Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/choral-compositions-by-edward-elgar

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Good Morrow

1557 poem by George Gascoigne set to music by Edward Elgar in 1929

Summary

1557 poem by George Gascoigne set to music by Edward Elgar in 1929

"Good Morrowe" is a poem written by George Gascoigne in 1557 and set to music by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar in 1929. Elgar titled it in modern English "Good Morrow" with the subtitle "A simple Carol for His Majesty's happy recovery", and it is a setting for unaccompanied four-part choir (SATB), though a piano accompaniment is provided.

The work was written to celebrate the recovery of King George V from serious illness. In October 1929, Elgar, as Master of the King's Musick, was invited by Walford Davies (organist at St. George's Chapel, Windsor and himself next holder of that post) to write an appropriate work to be performed by the choir of St. George's at their Annual Concert in Windsor Castle on 9 December 1929. Elgar conducted the choir, and the performance was broadcast to the nation.

Elgar found the poem, called "You that have spent the silent night" in a volume of poems by George Gascoigne entitled "A hundreth Sundrie Floures bound up in one small Posie". from which he extracted five verses. He gave the poem a hymn-like setting, possibly from a tune to a hymn "Praise ye the Lord on every height" he had written in his youth, and he called it 'just a simple tune'.

Lyrics

Though Elgar changed Gascoigne's verse to modern English, he requested that the original sixteenth-century text be shown on the last page of the vocal score and be printed like that on programmes:

Recordings

Notes

References

References

  1. The piano accompaniment doubles the choir voices all through, only differing at the end of each verse where the bass is doubled in octaves.
  2. Moore,''Edward Elgar: A Creative Life'', p. 782
  3. Young: ''Letters of Elgar'', p. 300
  4. ''Time magazine'', New York, 30 December 1929
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

choral-compositions-by-edward-elgar 1929-compositions george-v
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Good Morrow — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report