Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
These are the final lines of Joy by Lisel Mueller, a poem about mortality and how those blissful moments in life make you aware of all that will, someday, be lost . It begins with the line Don’t cry, it’s only music, an instruction that applies in particular to singing or listening to Stanford’s The Blue Bird. What makes this part-song’s simple statement “I just saw a bird” so moving, elevating it into a masterpiece of word setting and choral writing?
The Blue Bird (i.e a bird that appears blue and of no particular species) is No. 3 of Stanford’s Eight part-songs, op. 119, all of them settings of Mary Coleridge (1861-1907). Mary Coleridge, great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was better known in her lifetime as a novelist but her fresh and direct poetry, with a touch of mysticism, was admired by Stanford and Parry. Both were friends of Mary’s father, Arthur Duke Coleridge (founder of the London Bach Choir) and were frequent visitors to the family home at 12, Cromwell Place in South Kensington. Both composers were very upset by Mary’s sudden death in 1907 from appendicitis. Parry was first to react musically, setting seven of her poems as songs for voice and piano in his English Lyrics, Ninth Set, published in 1909. Stanford followed a year later: the associations with the memory of Mary are very strong. I believe. Performed in sequence within the op. 119 set, the connection of The Blue Bird to Mary herself becomes evident. No. 2 in the set, Farewell, my joy seems to prepare what follows textually and harmonically. Here is the last verse, from the poem that Mary entitled Hail and farewell:
Hail and farewell, my joy! If I might give
To one sweet friend the rapture that I miss,
Read in her eyes that ecstasy of bliss,
Tho’ death were in my own, I yet should live.
Mary Coleridge first published her poem L’Oiseau Bleu under the pseudonym Anodos in 1897. It appeared under her real name, still with the French title in the posthumous anthology Poems (1908)1, which ran through four reprints within six months. There are many analyses of the poem online, likewise of Stanford’s setting. Here’s one from singer and music teacher Walter Bitner:
Coleridge’s poem captures a single moment in two quatrains, in the manner of a Japanese haiku. There is nothing extraneous; the poem’s great beauty lies in its direct expression of natural beauty and its power to evoke a strong impression in the imagination of the reader (and for the song of course, the singers and listeners). The poet carefully identifies the subject of the poem as “I” so that as each of us reads or hears it, we see this image in our mind’s eye as if we ourselves are the witness of the event.
In Stanford’s setting the choir’s opening chords provide a cool description of the poem’s setting: The lake lay blue below the hill, and over this, the soprano soloist flies in pianissimo with the single word blue. For a scarce four minutes, this bird flies by: the soprano’s melody swoops gracefully, rising and falling above the choir, sometimes blending with what her peers are singing, sometimes distinctly climbing high above. Blue in blue. There is no final cadence: this bird simply flies off into the distance on the fifth of a minor seventh chord, leaving the scene without resolving.
It is pure impressionism. https://walterbitner.com/2020/12/01/the-blue-bird/
The inconclusive ending of The Blue Bird places the work in esteemed company, including Chopin’s most sorrowful Mazurka, op. 17 no. in A minor and Child falling asleep from Schumann’s Kinderszenen. Stanford chose the key of G flat major, a rare key mostly used for piano music, e.g. two Etudes by Chopin, Impromptus by Chopin and Schubert, a Prelude by Rachmaninoff and Debussy’s prelude La fille aux cheveux de lin. This last example dates from 1909/1910, the same year as Stanford’s Op. 119. The harmonic language of Debussy’s prelude is simpler than most of this other works but employs many non-standard formulations. As does The Blue Bird with its widespread use of chord inversions and secondary sevenths. Was Stanford briefly under the Gallic influence, prompted by the poem’s French title?2 French composers have also been famous for associating musical notes and keys with the colours. G flat (or F sharp) – as you may have already guessed – coincides with the blue and violet part of the spectrum.
