Songs of Peace and Joy (words by Frances Ridley Havergal, set to music by Charles Henry Purday) was published by James Nisbet & Co., London, 1879. Charles H. Purday, over 80 when this volume of music was completed, was a composer whose music F.R.H.'s father, William Henry Havergal, had admired. A finely gifted singer, he had sung at the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 when F.R.H. was a toddler. In the summer of 1878 he for the first time read poems by F.R.H. in The Ministry of Song and Under the Surface, and began setting a number of them to music. He wrote to F.R.H., asking her approval, and later she made notes and suggestions to the manuscript scores, gratefully endorsing her senior colleague's work. This has 36 poems by her, nearly all the scores composed by Purday, with two scores by her and one by her father. Frances' Prefatory Note was dated May 13, 1879, three weeks before her unexpected early death at the age or 42. Purday's Composer's Preface was signed October 1, 1879. From the new edition of The Complete Works of Frances Ridley Havergal, this is another volume of true music and true worship.
About the Author: Charles Henry Purday, over 80 when this volume of music was completed, was a composer whose music Frances Ridley Havergal's father, William Henry Havergal, had admired. A finely gifted singer, he had sung at the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 when F.R.H. was a toddler. In the summer of 1878 he for the first time read poems by Frances in The Ministry of Song and Under the Surface, and began setting a number of them to music. He wrote to F.R.H., asking her approval, and over time this grew to become Songs of Peace and Joy (words by F.R.H., set to music by Charles Henry Purday), published by James Nisbet & Co., London, 1879. After he had composed more settings, he sent them to her, and she made notes and suggestions to the manuscript scores, gratefully endorsing her senior colleague's work. This has 36 poems by her, nearly all the scores composed by Purday, with two scores by her and one by her father. Frances' Prefatory Note was dated May 13, 1879, three weeks before her unexpected early death at the age or 42. Purday's Composer's Preface was signed October 1, 1879. Songs of Peace and Joy (words by Frances Ridley Havergal, set to music by Charles Henry Purday) was published by James Nisbet & Co., London, in 1879. From the new edition of The Complete Works of Frances Ridley Havergal, this is another volume of true music and true worship. Not only a fine poet and equally fine writer of prose, Frances Ridley Havergal was a wonderfully gifted musician, both as a singer, pianist, and composer. Her formal education ended when she was seventeen, with one term at a young women's school in Düsseldorf, Germany, yet she was a true scholar all her life. Fluent in German and French and nearly so in Italian, she read and loved the Reformers in Latin, German, and French. Knowledge was never an end in itself, only a means to know better her Lord and Saviour and to help to bring others to know Him. Like her works, her life richly touched the ones near her and countless many who met or heard her. The Lord Jesus Christ was her alone, only beauty, and she glowed Him and His truth. Her works are a gold-mine of help and enrichment. As her sister Maria, wrote, Knowing her intense desire that Christ should be magnified, whether by her life or in her death, may it be to His glory that in these pages she, being dead, "Yet speaketh !" David L. Chalkley and Glen T. Wegge, editors