Durham E-Theses TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF TRACTARIAN HYMNODY: A Critical Appraisal of the Interaction between Theology, Poetry and Music in Anglican Hymnody between 1840 and 1900. HARPER, JOSEPH,FRANK How to cite: HARPER, JOSEPH,FRANK (2010) TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF TRACTARIAN HYMNODY: A Critical Appraisal of the Interaction between Theology, Poetry and Music in Anglican Hymnody between 1840 and 1900., Durham theses, Durham University. 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JOSEPH HARPER Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Durham University 2010 i ABSTRACT In October 1900 Henry Hadow delivered a damning appraisal of Stainer’s Hymn Tunes, and in so doing, castigated an earlier generation of Victorian poets and composers who had been inspired by the Tractarian revival. Hadow’s aesthetic judgment was formed by a new generation intent on the promulgation of ‘good taste’ which regarded the hymn repertoire of earlier Victorians as insincere, cloying and sentimental, with little regard for craftsmanship, artifice or spiritual expression. The objective of this thesis is to examine in detail the genre of the ‘Tractarian hymn’ in terms of its theological origins and content and its musical manifestations. The first half is essentially a discussion of Tractarianism as a revival movement (and precursor to the Oxford Movement) and how it found its roots in the political reaction to state interference in ecclesiastical affairs (the ‘Erastian Sacrilege’). The Tracts for the Times, which were widely disseminated, are used as a basis for a more thorough investigation of Anglicanism’s revival in the 1830s and renewal of commitment to liturgical order, the authority of the church (through the agency of the Book of Common Prayer) and personal holiness of life, as well as to the appropriateness of music to divine service. Tractarianism rapidly spawned an artistic creativity which, through its natural affinity with Romanticism, excited a major movement in religious poetry, much in evidence in Keble’s compendium The Christian Year but also in a generation of Tractarian poets such as Caswall, Faber, Lyte, Elliott, Chandler, Thring, Neale, Ellerton, Chatterton Dix, Plumptre and Baker, and in the benchmark publication of Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861. The second half of the thesis is devoted exclusively to a detailed musical analysis of hymns from this period in order to assess the appropriateness of the musical response to the poetry. Initially a discussion is devoted to the evolution of the hymn from its origins in metrical psalmody (in Redhead, Gauntlett, Elvey and Ouseley), to increasingly more sophisticated organic examples by Monk, E. J. Hopkins, A. H. Brown and Oakeley where the influence of song and the expressive capacity of chromaticism are in evidence. Moreover, in conjunction with this artistic development, the concurrent evolution of the choir, organ and the imperative of harmony are discussed as a major factor in the expansion of the genre. Central, however, to the model of the Tractarian hymn was John Bacchus Dykes. His settings of Tractarian poetry brought the hymn more readily within the confines of Romantic art music with their reference not only to broader mainland European influences (especially in terms of harmony) but to other genres as partsong, oratorio chorus, lieder and chant. Using the model of Dykes, a later generation of ‘professional’ composers – Barnby, Stainer and Sullivan – were ready to continue the transformation of the Tractarian hymn still further, with more marked reference to secular influences. In Stainer’s case, the hymn became more of a cerebral vehicle in which musical artifice and contrivance played a major role. In this regard, Stainer’s promotion of the genre confirmed it as a serious form of composition, worthy of Ruskinian artistic ethics of the time. In summary, the hymns of Dykes, Stainer, Barnby and Sullivan, with their earnest attention to harmony, form and genre, serve both to accentuate the sophistication of Tractarian hymnody and refute Hadow’s accusation of superficiality. ii CONTENTS Abstract ii Contents iii Introduction iv Acknowledgements xii Abbreviations xiii PART I Towards the formation of a Tractarian ‘Blueprint’ through the agencies of Theology, Liturgy and Poetry Chapter One Tractarianism as Concept: The Tracts for the Times 1 Chapter Two Cranmer’s The Book of Common