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Music Notes: Second Sunday of Lent – 8th March 2020
The mass setting at the Solemn Eucharist this week is the Missa Brevis by William Walton (1920–1983). This piece was the result of a commission from the Friends of Coventry Cathedral in 1965, and was first performed there in 1966. The commission came just three years after the Cathedral had first opened in May 1962, having been built alongside the ruins of the bombed-out 14th century church that was destroyed in the Second World War. At the end of May 1962, the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was premiered there. Its fruition was the result of another commission by the cathedral for a work to mark the consecration of the new building designed by the architect Basil Spence. Michael Tippett (1905–1998) had also been commissioned to provide a work for the arts festival associated with the consecration, and he provided the opera King Priam. So, there was commissioning fever in the air, and William Walton was certainly a key British composer who could rank alongside Britten and Tippett. In fact, he was really rather jealous of Britten’s success and resented his seemingly easy access to the upper echelons of the British establishment. He believed that this was the result of a gay cabal from which resolutely heterosexual composers such as he were unreasonably excluded, all the more unfair, he thought, as the members of his tribe were surely the ‘normal’ ones. (This is a reasonably accurate paraphrase of several comments he made.) Coventry Cathedral was, as a result of the War Requiem, inextricably connected with Britten, so one can just imagine what he felt when he was approached just three years later to provide a work of his own. To be fair, he had written to Britten in November 1963 on the occasion of Britten’s 50th birthday and said (one of Britten’s biographers, Paul Kildea, says this must have been through slightly gritted teeth) in the last years your music has come to mean more and more to me, so just possibly this was less of an issue than would have been the case, say, a decade earlier.
In any case, the result is a work that Walton himself described as being very brevis. Its entire performance time is something like seven minutes, which leaves room for an entire extra gin and tonic before lunch. It is in effect four terse movements, Kyrie, Sanctus & Benedictus, Agnus Dei, and Gloria, the first three of them remarkably austere. The sequence is important here, because this work’s concept of the liturgy involves the Gloria coming near the end of the service after the Communion – in other words, in the position assigned to it in The Book of Common Prayer 1662. This is visible not only in the printed sequence of the published work, but also in the fact that the first three movements are all unaccompanied, while the last, the Gloria introduces the organ to dramatic effect, making this the climax of the work when performed in the 1662 sequence. Of course, this being Lent, we don’t use the Gloria at all, so will miss this experience altogether!
Incidentally, Walton wasn’t totally wedded to the Prayer Book because he set the Benedictus after the Sanctus. This does not follow the 1662 pattern – in which there is 2
no Benedictus at all – but is permissible in the 1928 version. However, he did this because it was Coventry’s usage, rather than a liturgical choice by the composer.
More from Walton at the Communion Motet, which is the beautiful miniature Drop, drop slow tears. In fact, Walton’s musical life almost didn’t get off the ground. Much as one thinks of him later in life as a “grand old thing” with a knighthood and bags of “establishment approval”, his early background was, in those days, not the usual springboard to such things. His mother’s attempt to have him accepted as a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford was almost derailed by his father’s drinking away the price of the train tickets down from the family home in Oldham in Lancashire. Still, with the help of a loan from the local greengrocer, Mrs Walton managed to make the journey, with son in tow, and browbeat the Organist into testing William, and he was duly accepted. In fact, his Oxford career, which continued from chorister to undergraduate, was not a complete success, and, in spite of his unquestioned genius, he failed his exams repeatedly, and eventually went down without a degree.
Nevertheless, Walton had learnt a great deal during the many years he spent in and around Christ Church, and was what can only be described as a determined composer from an early age. Drop, drop slow tears began as a piece for four treble voices, and a minor third higher in pitch than the version we know today. Nevertheless, it is recognizably roughly the same work, and the extraordinary thing is that this was written at Easter 1916, roughly the same time that Hubert Parry (1848–1918) was writing what we know as the hymn Jerusalem. Drop, drop slow tears begins with a somewhat astonishing discord. We mustn’t overstate the conservatism of English musical language at the time, but the most inventive and acoustically challenging work of the period was mainly to be found in mainland Europe and the United States – for example, Charles Ives’s (1874–1954) iconoclastic Fourth Symphony was written the same year – so this discord is only so unexpected because it was an English schoolboy creating it. Benjamin Britten would be doing much the same kind of thing ten years later, so the seeds were being sown here of a British musical language that would simply germinate here somewhat later than elsewhere.
The following year, the now fifteen-year old Walton revised Drop, drop slow tears, changing the choral texture to that of a conventional four-part choir, and bringing the pitch down a minor-third. He was to go on revising the piece from time to time – a very characteristic process for him of slow refinement – and the final version (known as “the third version”), now published as the “definitive” one, dates from 1930.
