Five Songs of Laurence Hope sets two poems from India’s Love Lyrics, two from Stars of the Desert (1903), and one from Last Poems (1905, posthumous). In the prefatory note to the original 1915 publication of Burleigh’s settings, H. E. Krehbiel, musical editor of the New York Tribune, wrote, “They are...artist’s songs, in which singer and pianist are paired in a lovely union and engaged in a mission calculated to warm the feelings of those who contemplate it.”

Burleigh’s legacy rests with the fact that he sang Negro spirituals to Antonín Dvořák and then, later, was among the first composers to set spirituals as art songs. His non-idiomatic art songs, however, are still undiscovered by most soloists. In the same year Five Songs of Laurence Hope was published, G. Ricordi published Burleigh’s Passionale, a cycle of four songs for tenor, setting texts of James Weldon Johnson. With the publication of these choral arrangements of Burleigh’s songs, I am hopeful that some light will be shed on the 70+ original art songs he composed in addition to his song cycles.

For the original song cycle by Burleigh, visit https://imslp.org/wiki/5_Songs_of_Laurence_Hope_(Burleigh%2C_Harry_Thacker).