Vaughan Williams’s Journey into Folk: 22 December 1904
‘Grand Conversation on Napoleon’, Henry Burstow, Horsham Surrey
A friend of Napoleon Bonaparte visits his grave on the isolated island of St Helena – ‘this dreary spot’. He remembers Napoleon’s heroic deeds in a ‘grand conversation’, although the song describes the disastrous campaign in Russia and the defeat at Waterloo, rather than any triumphs.
Still at Leith Hill Place for the Christmas holidays, Vaughan Williams spent this day recording sixteen more songs from Henry Burstow [7 December 1903], ten more from Mrs Verrall [24 May 1904], and three from Ted Baines of Plummers Plain, south-east of Horsham. The composer’s notes for these songs don’t show that he used a phonograph but elsewhere in his papers there are indications that he was possibly working on transcriptions of ‘phonograph reproductions’ from Burstow and Verrall a few days later, on 31 December. The Verralls’s son recalled the composer and another man (possibly friend and composer George Butterworth), visiting their house with a phonograph. He didn’t specify when or how often they came [see also 8 October 1904] – but without the machine, it would have been a long and tiring day if Vaughan Williams had been relying only on his ears to take down twenty-nine songs.
The composer didn’t make a record of the words for any of the songs Burstow sang on this day, so I’ve used the words from the version he published in the Journal of the Folk Song Society (8, 1906) which were probably supplied by the singer. Burstow knew six songs about Napoleon and sang four of them. Though the French leader had led his armies against the British forces and was eventually defeated, the lyrics are surprisingly sympathetic in tone, identifying him as an heroic figure.
Napoleon died and was buried on St Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic, six years after he was exiled there by the British, following the battle of Waterloo in 1815. In 1840 the French government gained permission from the British to exhume his body for reburial in Paris, so this song probably dates from between 1821-1840 when the campaign for the return of his body was under way. The funeral in France was led by Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult who had served under Napoleon and was now a minister of war under King Louis-Philippe. He is mentioned in another of Burstow’s Napoleon-themed songs from this day, ‘Deeds of Napoleon’: ‘Soult did come this way [to St Helena]/To beg the bones of Bonaparte’: it may be that the friend who ‘paces the sands and lofty rocks’ of the island’s shore in ‘Grand Conversation on Napoleon’ is intended to be Soult. In fact, he didn’t make the trip to St Helena. The expedition to the island, which took over three months on the outward journey, was led by Prince de Joinville, a son of the king. Apparently, when Napoleon’s grave was opened, his body was well-preserved, and he remained easily recognisable.
Vaughan Williams wrote the song in the key of G major, but noted it was mixolydian in tone – all the F#s are flattened to F natural [see 14 April 1904 on modes]. For some reason he doubted whether the penultimate note was an F natural and leaves a question mark in the published version (Journal of the Folk-Song Society 8, 1906) – but it would be odd if the last F was different to all the others. I’ve sung it with F natural throughout.
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library link: https://www.vwml.org/record/RVW2/2/184
Roud No.1189
Next post: 23 December