The Canticles at Evensong are the Evening Service in B minor by T. Tertius Noble (1867–1953). Noble was the organist of York Minster between John Naylor (father of Edward Naylor, composer of Vox Dicentis: Clama, the anthem at Evensong two weeks ago) and the great Edward Bairstow (who wrote Save us, O Lord, last week’s Evensong anthem). Noble succeeded Basil Harwood (1859–1949) – incidentally, 3
himself a great church music composer – at Ely Cathedral, serving there from 1892 to 1898 before moving on to York Minster. That was, however, as nothing compared with Noble’s next move, which was across the Atlantic in 1913, where the Church of Saint Thomas, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was being rebuilt after a disastrous fire three years previously. The Vestry (the name we also used to use for an Anglican church’s governing body, but which has meantime been turned into “PCC” over here but not over there) was considering how the church might establish cathedral- standard music, such as was believed to exist in England. The obvious solution was to pilfer a genuine example of a great English cathedral organist, and their eye fell on the appealing-sounding Noble, then conveniently engaged in a series of organ recitals in the United States. He accepted the challenge and made permanent the move across the Atlantic from Old York to New York, living the rest of his life there. He accepted a parallel position in the editorial department of Messrs Schirmer, music publishers, so his time was well and truly occupied. Six years later, the Saint Thomas Choir School for boys was established (the only church-related boarding school in the USA), and the church has not looked back. It is still an excellent example of the Anglican choral tradition. I must tell you that when T. Tertius Noble retired from St Thomas, he was replaced by another British organist by the name of T. Frederick H. Candlyn. Evidently the “T for Thomas” did it for them both!
In fact, Noble’s “Tertius” came about because both his father and grandfather were called “Thomas”, which is also the name represented by the initial “T.” in the styling by which we usually know him. So, the whole thing might have been represented in the United States more usually as “Thomas Noble III”. Using the number as a name might perhaps call to mind Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg’s interesting decision to call his sixth child “Sixtus” (to be more complete: Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg) – but as you can see from the above, this was quite different in the case of the Nobles.
From 2004 until his most untimely death in 2015, the music at St Thomas was directed by another import from the UK, John Scott, previously organist of St Paul’s Cathedral. Thereafter, the post was taken by yet another British import, Daniel Hyde, who moved on relatively quickly, in his case to the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where he succeeded the late Stephen Cleobury as Director of Music, and has indeed broadcast his first Christmas Eve carol service from there. Now, yet another Brit, the brilliant Jeremy Filsell, who has lived and worked in the United States for many years, is in post at St Thomas’s.
Writing about Noble’s move in the Musical Times on 1st February 1913, the legendary organist, teacher and writer, Walter Alcock, noted Noble’s genial and cordial manner, overflowing with enthusiasm for his art, with the highest ideals of all that is manly and true… and noted that he was accompanied on this venture by his charming wife, daughter of the late Bishop Stubbs of Truro, formerly Dean of Ely, adding: The wholesome traditions of English family life will be well represented in a country where they are certain of 4 a cordial reception. So little of that would be framed in quite the same way today. Nevertheless, it was a big step. Although it was an Anglican church he was going to, he had in effect left the Church of England, with its rules and governance structures, and joined the Episcopal Church, which did things differently, as it still does today.
Noble’s Evening Service in B minor, written while he was at Ely Cathedral working still under the patronage of his future father-in-law, is one of the best loved settings in the Anglican tradition. The music displays an engaging late Victorian chromaticism that lends it much emotional colour. Interest is also maintained by constantly changing combinations of voices and long flowing lines for the top line, clearly designed for cathedral choirs (or somewhere like St Thomas’s, in fact) to show off their trebles’ voices.
The anthem is by Hubert Parry (1848–1918). Lord, let me know mine end is the last of the six choral works published as Songs of Farewell, and composed between 1916 and 1918. The set starts out with the – well-known and often sung – My soul there is a country, written for just four voices. The second, I know my soul hath power sticks to the same forces, but thereafter each successive movement adds a level of vocal complexity. Never weather-beaten sail brings in a second soprano part, tonight’s anthem adds in a further bass to make a six-part texture. At the round earth’s imagined corners jumps directly to eight parts but treats them as a single ensemble. The final movement, Lord, let me know mine end retains the eight voices, but splits them into two four-part choirs.
One cannot help feeling that writing these choral songs between the ages of 68 and 70 was not done without conscious awareness of the march of time. Indeed, one thinks of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, which truly were that composer’s last completed works, and all the more powerful for that knowledge, especially as they too deal with themes of longing and farewell. On his 70th birthday in February 1918, Parry wrote I have reached the last milestone. He couldn’t have known quite how precisely true these words were at that time. The so-called “Spanish Influenza” epidemic of 1918 – which killed up to 100 million people around the world, and which doubtless feeds the concerns of those supervising the current COVID-19 emergency – was to claim his life in October of that same year.