Bendemeer's Stream: A Song History

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Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817) put its author in the same league as Byron and Scott in the eyes of his contemporaries; Britannica adds that his £3,000 fee was a record for a poem from an English publisher and that the work was "perhaps the most translated poem of its time."[1] The University of Galway reports that the first half-year after publication called for six editions.[2] The song "There's a Bower of Roses by Bendemeer's Stream" belongs to the first of the book's verse tales, "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan."[3] Project ERIN at Queen's University Belfast identifies the singer as Zelica, now the prophet's concubine, acting on his command to lure Azim, the man she had once loved.[4] In his notes to the poem, Moore glosses Bendemeer as a river near the ruins of Chilminar, a name he elsewhere explains as the Persian term for the ruins of Persepolis.[3]

Early photograph of the ruined columns of Persepolis on a wide plain

Luigi Pesce, Veduta generale di Persepolis presa dalla Montagna, salted paper print from paper negative, 1858. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). The ruins of Persepolis, which Moore’s note places near Bendemeer.

According to Project ERIN, composers set this lyric more often than any other in Lalla Rookh.[4] Soon after the poem appeared, the London publisher James Power issued versions by Lord Burghersh, William Hawes and Lady Flint, and Queen's University Belfast holds a copy of the Hawes setting dated 1818.[4][5] The words also reached America early: Project ERIN lists American settings by J. Wilson in New York in 1817 and by R. W. Wyatt and S. Wetherbee in Boston in 1820, and the Library of Congress holds another, published in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1850.[4][6] Later in the century Edward Bunnett published a setting in 1865, and Charles Villiers Stanford worked the song into his opera The Veiled Prophet, staged in Hannover in 1881 and in London in 1893.[4]

Moore's words were also fitted to an Irish air: Boosey and Co. of London published "Bendemeer's Stream" in 1893 as an Irish melody arranged by Alfred Scott Gatty.[7] The Gatty arrangement reached records too; the Library of Congress's National Jukebox credits him as arranger of a Columbia disc (A5241) sung by the contralto Mrs. A. Stewart Holt, which it lists only under the year 1914.[8] The IMSLP catalogue entry gives no name for the air beyond calling it Irish, and the sources consulted here do not establish which traditional tune Gatty arranged.[7] The song still appeared in American songbooks in the twentieth century, among them Ginn's Assembly Songs and Choruses for High Schools (1929) and Leon Dallin's Heritage Songster (1966).[9][10]

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Sources

  1. Britannica: "Thomas Moore".
  2. University of Galway: "NUI Galway to commemorate bicentenary of Thomas Moore's epic poem Lalla Rookh".
  3. Project Gutenberg: Thomas Moore, "Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance" (London: Longman, 1861, illustrated by John Tenniel).
  4. Project ERIN, Queen's University Belfast: "Thomas Moore's most popular songs: Bendemeer's stream".
  5. Special Collections & Archives, Queen's University Belfast: "William Hawes's Bendemeer's Stream (Lalla Rookh)".
  6. Library of Congress: "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream" (Louisville: Peters, Webb and Co., 1850).
  7. IMSLP: "Bendemeer's Stream (Gatty, Alfred Scott)".
  8. Library of Congress, National Jukebox: "Bendemeer's stream" (Columbia A5241).
  9. Internet Archive: "Assembly songs and choruses for high schools" (Boston: Ginn, 1929).
  10. Internet Archive: Leon Dallin, "Heritage songster: 320 folk and familiar songs" (Dubuque, Iowa: W. C. Brown, 1966).