Background to the poem and music

John Stagg (1770-1823), known as ‘The Blin’ Bard’, and later ‘The Cumbrian Minstrel’, was born at Burgh by Sands on the north coast of Cumbria.  That same year also saw the births of the better-known Cumbrian poets William Wordsworth in Cockermouth and Robert Anderson in Carlisle, (not to mention the composer Beethoven in Bonn).  Stagg was the son of a tailor at Burgh, but as he showed such unusual promise, his parents decided to educate him for the church. However, a childhood accident blinded him and put an end to his studies.  For a while he made a living by keeping a library in the nearby town of Wigton, while playing his fiddle for local gatherings (he can be found as a character in Robert Anderson’s poem of 1802, ‘Worton Wedding’, where he recounts that Blin Staig the fiddler, gat a whack.  Stagg married in 1790, and after a short stay in Carlisle, he went to live in Manchester where he stayed most of his life, returning often for visits to his home county.  He died in Workington in 1823.

Stagg’s first collection of Miscellaneous Poems was published in Carlisle in 1790, and this was followed by two more in 1804 and 1807.  His next collection, The Minstrel of the North appeared in 1810, subtitled Cumbrian Legends, being a poetical miscellany of Legendary, Gothic and Romantic Tales, and it was here that The Vampyre made his first appearance.   Stagg’s poem, telling the story of the vampire legend, was one of the first in the English language (although Robert Southey did include a vampire in his epic poem Thalaber the Destroyer of 1801).  Byron’s epic The Giaour, in which he alludes to a vampire, came shortly afterwards in 1813, and it was to be 87 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897.

The Vampyre was written for, and will be first performed by, Wigton Choral Society in 2026. In setting the poem to music I hope to make John Stagg a little more well known in his home area, and the contribution to English literature by Cumbrian poets (not just Wordsworth) more widely recognised and acknowledged.  This setting is meant to make the poem more accessible to contemporary audiences and choirs, using music styles drawn from computer games alongside a reworking of a Funeral March for piano by Chopin (who was born in 1810, the year of this poem’s publication).

The accompaniment of piano, violin and cello not only makes it affordable for groups to perform, but also reflects the instrumentation used by Haydn, Beethoven and others in their settings of folksongs and poems by other contemporary authors like Robert Burns, Susanna Blamires and many more.  The addition of a bell, evoking the tolling of the bell in the poem, is an optional atmospheric extra which could be provided by a tubular bell or similar.

Movements and verses