Whispering Hope: A Song History

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“Whispering Hope” is the work, both words and music, of the Philadelphia songwriter Septimus Winner, and Lee & Walker of Philadelphia published it in 1868.[1] Winner was born in Philadelphia in 1827 and died there in 1902.[2] He published many songs under pen names, of which Alice Hawthorne was one.[2] He issued “Whispering Hope” as Alice Hawthorne, which Richard Jackson calls his favorite pseudonym; hymnary.org says the name was adapted from his mother’s maiden name.[1][3] Jackson counts the song as the third of Winner’s great popular hits, after “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and “Der Deitcher’s Dog.”[1]

Painting of two girls at a piano, one playing while the other leans over to follow the music

Auguste Renoir, Two Young Girls at the Piano, oil on canvas, 1892. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Jackson treats it as a secular parlor song in the form of a waltz duet, and notes that its hopeful text contains no doctrine.[1] Even so, it moved into church choirs early in its life and turns up in many gospel songbooks, a career Jackson thought curious because its music was “a child of the Victorian ballroom.”[1] Winner himself recorded in his diary on 18 November 1901 that he went to a Catholic church to hear it played.[1] The Library of Congress holds an 1881 Boston edition from Oliver Ditson, catalogued as a two-part chorus for women’s voices with piano, and hymnary.org now lists the text in more than a hundred hymnals.[4][3]

Columbia recorded it as a duet by Clara Moister and Beulah Gaylord Young in New York in October 1911.[5] Victor recorded the soprano Alma Gluck and the contralto Louise Homer, with orchestra, at Camden, New Jersey, on 12 April 1912.[6] The discography in a later Paul Weston anthology lists a 1949 Capitol recording by Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae with Weston’s orchestra.[7]

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Sources

  1. Dover Publications (Internet Archive): Richard Jackson, "Popular Songs of Nineteenth-Century America" (1976).
  2. Library of Congress: "Septimus Winner" (biography).
  3. Hymnary.org: "Whispering Hope".
  4. Library of Congress: "Whispering hope" (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1881).
  5. Library of Congress, National Jukebox: "Whispering hope" (Clara Moister and Beulah Gaylord Young, 1911).
  6. Library of Congress, National Jukebox: "Whispering hope" (Alma Gluck and Louise Homer, 1912).
  7. Acrobat Music (Internet Archive): "The Paul Weston Collection 1935-61" (2015), booklet.