thumb|The 1899 [[Boosey & Hawkes|Boosey and Co edition of Sea Pictures|upright=1.25]]
Sea Pictures, Op. 37 is a song cycle for contralto and orchestra by Edward Elgar. It consists of settings of a poems by five different authors. It also exists in a version for solo voice with piano accompaniment.
The songs are:
- "Sea Slumber Song" by Roden Noel
- "In Haven (Capri)" by Alice Elgar, the composer's wife
- "Sabbath Morning at Sea" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- "Where Corals Lie" by Richard Garnett
- "The Swimmer" by Adam Lindsay Gordon
History
Elgar finished scoring his Enigma Variations in February 1899 and immediately began work on an orchestral song-cycle for the Norwich Festival that October. He composed the cycle around "Love alone will stay", a short song for voice and piano he had written some years earlier to words by his wife, Alice. She revised the poem to give it a maritime flavour and changed the title to "In Haven (Capri)". This became the second song in the cycle. Elgar then set four other poems to do with the sea, each by a different poet, in the manner of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été, and later favoured by Mahler.
The composer's literary taste in selecting the verse has been adversely criticised: his biographer Michael Kennedy has written, "Today these songs have only to appear in a programme for someone to castigate the words of the poems Elgar chose to set", and adds that so far as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sabbath Morning at Sea" and Adam Lindsay Gordon's "The Swimmer" are concerned the criticism is justified. The music critic Andrew Farach-Colton describes these two poems as "creaky and overblown" and Roden Noel's 'Sea Slumber-Song' as "excessively alliterative" and "simply mediocre".
The premiere took place on 5 October 1899 at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival with Elgar himself conducting and Clara Butt singing, dressed as a mermaid.
Butt gave the first London performance two days later at St James's Hall, with Elgar at the piano. On 20 October Ada Crossley performed the work for Queen Victoria at Balmoral. Programmes at the Elgar Birthplace Museum document eleven performances between the premiere and June 1901. Soloists included Butt, Crossley, Muriel Foster, Gertrude Lonsdale and Helene Valma.
At the time he was composing Sea Pictures Elgar had temporarily fallen out with his usual publishers, Novello and Co, and he offered the new work to Boosey and Co, who bought the copyright for £50, with a royalty payment of 3d a copy for any of the songs published separately. They also secured the Cockaigne overture, and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches Nos. 1 and 2.
Elgar's music went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, and Sea Pictures fell out of the regular concert repertoire. The Record Guide, published in 1955, gives no recordings of the work among the sparse Elgar listings. The leading contralto of the post-war years, Kathleen Ferrier, did not like the work, although other singers performed individual numbers from it at five Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in the 1950s. The conductor Sir John Barbirolli continued to champion the work. He said to Kennedy, "He [Elgar] makes you see the sea lapping over the beach, you can almost feel the pull of the tide." It was his recording of Sea Pictures with Janet Baker and the London Symphony Orchestra made in 1965 and coupled with the Cello Concerto with Jacqueline du Pré that reintroduced the cycle to popularity. The same artists recorded the remaining three songs on 8 January 1923. Later recordings:
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align: left; margin-right: 0;"
! scope="col" |Soloist
! scope="col" |Orchestra
! scope="col" |Conductor
! scope="col" |Year
|-
| Muriel Brunskill
| unnamed orchestra
| unnamed conductor
| 1926
|-
| Gladys Ripley
| Philharmonia
| George Weldon
| 1946
|-
| Gladys Ripley
| London Symphony
| George Weldon
| 1954
|-
| Constance Shacklock
| Hallé
| Sir John Barbirolli
| 1958
|-
| Janet Baker
| London Symphony
| Sir John Barbiroll
| 1965
|-
| Kerstin Meyer
| Hallé Orchestra
| Sir John Barbirolli
| 1970
|-
| Yvonne Minton
| London Philharmonic
| Daniel Barenboim
| 1977
|-
| Larisa Avdeyeva
| USSR State Symphony
| Yevgeny Svetlanov
| 1977
|-
| Lauris Elms
| Sydney Symphony
| John Hopkins
| 1978
|-
| Bernadette Greevy
| London Philharmonic Orchestra
| Vernon Handley
| 1981
|-
| Margreta Elkins
| Queensland Symphony
| Werner Andreas Albert
| 1983
|-
| Dame Janet Baker
| London Philharmonic Orchestra
| Vernon Handley
| 1984
|-
| Maureen Forrester
| McGill Symphony Orchestra
| Richard Hoenich
| 1986
|-
| Felicity Palmer
| London Symphony
| Richard Hickox
| 1987
|-
| Linda Finnie
| London Philharmonic
| Bryden Thomson
| 1991
|-
| Rosemarie Lang
| Helsingborg Symphony
| Hans-Peter Frank
| 1991
|-
| Birgitta Svendén
| Orchestre philharmonique de Nice
| John Carewe
| 1991
|-
| Della Jones
| Royal Philharmonic
| Charles Mackerras
| 1994
|-
| Jard Van Nes
| Residentie Orkest
| Yevgeny Svetlanov
| 1994
|-
| Elizabeth Campbell
| Adelaide Symphony
| Nicholas Braithwaite
| 2002
|-
| Catherine Wyn-Rogers
| BBC Symphony
| Sir Andrew Davis
| 2003
|-
| Sarah Connolly
| Bournemouth Symphony
| Simon Wright
| 2006
|-
| Roderick Williams
| BBC Concert
| Martin Yates
| 2010
|-
| Sarah Connolly
| BBC Symphony Orchestra
| Sir Andrew Davis
| 2014
|-
| Jennifer Johnston
| BBC National Orchestra of Wales
| Francesco Angelico
| 2015
|-
| Alice Coote
| Hallé
| Sir Mark Elder
| 2015
|-
| Elīna Garanča
| Staatskapelle Berlin
| Daniel Barenboim
| 2019
|-
| Marie-Nicole Lemieux
| Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine
| Paul Daniel
| 2019
|-
| Kathryn Rudge
| Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
| Vasily Petrenko
| 2019
|-
| Dame Sarah Connolly
| Philharmonia
| Oliver Zeffman
| 2022
|}
Recordings with piano accompaniment
- Birgit Finnilä, Geoffrey Parsons, 1975
- Claire-Louise Lucas, Jonathan Darnborough, 2002
- Konrad Jarnot Reinild Mees, 2007
- Amanda Pitt, David Owen Norris, 2007
- Amanda Roocroft, Reinild Mees, 2007
Other
- Version for SATB choir and string orchestra arr. Donald Fraser, Rodolfus Choir, English Chamber Orchestra, Kenneth Woods. 2013.
- Individual numbers from the cycle have been recorded by singers including Clara Butt, Aafje Heynis, Mary Jarred, and Maartje Offers.
Notes, references and sources
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
- Translations of Sea Pictures from The LiederNet Archive
- Elgar—His Music: Sea Pictures from All About Elgar
- Programme notes by Fred Kirshnit (American Symphony Orchestra)