As Portsmouth Baroque Choir began rehearsing The Blue Bird in September, a chance reading of ‘The blue of distance’, an essay in A Field guide to getting lost by Rebecca Solnit3 suggested to me other associative layers at play in the words and music, especially in the word ‘blue’. Our lives are surrounded by the colour blue but apart from mould, some flowers, precious stones and manufactured dyes or paints, nothing tangible has that colour. Here she gives as poetic a description as you will find of the Rayleigh scattering law:4
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water... This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
Blue lies at the far edge of what can be seen: “horizons, remote mountain ranges, anything far away… the colour of where you can never go”. Wishing to render the world as it appeared to the human eye, European painters in 15th began to capture ‘the blue of distance’, using it as another “means of giving depth and dimension to their work”, occasionally overdoing it so even before your eye reaches the vanishing point of the picture there are “blue sheep, blue shepherds, blue houses, blue hills, a blue road, a blue cart”. She gives as an example Hans Memling’s triptych of the Resurrection ca. 1490.
Just above the heads of the brown-haired figures is the near shore of a lake:
The lake is blue and beyond it are blue hills, as though there were three realms, the heaven whose sunset colors the floating figure is entering, the many coloured earth below and the faraway blue realm that is neither.
Another example is Joachim Patenier’s painting of St Jerome in the wilderness:
Jerome crouches in a ragged-roofed hovel… and behind him much of the world is blue, blue river, blue rocks, blue hills, as though he were in exile not from civilization, but from this particular celestial shade. However, like one of the figures in Memling’s painting, Jerome is clad in soft blue, as are so many Virgin Marys, as though they were clad in the faraway, as though some part of this ambiguous faraway had moved forward.
In the same way that Stanford’s compositional art extends the madrigal tradition through Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms, it is not too fanciful, I believe, to see the writing of Mary Coleridge and her contemporaries absorbing centuries of visual as well as textual imagery. In this way, consciously or otherwise, Stanford portrays Mary’s free soul as “a bird whose wings were palest blue” (albeit masculine) and sets the words to a beautiful, soaring melodic line given to a soprano solo, repeated for the words “it caught his image”, soaring upward, if not in the manner of a resurrection then in heavenwards flight.
The Blue Bird is usually viewed as standing apart stylistically from Stanford’s other music. But Stanford was not satisfied with one set of part-songs as homage to Mary Coleridge. He composed a second set in the same year, 1910, published as op. 127 and there we find a very close match to The Blue Bird in emotional depth and choral sonority: listen to no. 4 of the set, The Haven – the colour fixation turns to bleaker grey, smothering any glimpse of blue. And there is that depth of perspective again:
Where the gray bushes by the gray sea grow,
Where the gray islands lie,
Naked and bare to all the winds that blow,
Under the dim gray sky –
The very flowers are gray, and dare not show
The blue we know the little harebell by.
I have used the title ‘Blues for Mary’. I am not sure Stanford, even at his most Irish, would have had time for the Afro-American genre later embraced by Tippett but in the sense that the blues involve an outpouring of melancholy and sadness, The Blue Bird and its companion The Haven can be regarded as deeply personal statements by Stanford in connection with the death of Mary Coleridge.
Footnotes
- https://archive.org/details/poemsmary00cole/page/52/mode/2up ↩︎
- The answer to that question has to be negative, insofar as there might be any connection between Stanford’s part-song and Debussy’s Preludes. The first public performance of Book 1 of the Debussy Preludes was not given until May 1911 and in Paris. The earliest London performance (Book 2) was much later, in 1913. ↩︎
- Rebecca Solnit A field guid to getting lost.- New York: Viking, 2005. ↩︎
- The Rayleigh scattering law, derived by Lord Rayleigh in 1871, applying to particles smaller than the wavelength of light being scattered. Nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere are such particles, scattering blue light many times as much as red light, making the sky appear blue to our senses. ↩︎