Worcester and the Three Choirs Festival – a 300-year journey, and counting…

The first known Worcester festival was in 1719. The latest should have been this month. The 1719 festival most likely consisted of two days of music with the cathedral choirs singing in the cathedral with a small orchestra in the mornings and in secular concerts in the evenings with the music of Purcell much to the fore.

This year should have seen a Gabriel Jackson premiere, The World Imagined, his first oratorio for full symphonic forces, and also one by Jonathan Dove, Gaspard's Foxtrot, an event specially designed for families. There was also to be a new anthem for the combined cathedral choirs by John Rutter, which would have been broadcast, and other premieres by Roddy Williams, James Francis Brown and Dan Howard. Let's hope most appear in 2021!

Key Worcester dates:

1719. The first newspaper report, so far traced, referring directly to the Music Meetings of Gloucester, and Worcester. It appeared in the Worcester Postman newspaper of August 1719 and makes it clear that there had been several similar musical assemblies before this time.

1788. Visit to Worcester Meeting by King George III and other members of the Royal family and their retinue. While in Cheltenham on a visit for his health, the King had learned that the Triennial Festival was to be held in Worcester during the last week of August. Not being able to make those dates he requested that the Festival be moved to a more convenient time earlier in the month. It duly was moved and the royal party took up residence in the Bishop's palace from where they attended several concerts and heard a lot of Handel's music including . Until 1834 all cathedral performances during the Festivals were given in the quire but for this festival only the nave was fitted up for the occasion with a gallery for the royal family erected under the Great West Window.

1800. First Three Choirs performance of Haydn' s Creation. It had been first performed in Vienna just two years earlier in 1798.

1875. 'The Mock Festival.' For much of the 19th century there was opposition among some clergy to the increasing secular nature of the Festivals. This came to a head in 1875 when the Dean and Chapter of Worcester encouraged by the Earl of Dudley refused the use of the cathedral in its present form. They insisted that no platforms be erected, no soloists or orchestra engaged, no admission prices, no secular concerts and no oratorios. Not even Handel’s Messiah. And so the resulting cut down festival was known as 'The Mock Festival' There was general indignation in the city to this, and it is reported that black flags were displayed. Fortunately, by the time of the next Worcester festival things had returned to normal.

1890. First performance of a piece by at the Festival. This was the Froissart overture, composed specially for the occasion. Elgar's first appearance at the Festivals had been in 1878 as a member of the orchestra, and he was again playing in his own Froissart among the violins.

1902. First acceptable performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. The work had been commissioned, and given a disastrous first performance by the Birmingham Festival of 1900, but thanks to the support and encouragement of Ivor Atkins it was given the performance it deserved at Worcester in 1902, conducted by Elgar himself. It went on to be performed at 18 more Festivals during Elgar's lifetime, usually conducted by the composer himself, and many more since.

1911. First performance of the Five Mystical Songs by . Alongside Elgar, Vaughan Williams was another composer who dominated the Festival programmes in the first half of the twentieth century. The Five Mystical Songs were Vaughan Williams’ second Three Choirs commission after the Fantasia on Theme by Thomas Tallis from the Gloucester festival of 1910. Further Vaughan Williams first performances followed in Worcester, including Four Hymns (1920), Magnificat (1932) and (1954).

The Festivals continued to commission new works from leading composers over the years. At the 2014 Worcester Festival, Torsten Rasch's A Foreign Field was premiered, and in 2017 it was the turn of Sally Beamish's The Birds, sung by Kitty Whateley. This was a significant moment, as having the main première being a chamber scale event marked the increasing quality and scope of the full festival programme, as it comes up to match the flagship events in the cathedrals.

Key Worcester personality: Sir Ivor Atkins

The Three Choirs Festival owes much to Sir Ivor Atkins, who was organist of between 1897 and 1948. Firstly, the fact the Festival still exists at all is in no small part due to him almost single-handedly ensuring that they resumed in 1920 after being suspended during the First World War. This was not a given, since a few other Triennial festivals in the country were abandoned at this time. It was for this achievement that he was knighted. The present numbering system for the Festival is also due to Atkins. On the resumption of the Festival in 1920 he decided that the most likely start date was 1715, which therefore made the 1920 Festival the 200th.

Ivor Atkins was born in 1869 in Cardiff where his father was organist of St John's church. He received his first music lessons from his father and then took organ lessons from Charles Lee Williams, later organist of Gloucester Cathedral but then at Llandaff Cathedral. In 1885 he went to as pupil and assistant to George Robertson Sinclair, whom he followed to in 1890. He was appointed to Worcester Cathedral in 1897 and subsequently directed 12 Three Choirs Festivals.

A keen musical history scholar, he produced an edition of Bach's Orgelbuchlein in 1916 and with Elgar prepared an edition of that composer's St Matthew Passion in 1911 and established that work as a regular feature of the Three Choirs Festival. He also produced the first popular edition of Allegri's Miserere with the famous top Cs in the treble line in 1951. This edition was subsequently recorded in 1963 by King's College Choir, Cambridge under , Atkins' successor at Worcester; a recording which led to its current and continued popularity.

Simon Carpenter Three Choirs Festival archivist