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| The Howells family in 1930. Royal College of Music, ref. LDRCM.HH.1.138, retrieved from http://museumcollections.rcm.ac.uk/collection/Details/collect/5037, reproduced under CC BY 4.0 licence, cropped and enhanced slightly. |
If Herbert Howells’ half-religion was indeed a personalised theology of his own creation, one of art and ardour without tenets or sacraments, it was not, however, a shallow or trivial one. For one thing, his view of the world was forged in great suffering: he was a man who knew pain in plenty. The experience at the age of eleven of his father’s bankruptcy scarred him considerably; the subsequent ostracisation of his family by the local townspeople left him with a life-long anxiety about money. Then, a decade later, there was the brutality with which the Great War cut short his youth, and with it the company of the poet Frederick William Harvey and of Ivor Gurney, whose life was to end so unhappily, and so far away from his beloved Gloucestershire, in a Dartford mental asylum. Francis Purcell Warren, a friend from the Royal College of Music, to whom Howells had dedicated a movement of his orchestral suite ‘The B’s’, was killed in the Battle of the Somme, and his body never found; ‘and one of humanity’s tenderest possessions was ruthlessly destroyed,’ as Hubert Parry’ said. [1] Howells himself avoided military action only because he was facing death on a different front: having been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, he was told at one point that he had only months to live, and at this time was among the first people in Britain to undergo radium treatment. Years later, even the Second World War was not to spare him: his house in Barnes was bombed in an air-raid, with great loss to his library and manuscripts. Surpassing all these, however, one supreme pall of grief lay over his life: that cast by the death, aged nine, on the 6th September 1935, from a form of meningitis or polio, and within a matter of days after the first signs of illness, of his son Michael.
A Sequence for St. Michael (1961), sung by the choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge.
The effects of this catastrophe were as deep and irreversible as might be imagined. For some time afterwards, frozen, Howells could not compose a single note of music. Eventually, though, his daughter Ursula encouraged him actually to work out his grief in music, and this he did. There had been dedications before — ‘Michael’ was already the name of the tune to which we commonly sing the hymn ‘All my hope on God is founded’ — but now it was with grief, as well as with love, that he was to inscribe his son’s name above the manuscripts. Given this context, it is actually rather difficult to hear, in the opening bars of his Sequence for St Michael of 1961, the name ‘Michael’ cried in bright anguish to heaven, and not, we realise, to the Archangel alone. But the greatest memorial that Howells made to his son grew from one of the first pieces he took up when he began composing again: an earlier Requiem that he had already written for a cappella choir. This he expanded, orchestrated, and indeed transfigured into Hymnus Paradisi, the first of his three great master-works for chorus, orchestra and soloists. In spite of its enormous scale, he made known its existence to almost nobody for years, until various friends — notably Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Sumsion — persuaded him to allow its performance during the Three Choirs Festival of 1950. [2]
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| Howells at Gloucester Cathedral on the 7th September, 1950, just before conducting the first performance of Hymnus Paradisi. The previous day had been the fifteenth anniversary of his son Michael’s death. Royal College of Music, ref. LDRCM.Ph.22.77, retrieved from http://museumcollections.rcm.ac.uk/collection/Details/collect/5038, reproduced under CC BY 4.0 licence, cropped and enhanced slightly |
Like the later Missa Sabrinensis, Hymnus Paradisi was non-liturgical in character. Howells made much freer with his texts in this first work, intertwining the Sanctus with the 121st Psalm, and choosing for his final movement words from the Salisbury Diurnal: ‘Holy is the true light, and passing wonderful, / Lending radiance to them that endured in the heat of the conflict.’ It was, then, a personal and personalised Requiem, but one with a deadly serious purpose, far more so than in the case of the Mass. Its creation was a religious act in which Howells’ artistic half-Christianity was put to the test, and required to perform a real and serious spiritual duty: a direct reckoning with the worst of griefs. The remarkable and sobering thing is that in great measure it worked: it solemnised Howells’ grief; it made his anguish expressible, and in doing so made it to some extent measurable and compassable. Beauty being only one face of the mountain of God, it was by no means a resolution — twenty years later, the well of grief remained deep enough for him to draw forth a third choral-orchestral work, his 1965 setting of the Stabat Mater, with its unflinching depiction of Mary’s grief at the foot of the Cross — but, in circumstances under which any straightforward healing seems inconceivable, it is notable that Howells did find a degree of consolation. And it should be said that Hymnus Paradisi is, like all memorials, meant for the rest of us, too: the music itself, its ascent into supernovic light, its supplication for perpetual light for the departed and consolation for the bereaved, can never be forgotten once heard. Surely even those untouched by the music itself will be moved by the circumstances of its creation, and by the consecration of such a complex, magnificent work of art, one of the greatest English musical works of the twentieth century, to the memory of a child of nine.
