Two very different masterworks share our program this evening: Herbert Howells’
Hymnus Paradisi is a masterpiece rarely performed, especially on this side of the Atlantic. On the other hand, Leonard Bernstein’s
Chichester Psalms is one of the most frequently performed of all choral works (
especially on this side of the Atlantic!).
The Howells is an emblematic example of all the most wonderful aspects of music written to be sung in the great English cathedrals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was a time when composers such as Stanford, Perry, Vaughan Williams and Holst were inspired by the warm reverberance of those spaces (with acoustics similar to those of the Shrine) to write a unique repertoire of rich vocal sonorities and transcendent musical poetry.
Bernstein’s Psalms, on the other hand, though actually commissioned by an English cathedral, employ the distinctively plaintive melodic language of the Jewish cantorial style and the infectious rhythms of American musical theater.
Yet these two unlikely musical cousins somehow make a felicitous pairing. (We discovered only recently that the John Alexander and the Pacific Chorale paired these works on a now out-of-print recording just a few years back). Both possess a passionate lyricism that both connects to our world and draws us beyond it; both at times use astringent harmonies to convey a sense of the complex emotions of this world that so often fills us with pain, loss, and unfulfilled desire; and both, in their own ways, give us a glimmer of spiritual ecstasy as only music can.
When Herbert Howells suddenly lost his only son to polio at the age of nine in 1935, he felt himself to be spiritually “frozen” and “unable to work or think.” It has been said that it took the persuasion of his daughter to allow himself engagement with music again as a way of working through his sorrow. The initial result, completed three years later, was Hymnus Paradisi. He drew on musical ideas from an earlier unaccompanied Requiem (1932) for which we are not sure of the inspiration. Upon completion, Howells put away the Hymnus as a “personal document,” inappropriate for public performance. However, some years after World War II his revered mentor Ralph Vaughan Williams urged him to allow it to be performed, which is finally was in 1950. It is worth noting that the great sacred anthems (such as Like as a Hart) and liturgical settings for which he is best known today came only after this juncture in his life. His earlier compositions were predominantly instrumental works.
The instrumental Preludio opens with a short, brooding theme that is heard later on in the work. This leads directly into the Requiem Aeternam, where the choir sings the words of the opening text of the requiem mass to this melody. Howells writes for a “double” choir in this movement, and gives special attention to the words “et lux perpetua lucet eis” (and may light perpetual shine upon them”. Light will remain the central image of the Hymnus, culminating in the ecstatic final movement Holy is the true light.
But Howells was not interested in following the liturgical texts of a requiem. In the next movement, The Lord is my Shepherd, the soprano soloist leads the chorus into a many-layered setting of the beloved 23rd Psalm. The music seems almost strangely reserved and at times rather daring. At the end of this movement the music comes to a complete resting point for the first time since the beginning of the Praeludio.
This spell is broken by a three-part women’s choir of “heavenly hosts” conjuring up celestial realms for Howells setting of Psalm 121, one of the most confident of psalm texts, for the forth movement Sanctus / I will lift up mine eyes. The composer has the choir chant this psalm text mostly in forthright unison before bringing back the angels at full force (with male angels joining in this time!). But having forcefully transported us to another realm, an ethereal chamber choir lets us know we have actually arrived there by beginning an extended, subdued coda evoking the eternal protection of the Lord who shall “preserve thy going out and they coming in for this time forth, for evermore.”
This evocation is appropriately followed by a short setting of a text from the burial service, I heard a voice from Heaven. Led by the tenor soloist and the chamber choir, this briefest movement in the work offers the reassurance that the dead are already part of this other world.
The final movement, Holy is the true light, is a setting of a text from the ancient prayer book called the Salisbury Diurnal. Its central metaphor of radiant light being the embodiment of holiness gave Howells the theme he felt he needed to tie the whole work together. Beginning with ruminations on a repeated four-note theme (not unlike the compositional technique used in the first movement of the Chichester Psalms), the choir chants the opening line of text in unison. The organ sustains a low Bb pedal note for the first 60 bars of the movement, leading to a final, ecstatic “Alleluia!”
This musical procedure is followed twice more, the first line of the text “Holy is the true light” being sung by the chorus, followed by a progressively more complete version of the rest of text, and concluding with an ecstatic “alleluia.”
These are quite daunting passages for the choir in terms of both realization and stamina – they are musically “over the top” as Howells pushes himself beyond restraints of conventional expression. Allow yourself for a moment to be “carried away” by this strange and wonderful music, without trying to “make sense” of it. Time for that will come later, as the experience lingers in your memory.
The work ends with a sustained intonation of the words “Requiem dona eis sempiternam” (“Rest grant them forever”) by the full chorus and orchestra, with both listeners and singers now in a different place as the organ concludes with the opening theme of the Praeludio.
Leonard Bernstein wrote his Chichester Psalms in response to a commission in 1965 from the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England for an annual choral festival there. Forgoing texts in Latin or English, he chose to set a selection of psalms in the original Hebrew, with music reflecting Jewish origins as well. This work was the main result of a year-long sabbatical from the directorship of the New York Philharmonic taken for the express purpose of exploring new compositional idioms. But he later wrote (in 1977, quoted from Joan Peyser’s 1987 biography):
……In the course of that year I made many experiments because I had the luxury of a whole year to do nothing but experiment. And part of my experimentation was to try – it was the only time in my life I tried to write a specific kind of music – to try to write some pieces which, shall we say, were less old fashioned. And I wrote a lot and a lot of it was very good, and I threw it all away. And what I came out with at the end of the year was a piece called
Chichester Psalms, which is simple and tonal and tuneful and as pure “B flat” as any piece you can think of. I don’t mean that it was all in B flat but I’m sure you get my point. Because that was what I honestly wished to write.
The resulting work is as open and straight-forward as Howell’s Hymnus is oblique and many-layered. Like Howells, he does open his Psalms with a straight-forward declamation of a melody which is brought back again later in the piece. But his melody is as jagged as Howell’s is linear. Brisk dance-like music follows with an irregular seven beats to the bar, giving it the first movement something like “show-stopping” energy appropriate to the psalm text “Hariu l”Adonai kol ha’arets” (Make a joyful noice unto the Lord).
The second movement juxtaposes two very different musical and poetic ideas. A plaintive setting of the same 23rd Psalm set by Howells in Hymnus Paradisi is sung by a child soloist to a simple harp accompaniment, only to be harshly interrupted by the violent reality of the world in the famous words of Psalm 2: “Lamah rag’shu goyim” (Why do the nations rage?).
While the third and concluding movement of the Psalms, like the first movement, begins with a slow and jagged introduction, it yields to a lyrical, extended melody with modal inflections, this time five beats to the bar instead of seven. The flowing unison singing of the choir reflects the humility of the text of psalm 131 “Adonai, Adonia, Lo gavah libi” (Lord, Lord, my heart is not proud). The opening theme comes back one last time as the choirs sings it quietly to different words, a moving passage from Psalm 133: “Hineh mah tov, Umah naim, Shevet ahim, Gam yahad” (Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity). It would be hard to think of a more fitting text to conclude a concert where singers and listeners from many walks of life are brought together by the power of singing.
– Thomas Lloyd
