Ex. 7-9: An Old English Love Song

Composed around 1887 by Frances Allitsen, the pen name of Mary Frances Bumpus (1848–1912). It was her first success — and the road to it was a hard one.

As a child in London, Allitsen loved literature more than music, and she wrote a novel and short stories before she gave up writing and turned to music. She first trained as a singer, but she lost her voice and had to give up singing, so she turned to composing. Her family was against a woman making a career in music. To earn a living, she taught by day and studied composition at night, often exhausted. When she finally showed her work to Thomas Weist-Hill, the head of the Guildhall School of Music, he admired it — but was sorry she had begun serious study so late, already in her thirties.

The words are taken from a song book by John Dowland (1563–1626), the Elizabethan lute-song composer; the music is Allitsen's own. She wrote the song for a baritone voice, and it became a popular concert piece. Her songs were sung by leading performers of the day, including the contralto Clara Butt and the baritone C. Hayden Coffin.

Allitsen became one of the more commercially successful women composers of the Victorian era. Another of her best-known songs is "The Lord Is My Light," a setting of Psalm 27 from the Bible.