Category: Vocal Music / Art Song / Piano
Instrumentation: voice, piano
Duration: approximately 8–9 minutes
Text / Source: Poems by W. B. Yeats, Sara Teasdale, and Thomas Hardy
Publisher: North Star Music, LLC; Alymar
Performers: prizewinner at the 1997 Delius Composition Competition

Songs:
When You Are Old
Let It Be You
Let It Be Forgotten
A Thunderstorm in Town

Four Views Of Love is a song cycle for voice and piano that depicts four contrasting romantic moods. A prizewinner at the 1997 Delius Composition Competition, the cycle brings together poems by W. B. Yeats, Sara Teasdale, and Thomas Hardy, shaping them into a concise but emotionally varied exploration of love, memory, longing, melancholy, and youthful affection.

The work belongs primarily to Baxter’s vocal and art song catalog, while the piano part gives the cycle a strong chamber character. The piano is central to the expressive design of the songs, supporting the voice with recurring figures, chromatic color, lyrical shaping, and dramatic emphasis. Although the songs may be excerpted individually, they form a unified recital set through their shared focus on different emotional perspectives of romantic love.

The cycle includes When You Are Old, a setting of W. B. Yeats that reflects lost love and is the only song in the set indicated for male voice; it is through-composed, lyrical, and builds toward a soaring dramatic climax near the end before returning to the opening line. Let It Be You, with words by Sara Teasdale and dedicated to Baxter’s wife, Katherine, expresses deep love in a binary form whose two sections begin with the same melodic figure. Let It Be Forgotten, also on a poem by Teasdale, is a melancholy, romantic, and expressive song shaped by a recurring piano figure. A Thunderstorm In Town, on a poem by Thomas Hardy, offers a charming look at young love in free strophic form, with chromatic writing and some vocal leaps.

Four Views Of Love is well suited for vocal recitals, art song programs, teaching studios, and concerts centered on poetry and romantic expression. With difficulty levels varying from intermediate to upper intermediate, the cycle offers singers and pianists a compact, expressive set that combines lyrical melody, chromatic color, formal clarity, and a wide emotional range.