The wounded hussar : together with Sweet William's departure

Another moving lyric by Thomas Campbell, “The Wounded Hussar” describes Adelaide’s moonlight journey onto the now-silent battlefield on the Danube, during Napoleon’s campaigns in Austria during 1797-1800, seeking her cavalryman husband Henry. She finds him bleeding to death. He chokes out “adieu” and dies in her arms. The poet was born in Glasgow, studied law in Edinburgh in 1797, and moved to London where he lived as a “man of letters.” This poem was published in the first edition of his Pleasures of Hope (1799). According to J. Logie Robertson, “it was sung in the streets of Glasgow and soon found its way over the whole kingdom” (197-98).

The music for the American version of the song was written in Philadelphia by James Hewitt in about 1801 (Wolfe, Secular Music #3732, #3805-10, #10058-59). Joseph Hulton and Hewitt wrote an opera entitled The Wounded Hussar; or, The Rightful Heir that was first performed in 1809 in Philadelphia; the song does not appear in the printed libretto (Porter, With an Air 500). Hewitt later appropriated the music in 1813 for “Lawrence the Brave,” a song on the naval engagement between Chesapeake and Shannon. Printed in eighty-five songsters between 1801 and 1820, Campbell’s song was collected in Canada with a text that shows signs of oral transmission (R. Keller, Early American Songsters and Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources; Creighton 159).

The second text, “Sweet William’s Departure,” is described on Black Ey’d Susan.