Woodforde-Finden: The Oriental Song-Cycles

Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860–1919) epitomizes the Edwardian drawing-room ballad. +Her song-cycle Four Indian Love Lyrics (1902) contains the ‘Kashmiri Song’, a runaway success in its own day. +Her five other ‘oriental’ song-cycles, which have long since fallen from favor and are revived here for the first time, contain plenty of honest sentiment, good tunes and splashes of local color. +Their hints of inter-racial love and lesbian romance must have given a real frisson to their contemporary audiences.