Silent worship

The song Silent Worship is a 1928 adaptation for voice and piano by Arthur Somervell of the aria Non lo dirò col labbro in Handel's opera Tolomeo (Ptolomy), from 1728, just 200 years earlier, which has remained a popular classic in song-recitals and home music-making. For many, its use in the 1996 film of Jane Austen's Emma effectively captures an atmosphere of 19th C. home entertainment , and indeed it seems that the Italian original was recorded in Jane Austen's handwritten songbooks , although historically this English drawing-room version was created more than a century after the action of the novel. Other arrangements include solo song accompanied by a modern symphony orchestra , and male-voice choir .

Musically the song is a simple transcription of the original with the orchestral parts reduced for piano, one or two slight changes in harmony, and the instrumental ending (postlude) omitted . In the 1996 film version, the introduction is also shortened .

However the text is treated quite differently in the two versions:

• in the baroque original, the first part uses a single couplet to express a single two-fold thought, the words often repeated, perhaps even more than usual to emphasis the lack of courage: 'I will not say it with my lips, they do not have the courage'; while the second part expresses a complement to the first, its antithesis, twice as many words for half as much music, and so not repeated: 'Perhaps, with sparks from yearning eyes, my gaze will speak to reveal how I am consumed by flames'; the first part is then repeated (ABA, da capo aria form).
• Somervell took the basic thought and recast it to suit the aesthetic of a later era, expanding a two-line description of a static emotional state to a 16-line narrative, in which only a single line is repeated: even the da capo - the reprise of the first section at the end - has a new paraphrase of the first text rather than the simple repeat which the baroque aria uses .

Non lo dirò col labbro

Non lo dirò col labbro/Che tanto ardir non ha.''

Forse con le faville/Dell'avide pupille,/Per dir come tutt'ardo,/Lo sguardo parlera''

Non lo dirò col labbro/Che tanto ardir non ha.''

Silent Worship

Did you not hear My Lady/Go down the garden singing/Blackbird and thrush were silent/To hear the alleys ringing...

Oh saw you not My Lady/Out in the garden there/Shaming the rose and lily/For she is twice as fair.

Though I am nothing to her/Though she must rarely look at me/And though I could never woo her/I love her till I die.

Surely you heard My Lady/Go down the garden singing/Silencing all the songbirds/And setting the alleys ringing.

But surely you see My Lady/Out in the garden there/Rivaling the glittering sunshine/With a glory of golden hair.