Sing, sweet harp (Charles Villiers Stanford)
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- (Posted 2024-03-16) CPDL #79567:
- Editor: David Anderson (submitted 2024-03-16). Score information: Letter, 8 pages, 567 kB Copyright: Personal
- Edition notes: This edition is the first since its original U.S. printing, transcribed and edited by the discovering researcher.
General Information
Title: Sing, sweet harp
Composer: Charles Villiers Stanford
Lyricist: Thomas Moore
Number of voices: 4vv Voicing: SATB
Genre: Secular, Partsong, Folksong
Language: English
Instruments: A cappella
First published: 1904 Oliver Ditson Co.
Description: OLD IRISH AIR
Commissioned by the Irish Choral Society of Chicago, this Irish folksong setting was never published in the UK and was unknown to scholars for over a century.
External websites:
Original text and translations
English text
Sing, sweet Harp, oh sing to me
Some song of ancient days,
Whose sounds, in this sad memory,
Long-buried dreams shall raise;—
Some lay that tells of vanish’d fame,
Whose light once round us shone;
Of noble pride, now turn’d to shame,
And hopes for ever gone.—
Sing, sad Harp, thus sing to me;
Alike our doom is cast,
Both lost to all but memory,
We live but in the past.
How mournfully the midnight air
Among thy chords doth sigh,
As if it sought some echo there
Of voices long gone by;—
Of chieftains, now forgot, who seem’d
The foremost then in fame;
Of Bards who, once immortal deem’d,
Now sleep without a name.—
In vain, sad Harp, the midnight air
Among thy chords doth sigh;
In vain it seeks an echo there
Of voices long gone by.
Could’st thou but call those spirits round,
Who once, in bower and hall,
Sate listening to thy magic sound,
Now mute and mouldering all;—
But, no; they would but wake to weep
Their children’s slavery;
Then leave them in their dreamless sleep,
The dead, at least, are free!—
Hush, hush, sad Harp, that dreary tone,
That knell of Freedom’s day;
Or, listening to its death-like moan,
Let me, too, die away.