Stanford: Love’s White Flame, Songs Vol. 1 – Elisabetta Paglia

Stanford rarely provided autobiographical clues to his works. In the case of the Five Sonnets from The Triumph of Love op.82, however, external pointers are strong. The cycle was published in 1903, the year of his 25th wedding anniversary, and the poet, Edmond Holmes, was a longstanding friend and a cousin by marriage who had played an unusual role in Stanford’s own marriage. The composer’s father had initially opposed the match with Jennie Wetton, an English girl his son had met in Germany. He decreed that the two were neither to meet nor to correspond for a year. If they were still of the same mind at the end of the year, they could marry. Plunket Greene adds: ‘[Holmes] carried no messages, but he saw to it that each had happy news of the other’s well-being of mind and body, and helped the black months to pass. [Stanford] never forgot it, and when the occasion arose, as many years later it did, fought for him like a tiger.’ (Harry Plunket Greene: Charles Villiers Stanford, 1935).
The cycle was performed by Marie Brema, with Stanford at the piano, in St. James’s Hall on 8.1.1903, rather in advance of the actual anniversary date of 6 April. Moreover, Holmes’s cycle of 63 sonnets was published, like Stanford’s song cycle, in 1903, so Stanford must have received a pre-publication copy, or seen them in manuscript. As well as celebrating Stanford’s wedding anniversary, therefore, the cycle, and its performance, offered a strong launch for Holmes’s new book of poems.
Stanford, or Holmes himself, made an astute selection, setting 37, 48, 63, 5 and 22 in the published sequence to provide a progression in which passion, in itself liable to be burnt out, is given form and permanence by “love’s self-control”. Stanford responded with music of grandeur and, at times, mystic power. Nevertheless, Holmes had quite another agenda. Uneasy with orthodox Christianity, he had come round to a belief in reincarnation. In “The Creed of Christ” (1905), “The Creed of the Buddha” (1908) and a series of works culminating in “The Headquarters of Reality: A Challenge to Western Thought” (1933), he worked out a personal philosophical system from elements of Christianity and Buddhism. In his sonnet sequences “The Silence of Love” (1899) and “The Triumph of Love” (1903), ideally read in conjunction with his autobiography “In Quest of an Ideal” (1920), Holmes attempted to fit love into his scheme of things, concluding that human passion was the enemy of love and that genuine spiritual love, able to live on in our future reincarnated forms, was attainable only in the absence of – or rejection by – the loved one. “The Triumph of Love”, in Holmes’s full sequence, starts from a love apparently born in a previous incarnation and which triumphs over passion to live on beyond death. Whether or not Stanford was fully aware of the way his friend’s thoughts were tending, he could hardly have set his poetry with greater eloquence and conviction.