A concert of Glanville-Hicks’s songs, including the Five Songs based on poems by Housman and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, will be held on 10 April 2022 at The MC Showroom, 48 Clifton Street Prahran in Melbourne. Artists are Heather Fletcher (mezzo), Samantha Hargreaves (soprano), Alastair Cooper-Golec (tenor) and Coady Green (pianist), with commentary from Suzanne Robinson and Joel Crotty in conversation with Patrick Burns. Tickets are available on Eventbrite.
Published in 1938, Come Sleep is one of the best-loved of all Glanville-Hicks’s songs. The poem, which she thought was by John Fletcher (seen here in a portrait by an unknown artist), was published in the Oxford Book of English Verse in 1919 and has been set by others, including Rebecca Clarke, as simply “Sleep”. It derives from the play The Woman Hater, now attributed to both John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, published in 1607. Possibly its origins were unknown to Glanville-Hicks, who was simply attracted to a song about delight, pleasing dreams and abiding joys. But as a hymn to women’s wiles and as an example of a women using music to woo a man impervious to her charms, it seems fitting that it was published in the year Glanville-Hicks married Stanley Bate.
