Look Who it Was Random video

Carlyon de Lyle : Elaine

425 views · Published 3 November 2014 · 1:51 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2014 · Music

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#2 from 'Idylls of the King - Miniature Suite for Pianoforte" (pub. 1920)
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'Carlyon de Lyle' is a very evocative pseudonym used by the British composer Maud Wingate (1877-1958) for various songs and piano pieces published in the 1910s and 1920s. She was born in Lanarkshire (her father was a Scottish surgeon), but she moved to the Bristol area with her English mother after her father's early death.  In some of her pieces she collaborated with her husband 'John Alleyne' (actually John Allen Bartlett (1861-1933)), whom she married in 1922, and who was also noted as an automatic writer at séances.  This suite was published in the substantial Magnus series of albums (which contained works by York Bowen and Granville Bantock amongst many others). It draws its inspiration from Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King'.  I think that this piece (which I initially overlooked but was requested by a viewer)  - which plays like a short concert study - is perhaps the finest in the set, and has a really beguiling main melody, which follows a quite lengthy introduction.  It is a quotation from Tennyson's 'Lancelot and Elaine' (from 'Idylls of the KIng'): 
"for she did not seem as dead, but fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled." To cut a long and complicated story short, Elaine has just died after falling ill following the rejection of her love by Lancelot.

My thumbnail shows a detail from a 1911 illustration of Lancelot and Elaine by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale  (1872–1945).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear
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