"Lay a garland" is a popular English poem from the play ''
The Maid's Tragedy
''The Maid's Tragedy'' is a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. It was first published in 1619.
The play has provoked divided responses from critics.
Date
The play's date of origin is not known with certainty. In 1611, Sir George B ...
'' (Act II, Scene I) written in 1608-11. The poem was famously set to music by
Robert Lucas de Pearsall
Robert Lucas Pearsall (14 March 1795 – 5 August 1856) was an English composer mainly of vocal music, including an elaborate setting of " In dulci jubilo" and the richly harmonic part song '' Lay a garland'' of 1840, both still often performed ...
on 4 June 1840,
scored for
SSAATTBB in Eb. In 1854, Pearsall produced a
contrafactum
In vocal music, contrafactum (or contrafact, pl. contrafacta) is "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music". The earliest known examples of this "lyrical adaptation" date back to the 9th century in Gregor ...
of Lay a Garland, to the Latin text Tu es Petrus, dedicating it to the first bishop of
St Gallen
St. Gallen is a Swiss city and the capital of the canton of St. Gallen. It evolved from the hermitage of Saint Gall, founded in the 7th century. Today, it is a large urban agglomeration (with around 167,000 inhabitants in 2019) and rep ...
, John Peter. This is more often performed by choirs in a liturgical setting, as the original words for the music are more appropriate to a secular occasion.
Lyrics
The song is sung by Aspasia where her betrothed is forced into a
marriage of convenience
A marriage of convenience is a marriage contracted for reasons other than that of love and commitment. Instead, such a marriage is entered into for personal gain, or some other sort of strategic purpose, such as a political marriage. Cases whe ...
to the king's mistress. The original words are as follows:
Lay a garland on my hearse
of the dismal yew.
Maidens, willow branches wear,
say I died true.
My love was false, but I was firm
from my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie
lightly, gentle earth.
However Pearsall's music is set to these adapted words changed from
first
First most commonly refers to:
* First, the ordinal form of the number 1
First or 1st may also refer to:
Acronyms
* Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array
* Far Infrared a ...
to
third person
Third person, or third-person, may refer to:
* Third person (grammar), a point of view (in English, ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', and ''they'')
** Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person
* Third-person narrative, a perspective in p ...
[
]
Lay a garland on her hearse
of dismal yew.
Maidens, willow branches wear,
say she died true.
Her love was false, but she was firm.
Upon her buried body lie
lightly, thou gentle earth.
:I: These words were present in the original poem by Beaumont and Fletcher but omitted in the composition
:II: Word was added to the into the composition.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lay A Garland
Choral compositions
1840 compositions