The Curlew

One of the most extraordinary if disturbing English vocal works of modern times, Peter Warlock’s The Curlew is his masterpiece: an almost 30-minute song cycle for tenor voice and chamber ensemble that sets darkly haunting verse by W.B. Yeats in powerful terms. Written over several years, from an initial idea in 1916 through to completion in 1922, there are four songs in the cycle, linked by interludes for an accompanying string quartet with cor anglais (representing the mournful cry of the eponymous curlew) and flute (whose repetitive figures suggest another bird, the peewit). These ornithological details feed into an imagined landscape—some windswept shore or flat, grey marsh—where the poet wanders in the hopelessness of lost love, matching the desolation in his heart to that of the external world. As he says in a repeating refrain to the third song, “No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;/The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams.” Warlock paints this scene in terms of bleakly atmospheric music that reflects both the twisted harmonies of Bartók and the melancholy with which English Renaissance composers wrote for consorts of viols. And it isn’t hard to find some element of self-confession in his music. Famous as a drunken hell-raiser, Warlock was also suicidally depressive: dead, most likely by his own hand, at the age of 36.