As We Stood Then is a sequence of five song-settings of poems by the great English poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). It was undertaken in February and March of 1975 at the behest of then Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert-master Gerald Jarvis and his wife, mezzo-soprano Delia Wallis. The original scoring with piano was re-written in 1979 for orchestra.
The poetry itself may be the only program note the work requires. From a visit to the magical, mythical land of Arthur and Merlin, to the sounds of birds on a spring day in the English countryside, to the buzzing of a dying fly on a window-pane and the thunderous passage of a great, smoke-belching, 19th-century steam train, Weisgarber’s music is wedded wondrously with the text and serves as a prime example of his lyric sensitivity to the poet’s art, time and place.
The five songs are presented in a continuous, one-movement format interspersed with connective instrumental interludes that introduce each song. The poems themselves are unrelated, coming from a number of different collections. The uniting ethos of all five is the loss of past happiness and the regret of unrealized dreams. Weisgarber has arranged his five selections such that the first, third and fifth songs relate an all too human story of dreams dreamed and hopes dashed, interspersed with two nature poems reflective of the endless cycle of birth and death in the poet’s beloved English West Country. The closing line of the final poem provides the work with its title, an eloquent but simple statement of longing for a time called “then.”