"My love dwelt in a northern land" by Edward Elgar // Chamber Choir // Eugene Rogers, conductor

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Chamber Choir
Eugene Rogers, Conductor

Saturday, October 2, 2021
Hill Auditorium

My love dwelt in a northern land
Edward Elgar
(1857–1934)

Known primarily for his orchestral works, Edward Elgar maintained an unrivaled and unchallenged reputation as England’s only eminent composer before WWI. Shortly after his marriage to Alice Roberts in 1889, Elgar composed his first two part-songs, O Happy Eyes and My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land, perhaps as a wedding gift. These two part-songs marked the important beginning of Elgar’s relationship with publisher Novello, who at the time offered Elgar no money but one hundred copies in lieu of copyright.

In My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land, the Scottish poet Andrew Lang (1844–1912) evokes a theme common in Victorian times—the naïveté of youthful love often unrequited or unfulfilled because a lover dies. In Lang’s poem, the words are spoken by a woman who remembers her dead lover and the green forest in which they sat together and watched the moon. It may seem ironic that Elgar chose to set such a despondent text at the beginning of his marriage, yet the pervading sense of joy found within the music seems to illuminate an optimistic love.

Throughout the work, Elgar uses rich harmonies, soaring melodies, terraced dynamics, and a variety of textures to romanticize and highlight the text. The first, second, and fourth verses are set nearly identically in A minor with slight changes in each part to create interest and variety. In the third verse, Elgar changes from A minor to C major and divides both the tenors and the basses to fill out the sound. The soaring melody is then heard in the sopranos and first tenors, while everyone else sings a repetitive, rhythmic motif. This “accompanimental device” was a favorite of Elgar’s, later used in other works such as Death on the Hills and Serenade.

Note by David Hahn


My love dwelt in a Northern land,
A dim tower in a forest green
Was his, and far away the sand
And gray wash of the waves were seen
The woven boughs between:

And through the Northern summer night
The sunset slowly, slowly died away,
And herds of strange deer, silver-white,
Came gleaming through the forest gray,
And fled like ghosts before the day.

And oft that month, we watch’d the moon
Wax great and white o’er wood and lawn,
And wane, with waning of the June,
Till, like a brand for battle drawn,
She fell, she fell, and flamed in a wild dawn.

I know not if the forest green
Still girdles round that castle gray,
I know not if the boughs between
The white deer vanish ere the day:
The grass above my love is green,
His heart is colder than the clay.

Text by Andrew Lang