringes of the Fleet for four baritones. Such was its immediate success that it is recorded on 4th July 1917 at the HMV studios in Hayes, Middlesex.

It is performed for the recording, as it was on the stage of the Coliseum theatre in London, by a quartet of baritones comprising Charles Mott, Frederick Stewart, Frederick Henry, and Harry Barratt. The studio orchestra is conducted by the composer.

Alice, Lady Elgar, writes of that day in her diary:

E[dward]. and A[lice]. started just before 9 for Hayes, car sent for us. Very nice drive there - front window open, pleasant cool air - very fast driver. All so kind & nice at Gramophone, & much work done for the records. They shd. be good. Very heavy rain. Lunch there with nice kind little goblin man & nice nMr Darby & Mott, who motored with us to Coliseum. A[lice] home by tube, E[dward] had a very great ovation again.

Fare Well (Stanford - Newbolt)

This was made by the Columbia Graphophone Company in late 1923. It was the very last of Stanford's own recordings. Sung by the baritone Harold Williams and a male voice quartet and accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, it is the final song of the five which make up the 1910 cycle Songs of the Fleet. This was a companion set to the Songs of the Sea, which contained Stanford's immensely popular setting of "Drake's Drum".

Set originally for baritone, full chorus and orchestra, it dates from before the Great War, and the sentiments of Sir Henry Newbolt's poem are very much those which were current at the time. Stanford's superb setting and performance are deeply moving. The style of the singers in this performance is from another age but the use of an all-male chorus gives this performance a very special sound. There is a small cut, indicated below by square brackets. Stanford could have played the piece faster in order to accomodate it complete on the record; instead he chose to maintain the correct speed.

The words of the poem are:

Mother with unbowed head
Hear thou across the sea.
The farewell of the dead,
The dead who died for thee.
Greet them again with tender words and grave,
For, saving thee, themselves they could not save.

To keep the house unharmed
Their fathers built so fair,
Deeming endurance armed
Better than brute despair,
They found the secret of the word that saith
"Service is sweet, for all true life is death."

[So greet thou well they dead
Across the homeless sea,
And be thou comforted
Because they died for thee.]
Far off they served, but now their deed is done
For evermore their life and thine are one.

As with Elgar, this is only one of Stanford's war compostions. His most notable is, perhaps, his setting of The Last Post.