['The old friends leave us soon or late’: a poignant lyric by the author of ‘Danny Boy’, set to music within days of the composer’s death.] Signed Autograph Score by Frederic Nicholls Löhr, of his setting of ‘Friends’ by Frederic E. Weatherly.

Author: 
Frederic N. Löhr [Frederic Nicholls Löhr] (1844-1888), composer with Plymouth connections, father of Hermann Löhr; Frederic Edward Weatherly (1848–1929), songwriter and barrister
Publication details: 
Dated by Löhr to 20 November 1888. No place.
£150.00
SKU: 23825

Painfully appropriate words (‘The old friends leave us soon or late’), set to music within days of the composer’s death. Among Weatherly’s many lyrics are ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Roses of Picardy’. See his obituary in the Oxford DNB, and Löhr’s three-page obituary, with portrait, in the Musical Herald, London, February 1889. Löhr was the father of the composer Hermann Löhr (1871-1943). 2pp, 4to, on the facing pages of a bifolium. In fair condition, lightly aged, with a couple of closed tears unobtrusively repaired with archival tape. At head of first (left-hand) page: ‘Friends. / [at left] words by / Frederic E. Weatherly. / [at right] music by / Frederic N. Löhr’. Signed by Löhr upwards in bottom right-hand corner of second page: ‘Frederic N. Löhr | Novr. 20th. 1888.’ Around forty bars long. Not on printed music paper; Löhr has ruled out the twenty-four staves (arranged in the customary grouping of three) in pencil himself. The song is complete and consists of around forty bars of music. Löhr has set to music a poem by Weatherly, divided into three six-line stanzas, each with the same four-line chorus, the first stanza reads, with the chorus: ‘The old friends leave us soon or late, The old life changes for us all: And some must go, And some must wait A-lone, a-lone till even fall. A trembling grasp of loving hands, A broken prayer, a whisper low. And they are gone to other lands, But they are ours where’er they go. [Chorus.] New lands and other skies, New scenes and other ties, But let them wander where they will We know we have thieir old hearts still [bis]’ The lyrics of the last two stanzas are written out in the usual way at the foot of the second page beneath the score.