Howells Requiem

e c i v r e S s ’ l u a P t S 2 1 CHOIR OF TRINITY COLLEGE 0 2 R CAMBRIDGE STEPHEN LAYTON E N N I W D R A W A E Salve regina Gloucester Service g n N i h O s i S H r e P h M c O r L o M f , A E h t R L r I G a e , E m A Hymn for St Cecilia i h U e k a T W Q O E H R The manuscript of the opening page of Howells’ Requiem Reproduced by kind permission of the Literary Executors of the Herbert Howells Trust 2 HE MUSIC OF HERBERT HOWELLS (189 2–1983) the loss of a child is always uniquely poignant and tragic. is often associated with transience and loss. The The death from polio in 1935 of his nine year-old son Telegiac strain in English music of the twentieth Michael was, needless to say, the most traumatic and century is not confined to Howells; it is to be found devastating of Howells’ personal experiences. It is natural in different ways in the music of Delius, Finzi, Gurney enough to expect a deeply personal loss of this nature to be and Vaughan Williams, to name but a few. But Howells reflected in any artist’s work. On Howells, with his already seems to have had a particularly acute sense of the deeply embedded sense of the elegiac and transient, impermanence, the brevity and fragility of life. That this Michael’s death had a profound effect. It is arguable that arose out of experience from a very early age is beyond everything he subsequently wrote was coloured in some doubt. The bankruptcy of his father, a small town jobbing way by it. Three of the works recorded here, including the builder in rural Gloucestershire, and the family’s substantial Requiem for unaccompanied voices, are con - consequent loss of prestige, friends and social standing, nected in some way to Michael. None of the remaining was a formative experience. It led to a lifelong anxiety pieces was specifically composed as a memorial, but about money and income, which was one of the reasons everything on this disc comes from a mind that constantly why Howells never relinquished his teaching post at the reflected on the passing pageant of life, and is coloured by Royal College of Music and hardly ever turned down a that process of reflection. request to examine or adjudicate at music festivals to risk earning his living by composition alone. A Hymn for St Cecilia is a beautifully crafted occasional As a student in London he lost friends and contem - setting. Howells was an active member of the Worshipful poraries to the carnage of the First World War. His Elegy for Company of Musicians, one of the Livery Companies of viola, string quartet and string orchestra, perhaps the first the City of London with a history dating back to the middle of his works composed explicitly as a memorial, was of the fourteenth century. Once a powerful professional written in memory of Frances Purcell Warren, a viola organi zation with complete control over musical player killed at Mons in 1917. One of his closest boyhood performance in the City, the Company has long been a friends, Ivor Gurney, whose inherent mental instability philanthropic and ceremonial organization and now was almost certainly exacerbated by his experiences in supports musicians and musical education, awarding the trenches, was a later, longer drawn-out loss. Howells prizes, scholarships and medals. Howells was Master of himself was exempt from military service on medical the Company in 195 9– 60, and this tribute to the patron grounds due to the onset of Graves Disease, a condition saint of musicians was commis sioned by the Company in that forced him to give up his first salaried position as 1960. It was first sung in St Paul’s Cathedral on 22 sub -organist of Salisbury Cathedral (with a loss of income November 1961 at an evensong to mark St Cecilia’s day. and independence) and for a time threatened his lif e— The text is a poem specially written by Ursula Vaughan the ultimate loss. Williams. She wrote: ‘My St Cecilia is a girl in one of those The loss of income, security, employment, and of magical gardens from Pompeian frescoes, a romantic friends in the trenches, was not unique to Howells. Many figure among colonnades and fountains; Herbert’s tune suffered such setbacks and came to terms with them. But takes her briskly towards martyrdom.’ Howells’ tune is one 3 of his most memorable. The descant to the third verse was The Gloucester Service is an early fruit of the a happy afterthought. Added at the request of John Dykes- wonderful and rather extraordinary outpouring of music Bower, the cathedral organist, it lifts this simple setting for the Anglican cathedral tradition with which Howells onto a higher plane. revived his flagging career as a composer after the Second Salve regina comes from a much earlier period of World War. Over three decades Howells composed some Howells’ life, and is partly inspired by his student exposure twenty settings of the evensong canticles. The set for to church music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Gloucester Cathedral was one of the first, written as his One of the most influential and important figures in the mother lay dying in his home town of Lydney in 1946. His early twentieth-century revival of this music was Richard diary entry for 6 January reads: ‘A lovely day with Mother. Terry, who transcribed, edited and performed much of this F# Magn. and N. Dim. finished while talking to her.’ She music with his choir at the newly built Westminster died three weeks later. Although the dedication is to Roman Catholic Cathedral. Stanford, Howells’ composition Gloucester Cathedral, it was not composed to fulfil a teacher at the Royal College of Music, was in the habit of commission, but in the wake of the success of the recommending that his pupils go to Westminster to hear Collegium Regale set, written for King’s College, ‘Palestrina for tuppence’ (the cost of the bus fare). It was Cambridge in 1945. In 1950, Eric Milner-White, the through Stanford and Terry that Howells’ Mass in the visionary former dean of King’s who had encouraged Dorian Mode , a student work of 1912, was sung at the Howells to compose for the church, wrote of having heard cathedra l— his very first professional performance. Terry the Gloucester canticles twice in ten days at York Minster: was impressed with Howells’ work and requests for more ‘The Nunc Dimittis left me in inward tears for the rest of liturgical pieces followed. Four Anthems to the Blessed the day; it is true to say that no piece of music has ever Virgin Mary were composed in the space of one week and moved me in the same way or so much. At that first sung at Easter 1916 in the cathedral. The manuscripts are hearing, the Magnificat interested rather than moved now lost and only two anthems survive ( Regina caeli and me— though the Gloria I think tuned my spirit for the Salve regina ) in transcripts made by members of the Nunc Dimittis. On the second hearing the Magnificat cathedral choir. produced the same effect upon me as the N[unc] The music of the Salve regina has moved away from D[imittis] at the first; and the N. D. even increased its the style of Palestrina that Howells was required to parody power. We, not I only, found it overwhelming. […] I in the Mass , and the language is more personal without personally feel that you have opened a new chapter in giving much indication of the complexity of Howells’ church music. [It is] of spiritual moment rather than mature idiom that we hear in the other works on this disc. liturgical. It is so much more than music making; it is Perhaps he had been looking at the unaccompanied experiencing deep things in the only medium that can motets of Bruckner (or even Stanford), as well as Terry’s do it.’ transcriptions of Tallis and Byrd. Writing in the West - In his own sleeve note to the 1967 recording by King’s minster Cathedral Chronicle in 1922, Terry described College Choir of Take him, earth, for cherishing Howells’ Four Anthems as ‘… quite the finest by any Howells wrote: ‘Within the year following the tragic modern Englishman’. death of President Kennedy in Texas plans were made for 4 a dual American-Canadian Memorial Service to be held in The St Paul’s Service is one of Howells’ most cele - Washington. I was asked to compose an a cappella work brated settings of texts that he returned to time and for the commemoration. The text was mine to choose, again. Fashioned specially for a building with a spectacular Biblical or other. Choice was settled when I recalled a acoustic, consequently employing a less rapidly changing poem by Prudentius (AD 34 8– 413). I had already set it harmonic rhythm than would be possible in a less reso - in its medieval Latin years earlier, as a study for Hymnus nant building, this is a work in which Howells seems at his Paradisi . But now I used none of that unpublished setting. most confident and optimistic. It is the biggest boned, Instead I turned to Helen Waddell’s faultless translation the most expansive of all his treatments and justifies its […] Here was the perfect tex t— the Prudentius ‘Hymnus reputation as one of the best of his settings for the Anglican circa exsequias defuncti’.’ liturgy.

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