The Unconquered Passenger

There is a certain swagger in a piece of sheet music that announces itself in Latin.This one does: Invictus (unconquered) set for voice and piano by Bruno Huhn to a poem by William Ernest Henley, and copyrighted in 1910 by Arthur P. Schmidt of Boston.The song was issued in more than one key, and this copy takes the middle road, marked for mezzo-soprano or baritone. It is dedicated to Francis Rogers, a Boston-born, Harvard-educated baritone who made his name in the recital halls of New York, a singer admired more for subtlety and finish than for thunder. It was an odd and rather touching choice of dedicatee for a song that has been thundered ever since.The poem beneath the music has its own quiet secret. Henley wrote it in 1875 in an Edinburgh hospital, having already lost part of one leg to disease and fighting to keep the other.When he finally printed it in his A Book of Verses in 1888, it had no title at all.It was simply the fourth poem in a sequence he called Life and Death…

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