In 1996 my friends Jonathan and Ruth got married. Continuing a tradition that started some years ago, I wrote them a piece of music for a wedding present and it was sung at the ceremony. As theirs was a civil wedding, the music was secular in tone. The process of choosing the text, an English translation of a medieval Latin lyric, led me to reject a number of other attractive Latin lyrics in translation. As the plans for this concert started to take shape I conceived the idea of adding a number of other settings of these translations to provide some satisfactory companions for the original part-song. My original plans for having an explicit narrative theme running through the songs gradually changed to simply creating a group of songs all concerned with aspects of love and desire. In fact, if someone else had not got there first, I might have been tempted to call the cycle Aspects of Love! The current title Kiss thou this Rose has proved a problem with typesetters - in one article it was referred to as ‘Kill thou this Rose’ which conjures up all sorts of interesting ideas.
Robert Hugill