Of his part songs, all are good, some are masterly. Here he colors with the same lavish but softly blending touch as in his solos. "My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose" is altogether delightful, containing as it does a suggestion of the old formalities and courtly graces of the music of Lawes, whose songs Milton sonneted. I had always thought that no musician could do other than paint the lily in attempting to add music to the music of Tennyson's "Bugle Song," but Hawley has come dangerously near satisfaction in the elfland faintness and dying clearness of his voices.
He has written two comic glees, one of which, "They Kissed! I Saw Them Do It," has put thousands of people into the keenest mirth. It is a vocal scherzo for men's voices. It begins with a criminally lugubrious and thin colloquy, in which the bass dolefully informs the others: "Beneath a shady tree they sat," to which the rest agree; "He held her hand, she held his hat," which meets with general consent. Now we are told in stealthy gasps, "I held my breath and lay right flat." Suddenly out of this thinness bursts a peal of richest harmony: "They kissed! I saw them do it." It is repeated more lusciously still, and then the basses and barytones mouth the gossip disapprovingly, and the poem continues with delicious raillery till it ends abruptly and archly: "And they thought no one knew it!"
Besides these scherzos, Hawley has written a few religious part songs of a high order, particularly the noble "Trisagion and Sanctus," with its "Holy, Holy!" now hushed in reverential awe and now pealing in exultant worship. But of all his songs, I like best his "[When Love is Gone]," fraught with calm intensity, and closing in beauty as ineffable as a last glimmer of dying day.
When Love is gone.
(Soprano, or Tenor.)
[[Listen]]
C.B. HAWLEY.
Copyright, 1894, by G. Schirmer.