On William Alwyn’s birthday, the desolation of this piece seems particularly apt. Scanning some online commentary, I’m surprised to find some hear in it calm and nostalgia. More expectedly, others detect in it seasonal intimations, no doubt suggested by the title, “Autumn Legend.” The composer himself described it as “unashamedly romantic.” I don’t hear it, unless he means it very much in the 19th century sense, the exquisite melancholy of pining at a loved one’s tomb. I detect only grief.

Alwyn claimed that as he wrote the piece he felt the presence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the walls of his studio were hung with Rossetti’s paintings). The score is prefaced by a quote from Rossetti’s poem “The Blessed Damozel,” inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” Poe’s poem embodies earthly grieving for the departed; Rossetti flips the perspective, and conveys the damozel looking down on her lover from the beyond and yearning for their reunion in heaven.

As he sometimes did, Rossetti went on to illustrate the episode with a painting. The painting is something of a diptych, with a smaller, bottom panel depicting the damozel’s reclining lover.

“The Blessed Damozel” inspired several other pieces of music. Most frequently encountered is Debussy’s cantata “La Damoiselle élue.”

Alwyn prefaces his score with these lines from Rossetti’s poem:

Surely she leaned o’er me – her hair
Fell all about my face….
Nothing: the Autumn fall of leaves
The whole year sets apace.

Here’s Alwyn’s “Autumn Legend.”

Personally, I find more consolation in Debussy’s “Damoiselle.”

Michelle Kwan skated to Alwyn’s lovely harp concerto, “Lyra Angelica,” at the Nagano Olympics in 1998. Contrast this with any of the music heard at the Paris Olympics this past summer. The central section is actually from one of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (1:57-2:45), Kwan’s addition, not Alwyn’s.

The work in its entirety

My personal favorite of Alwyn’s five symphonies

Happy birthday, William Alwyn (1905-1985).