‘Requiem aeternam…’ The second movement of Hymnus Paradisi, given in a memorable Proms performance on the 29th August, 2012, by the combined forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus, the London Philharmonic Choir, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloists, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. The music runs on without a break into the 23rd Psalm.
Amid Howells’ output, Hymnus Paradisi stands in a class of its own. But there is another sense, too, in which it may be rather an exception. For whereas in this particular work Howells the composer and Howells the grieving father are evidently one and the same figure — and although it must be said that Michael’s death had a profound effect on his father’s musical output, bringing to an end to the largely orchestral and chamber music of his early career, along with all trace of their moments of whimsy, and being followed almost exclusively by his bittersweet, chromatic, luminously shadowy music for the Church — there is in much of his life a discernible distinction, one drawn by Howells himself, between his identities as a composer and as a man — and the man was rather more private than his music might suggest. We have already seen how, even in the case of Hymnus Paradisi, others had to persuade him both to write it and to allow its performance. It also seems unexpected, though consistent with his teaching duties, that he lived most of his adult life not in Gloucestershire but in the London suburb of Barnes (even if he did return every year to Michael’s grave and the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, Worcester or Gloucester).
Moreover, it has to be said that there was a certain poise or archness, even an artifice, in his public manner. Even allowing for the greater formality of his age compared to ours, his speech and writing can come across as oddly contrived. When writing about his own work, he had a tendency to refer to himself in the third person, as if he were a critic of his music, not its composer: consider the earlier-quoted remark about the Missa Sabrinensis’ being ‘essentially a composer’s personal and creative reaction to a text of immense, immemorial significance,’ and, again, in a letter to a friend about the same work: ‘In each movement the composer seems to have sought a dominant mood and to [have] allowed such mood to stamp itself intensively upon thought and expression.’ [3] Maybe he was aiming for a sober, objective, academic tone, but the effect is inevitably to cordon off or bracket his art; effectively to secularise it. The very man who might have provided us with insight into the music seems as intrigued by it as anyone else, even abashed, as if anyone’s guess is as good as his when it comes to its meaning. A similar stiffness is discernible in the only moving film of him available online as I write, in which he recalls attending the first performance of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. There is the poise of a man wishing to appear well before the camera, seeming almost to be acting the part of a great composer (which may seem exaggerated, but, on the other hand, his daughter Ursula was a professional actress.) And yet Howells is describing an occasion which he repeatedly acknowledged to have changed his life, another moment at which, as he admits explicitly, the composer and the man were one — ‘It was after then that I really felt I knew myself, as an artist and as a man.’ [4]
Herbert Howells, interviewed in 1970, describes one of the most significant moments in twentieth-century English music, at which he was remarkably fortunate to be present: the premiere performance of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in Gloucester Cathedral on the 6th September, 1910.
It seems almost as if his two identities became whole and integral only at the moments of greatest joy or rawest grief, the revelation of the Tallis Fantasia or the blinding trauma of his bereavement (which events, incidentally, both share the anniversary of the 6th September.) Most of the time, strange as it may seem, Howells half-holds himself from us, with a reserve that is perhaps almost as old as the first Elizabethan age. A dual identity is indeed an extraordinary paradox to find in the composer of such apparently intimate music as his, but it is another answer to the central question of this essay, another way in which Howells was able to maintain simultaneously his personal unbelief and his composition of explicitly spiritual music.
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| From left to right: Isobel Baillie (?), Herbert Howells, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Rutland Boughton. (Gloucestershire, mid-1930s). Royal College of Music, ref. LDRCM.HH.1.138, retrieved from http://museumcollections.rcm.ac.uk/collection/Details/collect/6566, reproduced under CC BY 4.0 licence, cropped and enhanced slightly |
Yet with Vaughan Williams, as with Howells, doubt is mingled with a definite kind of faith. Here was another profoundly spiritual man whose spirituality he had largely fashioned himself from tradition and from culture, and which was devoted ultimately to the transcendent quality of beauty. This is borne out in the words of his second wife Ursula (née Wood; not to be confused with Howells’ daughter; this essay owes a great deal to the testimonies of Ursulas!), who said said that her husband ‘was far too deeply absorbed in music to feel any need for religious observance’. Near the end of his life he famously remarked that after death, ‘I shan’t be doing music; I shall be being it.’ Put bluntly, music was Vaughan Williams’ religion, too.
Music from the last movement of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony, with its chilling ‘backwards Amen’, serves very effectively as an accompaniment to a bleak segment of John Betjeman’s 1977 documentary ‘A Passion for Churches’.
