Fand Catalogue

Pale Shadows

Three Clifford Bax Songs

for voice and piano

John Mitchell

£9.50

Clifford Bax (1886–1962) was the younger brother of the composer Arnold Bax. After initially studying art, he gave this up quite early on to concentrate on writing. His talents in this area were wide, including that of playwright, poet and author of many books. One of his earlier publications was Twenty Chinese Poems, which was issued in 1910. He describes the verse therein as being ‘paraphrased’ from the original translated texts, but they are fine examples of English lyric poetry in their own right. It is from this book that the lyrics of the first two songs of Pale Shadows are taken. Six years later Bax augmented the volume with five new ‘paraphrases’, one of these being A Vigil (which appears here as April Night).

The first and last poems of Pale Shadows are descriptive pictures of scenes at evening and night respectively, whereas the longer middle song also has a narrative quality to it. The title of the trio is a phrase extracted from April Night.

Sample pages

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Catalogue code: FM259 • Published: 24th February 2023
Entry last updated: 24th February 2023