Forgotten Musicals - Rutland Boughton with William Sharp/Fiona Macleod and The Immortal Hour
William Sharp, 1855 – 1905, was a Scottish writer, poet, novelist, biographer, critic, and editor born in Paisley, near Glasgow. He began his literary career in the 1880s, producing poetry, biographies (including of figures like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning), and criticism while working in publishing and journalism in London.
In 1893, Sharp adopted the female pseudonym Fiona Macleod for a new phase of his work. He maintained the deception rigorously during his lifetime corresponding as Fiona, inventing a reclusive Highland woman persona, and keeping the secret even from close associates. The Fiona Macleod writings, mystical poems, short stories, and prose evoking the Scottish and Celtic spirit, gained significant popularity and critical acclaim.
He/she became a central figure in the Celtic Revival of the 1890s. His works captured the romantic, mystical, and melancholic “Celtic Twilight” atmosphere—drawing on Gaelic folklore, the Western Isles’ landscapes, spiritual themes, and a sense of ancient mystery and renewal. Fiona Macleod was often hailed as a leading voice in the Scottish Celtic renaissance. His/her most famous work was The Immortal Hour embodying this ethereal, faery-haunted style.
Sharp was also involved in occult circles as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the influential late-Victorian esoteric society. He joined during the 1890s, a period when he experimented with spiritualism, psychic phenomena, and mysticism.
The Immortal Hour was set to music by Rutland Boughton and was a sensation running for 376 performances. Dame Ethel Smyth in 1922 said "The Immortal Hour enchants me. The whole thing gripped me". In 1924, Sir Edward Elgar described the opera as "a work of genius". Speaking in 1949, Sir Arthur Bliss said "I remember vividly how Boughton made his characters live, and the masterly effect of the choral writing". The same year, Ralph Vaughan Williams opined that "In any other country, such a work as The Immortal Hour would have been in the repertoire years ago". It still gets occasional performances which you can see if you search on-line and there is an high quality professional recording. Its most famous song The Luring Song remains a favourite.
Here it is:
How beautiful they are, the lordly ones Who dwell in the hills, in the hollow hills. They have faces like flow’rs And their breath is a wind That blows over summer meadows Filled with dewy clover. Their limbs are more white than shafts of moonshine, They are more fleet than the March wind, They laugh and are glad and are terrible When their lances shake and glitter Ev’ry green reed quivers. How beautiful they are, How beautiful, The lordly ones in the hollow hills.