Prayer and Keble’s 70 The Christian Year Chapter Three The Clarion Voice of Tractarian Poets, their 102 interpretation, insights and inspiration on some contemporary issues. PART II The Tractarian ‘Blueprint’ and the Evolution of the Anglican Hymn-tune as an Art Form Chapter Four The Tractarian Hymn and its Musical Pioneers 152 Chapter Five The Revd John Bacchus Dykes (1823-76): Tractarian 219 Hymnodist par excellence Chapter Six Barnby, Stainer and Sullivan: Tractarian Hymnody 281 and High Victorianism Epilogue 325 Bibliography 330 iii INTRODUCTION In an unremittingly brutal review of Stainer’s Hymn Tunes in The Guardian of 31 October 1900, Henry Hadow, one of Stainer’s own academic colleagues in the Music School at Oxford University, launched an attack on the very aesthetic of hymn tunes written by past generations of Victorian composers.1 ‘They seek the honeyed cadence and the perfumed phrase,’ he claimed, and damned the repertoire with the following: ‘they can touch the surface of emotion, but can never sound its depths.’2 As Ian Bradley has pointed in his monograph Abide with me, Hadow was of a later generation that admired the manifesto of Robert Bridges’ Yattendon Hymnal, recently published between 1895 and 1899.3 Bridges abhorred the sentiment and vulgarity of the popular Victorian hymn; composers and poets had suspended their critical acumens and what was wanted was a new beginning, where ‘good taste’ emerged as the principal criterion of aesthetic judgment. Indeed Bridges’ dismissal of hymns spawned by the Tractarian revival was symptomatic of a new wave of hymn composition which was symbolised not only by the Yattendon Hymnal but by both the committee of the 1904 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (HA&M) and the English Hymnal (EH)of 1906. Both these hymn books implicitly espoused the notion of ‘good taste’, one effectively articulated by new critical aspirations for both the ‘literature’ of the poetry and the quality of 1 Hadow, H., Review of Stainer’s Hymn Tunes, The Guardian, 31 October 1900, 1831. 2 Ibid. 3 Bradley, I., Abide with me (SCM Press Ltd: London, 1997), 203. iv the music. In terms of the music, which will be the focus of the second part of this thesis, Hadow concurred with his immediate contemporaries, Parry, Stanford, Parratt, Harwood and others, that the musical language should express something of a new manliness and healthiness, attributes that eschewed the so-called cloying and stultifying chromaticism of earlier Victorian generations. Instead, a new diatonic style of hymn, often sung in unison, was born in which tunes such as Stanford’s ENGELBERG and Vaughan Williams SINE NOMINE were typical examples of the new taste. Furthermore, the new age brought with it an antiquarian zeal for chorales, plainsong tunes, psalm tunes from early German, Swiss and French sources (a factor particularly evident in George Ratcliffe Woodward’s Hymns of Syon of 1904), and, in the case of the English Hymnal, a multiplicity of folk tunes. As Stanford articulated in his autobiographical Pages from an Unwritten Diary of 1914, the old hymn was a heritage to be cursed in the name of ‘fitness and decency’: Our hymn-books are about four times too large. Our population is smaller than that of Germany, but Germany finds a fraction of our number of tunes quite sufficient for her purpose. Her Chorales were the feeding-bottle of Sebastian Bach; and upon the foundation of their influence his music was built. Imagine the style which an English Church composer would develop whose early taste was formed by familiarity with *Dykes’s+ ‚O Paradise!‛ and such-like tunes! If ever a censor was wanted, it is here; an authority who would not only wipe out the rubbish, but insist on the proper speed. Fine modern tunes like S. S. Wesley’s ‚The Church’s one Foundation‛ are rattled through at a pace which would make its composer turn in his grave. The older melodies, written by men who had a sense of fitness and decency to v back their musicianship, are played and sung as if the whole congregation had to catch a train.4 The trend of damnation, as Nicholas Temperley has described, continued well into the twentieth century with Vaughan Williams, Ernest Walker, Erik Routley and Kenneth Long.5 Yet, as we know, while EH eventually enjoyed some success, the 1904 edition of HA&M was a considerable failure, requiring Sydney Nicholson to prepare a new edition in 1916 which looked to the 1889 supplement as the core of its text.