Sir
Walter Raleigh’s home village will be celebrating his life yet again in a few
weeks, but through his verse, in a concert on Saturday 3 November at the
wonderful All Saints' Church, pictured above.
He
lived more lives than most people of his time, of any time, historian Anna Beer
told the audience in the first talk of Budleigh’s 2018 Literary Festival. We
know of Raleigh the courtier and the explorer, the supposed discoverer of
tobacco and potatoes and the colonist who had an American city named after him
– two of its districts are even called Budleigh and Hayes Barton.
Not
so many people know Raleigh the poet. And yet, as Dr Beer writes in her
recently published biography of Sir Walter, ‘his poetry is where the tensions
in the life of the man are most visible and most enthralling’.
The
poems have frequently been set to music. One of his best known, ‘Even Such is
Time’, inspired at least five eminent composers, including local musician
Nicholas Marshall.
Most recently the Leeds-based writer
and musician Peter Spafford has set Raleigh’s poems to music. A History graduate of Exeter University, Peter
has spent his career writing a mixture of plays, radio plays, lyrics and
librettos, and working in various community and education settings. He regularly performs with jazz musicians like
multi-instrumentalist Richard Ormrod, whom he’s partnered at arts
and literature festivals all over the country.
As a writer in residence Peter
has spent time at both the Royal Armouries – where he organised a festival –
and in prisons, working with charities like Music in Prisons and the Writers in Prison network. He regularly
composes settings for poetry with Leeds-based band Schwa.
You can read more at https://schwasters.bandcamp.com/
Fellow-writers who’ve praised
his work include his friend the poet Meg Peacocke, pictured above, who was brought up in the
Budleigh area with her composer brother Richard Rodney Bennett.
‘I’ve no direct connection with
Sir Walter except that he fascinates me,’ Peter writes. Could it be that his
work with prisoners is inspired by the 13 years that Sir Walter spent in the
Tower of London?
Whatever the reason for his
fascination with Raleigh the dramas in the life of this most complex of
Renaissance figures will always inspire artists and writers. Peter was first
struck by the bitter rage of ‘The Lie’ and has since set eight Raleigh poems to
music.
Like Sir Walter, he’d started
with great ambitions, he confesses. ‘I’d
originally set out to write a play, with music, but only have the music so far
and as it’s the 400th anniversary…’
Peter Spafford’s song-cycle
based on the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh has its first performance in Devon at
The Blue Walnut http://www.bluewalnuttorquay.co.uk/, in
Torquay on Friday 2 November, and at Ashburton Arts Centre on the following afternoon.
The East Budleigh. performance starts at 7.00 pm on Saturday 3 November.
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