Songs of Farewell

Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell were written between 1913 and 1915, when the composer was deeply unsettled by World War I and grappling with failing health. Scored for unaccompanied choir, the six songs examine themes of transience and mortality, and show Parry at a peak of compositional skill and expressivity. The cycle’s first song, “My soul, there is a country”, employs regular pauses and changes of perspective to probe the Christian vision of the afterlife described in Henry Vaughan’s verses. In “I know my soul hath power”, there are sharp shifts in dynamic as Parry ponders what human life is, with all its wildly contradictory experiences. “Never weather-beaten sail” is a smoother, sweeter setting for five voice-parts, where the weary soul looks forward to “the joys of heaven’s high paradise”. The six-part “There is an old belief” is texturally even richer, offering a similarly consoling vision of an afterlife “beyond the sphere of Time and Sin”. For “At the round earth’s imagined corners” Parry expands to seven parts, trumpeting a Last Judgement where “numberless infinities of souls” are resurrected. In the concluding “Lord, let me know mine end” Parry works antiphonal exchanges between the two four-voice choirs into his setting of Psalm 39, where the psalmist asks “that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen”.