1827–1885 · United Kingdom · Romantic
Elizabeth Philp was an English singer, music educator and composer. Her life ran from 1827, in Falmouth, to 1885, in London. Philp wrote songs and song cycles to poems by various poets. Her pieces on the site are for voice and piano.
Elizabeth Philp was born in 1827 in Falmouth, in Cornwall. She was the eldest daughter of the geographer James Philp.
Philp studied harmony with the German composer Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne. Charlotte Cushman was her patron.
Philp lived in London. There she was a neighbour and friend of Catherine Hogarth and moved among musicians and writers. Her published collection How to Sing an English Ballad contained sixty songs.
Philp died in London in 1885 of liver disease. Her grave lies in Highgate Cemetery, on its eastern side.
Philp composed songs and song cycles. Her works include Good night, beloved, to a text by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Inclusion, Insufficiency and Sweetest eyes, to texts by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Tell me, the summer stars, to a text by Edwin Arnold; and When all the world is young, to a text by Charles Kingsley.
Two songs from Six Songs, O moonlight deep and tender and Serenade, set texts by James Russell Lowell. Two other songs go back to Heinrich Heine: The sea hath its pearls has a text by Longfellow after Heine, and The violets of spring has a text by Philp herself after Heine.
The site offers two of her songs for voice and piano, Bye-and-Bye and Forgiven, both at the Medium+ level.