Ron Goodwin: The Headless Horseman

Whilst writing my recent blog post about Ron Goodwin’s Jet Journey, I listened to one of his other orchestral miniatures: The Headless Horseman. I was reminded of an old Yorkshire legend. In the shadow of York’s ancient walls, Bishopthorpe Road harbours a darkness that predates the city’s gaslights. On nights when the fog rolls thick off the River Ouse, the silence is shattered by the rhythmic, heavy thud of invisible hooves and the frantic rattling of chains.

From the gloom emerges a blackened carriage pulled by four powerful horses - their necks ending in jagged, spectral stumps. Atop the box sits the coachman, a towering figure in a tattered funeral shroud, his head missing from his broad shoulders. He wields a whip that cracks like a lightning bolt, though it makes no sound upon hitting the air. He does not stop for passengers. This is York’s "Death Coach," a grim harbinger of doom. Legend warns that to investigate the empty space where the driver's face should be is to glimpse your own end. Yet no-one knows who he is or what the backstory is.

To be sure the ‘Headless Horseman’ is a trope of many diverse cultures and literary endeavours. Each one uses the image of a rider minus his head to induce fear into the local populace, or to point up the boundary between the living and the dead. In the Celtic tradition the Dullahan is the most striking: a dark fairy who carries his own head under one arm and rides a snorting black horse or driving a coach, appears as a harbinger of death.

Germany brings its own version of the legend: the Wild Hunt. Here the decapitated rider gallops across the countryside and offers a warning to all those who see him. Is this the imagery that Liszt engenders in his Transcendental Étude No. 8, “Wilde Jagd” (Wild Hunt)? The best-known incarnation of this tale is Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In Irving’s story, schoolmaster Ichabod Crane is hunted by a headless Hessian trooper, a spectral soldier whose head was carried away by a cannonball during the American Revolutionary War. Or was it all a hoax?

Across all these tales, the ‘Headless Horseman’ stands for something in the protagonist’s life that is left unfinished, whether an unburied warrior, a cursed soul, or a wandering messenger from the ‘other side.’ He rides endlessly between one realm and the next, a reminder that the past has a way of circling back when people least expect it.

Ron Goodwin’s The Headless Horsemen is a short piece, lasting less than three minutes. Yet, much happens in this miniature. It opens with a loud drum roll, followed by an onomatopoeic mimicking of a horse neighing. There is an upward sweep of strings before the rider sets off. Soon the percussion is beating out the thunder of hooves. His travels are announced by a big brassy theme. There are interjections from loud trombones, and every so often a whipcrack is heard. Is the listener misled by a slightly more lyrical moment in the central section? Screeching and swirling strings return before the piece finishes with a loud braying. The Headless Horseman has arrived at his destination, wherever that may be.

The Headless Horseman was first issued on a 78rpm record in 1956 (Parlophone R.4162). It was coupled with No Other Love. It can be heard on YouTube, here. The composer conducts his own orchestra. It has been reissued on 45rpm and on LP.