Through his mother Vaughan Williams was actually related to Charles Darwin, and would presumably have been no stranger to the debate over the theory of natural selection, neither its initial challenge to Christian cosmology, nor the subsequent contention with Christianity altogether. He, like Howells, also lost friends in the Great War; indeed, as an ambulance-driver on the Western Front, he saw its horror first-hand. Then there was the mood of the artistic world, in which, as elsewhere, the twentieth century came swiftly to be seen as an age of doubt, in contrast to the Victorians’ robust faith (a faith that was placed in science and progress as much as in Christianity). Doubt, to these artists, may have seemed the only tenable artistic position to hold with integrity, not least given that its open expression in music was new, and that in any case there is something compelling and tragic about it, and therefore appealing to artists.
Yet it seems somehow insufficient to say that Howells and Vaughan Williams were simply men of their age, still less that they were just casting themselves as heroes in their own spiritual epic. Both were complicated, thoughtful, spirited men. Consider Vaughan Williams’ perennial fascination with the idea of the human soul questing into the unknown, a theme present from his settings of the Walt Whitman’s humanist verse (the Sea Symphony, ‘Toward the Unknown Region’) all the way to the Sinfonia Antartica and Pilgrim’s Progress — this last was ‘the preoccupation of a lifetime’, according to Lewis Foreman. [7] These were questions of the highest order: neither he nor Howells were simplistically reductionist or fashionable in their lack of faith. Michael Kennedy’s words about Vaughan Williams (in the light of his having composed a Mass while still a ‘frightful atheist’) could just as well apply to Howells:
In Vaughan Williams we have above all else a creative artist of deep humanity — that is the supreme quality of his work […] No doubt he pondered on the great mystery of existence after death; perhaps the Finale of the Sixth Symphony is an attempt to peer into that particular void […] But Vaughan Williams was essentially a positive, affirmatory artist: he is concerned with life, not death, in all its facets — and these include the contradictions and conflicts epitomised in the spiritual uncertainty of the Sixth. As for the taunt that an atheist has no business to be writing a Mass, that is altogether too naive an argument. A composer is a man of imaginative vision and insight, and the inspiration of the words of the Mass alone would enable Vaughan Williams to respond to their humanity and drama, just as a great actor assumes a role entirely different from his own character, just as he of all people would be bound to respond to the implications of a Christian tradition, as opposed to dogma or theology — the tradition which bound generations of men and women together, into which folklore and folksong are interwoven, all part of man’s eternal quest. [8]
True artists are always attuned to reality; they are prophets and seers of a certain kind, but even so we cannot always expect the whole answer from them, neatly packaged and explained. We pay attention to what they say because we know that they themselves are at the limits, reporting what they find, in dialogue with forces that are greater than man, and beyond his understanding. They walk into the mystery. True composers, I now realise, do not write music that they want to write, but music that they have to write. They do not set out to write, but to discern what they are commanded to write, by something quite beyond themselves. Vaughan Williams in his Sixth Symphony was not exactly trying to write an ‘agnostic’s Paradiso’, or proving it could be done for the sake of it — it was simply what he was given to write at the time.
Howells, too, though he felt only too keenly what was wrong with the world, knew that the beauty it contained commanded a serious and reverent response; he knew that something to be longed for lay beyond this world, and he knew that his work had a spiritual dimension. He, likewise, can be said to have written only the music he had to write, in spite of his own unbelief. That he found a spiritual home for his half-religion in a temple whose tenets he did not share may even have been as puzzling to him as it is to us, but it was in that position that he sought to transcend his faults and his griefs, and, by the beauty of his music if nothing else, to mark the glory and anguish of mankind.
Continued in part 3 here…
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References
1. Entry for Francis Purcell Warren (1895–1916) from ‘War Composers’, web resource. Retrieved April 2021 from <https://www.warcomposers.co.uk/warren>.
2. Andrew Burn, sleeve-notes for ‘Hymnus Paradisi & An English Mass’ (1991), record on Hyperion, catalogue no. CDA66488, retrieved 11th May 2021 from <https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/notes/66488-B.pdf>
3. Herbert Howells, quoted in Jonathan Clinch, sleeve-notes for Hyperion’s disc ‘Howells Missa Sabrinensis’ (catalogue number CDA68294), retrieved 11 May 2021 from <https://jclinch.com/2020/07/16/hyperion-programme-note-for-herbert-howells-missa-sabrinensis/>
4. Lionel Pike, ‘Tallis—Vaughan Williams—Howells: Reflections on Mode Three,’ in Tempo, 1984, p. 2. Retrieved 11th May 2021 from <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0040298200058496>.
5. Michael Kennedy, ‘The Unknown Vaughan Williams’. Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, no. 99 (1972), p. 32. Retrieved 11th May 2021, from <http://www.jstor.org/stable/766153>.
6. Stephen Johnson, ‘Discovering Music: Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 6’, radio programme, first broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 11 May 2014. Retrieved 11 May 2021 from <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01yxd4b?.
7. Lewis Foreman, ‘Ralph Vaughan Williams’, biographical note for the website of Hyperion Records. Retrieved 6th May 2021 from <https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/c.asp?c=C611>.
8. Kennedy, p. 35.
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