The Unbelief, yet Half-Religion, of Herbert Howells (III)

Continued from part 1 here and part 2 here.

Having gone some way, in a fair manner I hope, to work out what Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams really believed about life and the ultimate things, and how their glorious music fitted into it, there is another question waiting to be answered: where does the unbelief of these church composers — however nuanced, however thoughtful — leave us, their listeners?  

John Skelton’s whimsical ode ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’, the middle movement from Howells’ suite ‘In Green Ways’, 1919.  This mood of whimsy disappeared for ever from Howells’ music after the death of his son Michael.

One way to approach this question, of course, is from the national perspective: to ask how, and why, these great Englishmen seem to have anticipated the enormous lapsation in faith that has befallen this country over the course of the past century or so.  There is no question that they were highly attuned to the spirit, character and landscape of England (indeed, both men received commissions for the Queen’s Coronation ceremony in 1953, setting to music prayers for the entire country.)  What change did these men, sensitive as they were, and so well-acquainted with Christian tradition, detect in the air; why did they not find in the old religion the assurances their forefathers found, as so many of our countrymen do not find it now?  An answer to this might take us some way towards working out why the Christian and the English imaginations have, for the moment, so catastrophically lost each other.  But, of course, their own personal reticence about these things — in its very Englishness! — deprives us of a clear answer.  

Howells’ anthem for the Coronation of Elizabeth II: ‘Behold, O God our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed’.  The opening motif in the strings is echoed, more duskily, more lingeringly, in the final bars.  The most extraordinarily beautiful music.

And what of us as individual listeners?  The writer Boyd Tonkin has recently argued — and I do not disagree — that agnostic listeners should not hesitate to draw spiritual comfort from church music, not least given that this is precisely what its composers, believers and unbelievers alike, were often seeking. [1]  But what about the other way around?  Can believing listeners find valid affirmation of a confessional faith in the sacred music of an unbelieving composer?  Or can an agnostic composer ultimately only ever compose ‘agnostic music’?  If we are uplifted by a Vaughan Williams hymn or a Howells anthem; if, as well as beauty, we find it expressive of truth to which we know they did not assent, are we misleading ourselves in our faith, and doing an injustice to their legacy?  

From the score of the anthem ‘Like as the Hart desireth the waterbrooks’ (Oxford University Press).

The question bites because we are afraid of deceiving ourselves.  Are we dupes?  Doubt, and the fear of mistaken belief, can be at least as contagious as faith, and there is something chilling about those words of Howells, ‘You know there’s nothing’.  Michael White is blunt: ‘Countless churchgoers who find Christian affirmation in the Howells oeuvre are hearing things he did not put there.’ [2]  When I asked a comparable question about the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, whether his vivid and lyrical music is spoiled by his apparently unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union, my hope was to be able to distance the music from the composer’s professed ideological fervour, to hold it at arm’s length, so that I could enjoy his music in greater comfort.  But with Howells it is the other way around: his position introduces an unwanted distance that we have neither anticipated nor desired.  By turning aside from the very Christian religion that his music ornamented and beautified, it is he, however unknowingly, however blamelessly, who seems to hold himself away from us.

It is not simply a question of comfort, though.  The fear behind the question is not simplistic; it is not that we are afraid of ambiguity or adventure.  After all, even confirmed and practising composers do not always offer an easy ride: that is not what faith is for; faith is full of mystery.  The difference is that, in the case of a believing composer, we are surer of our ground in approaching the music in the first place; more confident that we will know where to look for its meaning; more assured that we are all entering the world of the music through the same door, side-by-side with the composer.  The difficulty with Howells, then, is not that his music is mysterious — far from it; this is largely what is so appealing about it! — but that we are not quite sure how we are supposed to approach its mysteries.  We are necessarily less sure in our grasp of the inner sense of his work.

The orchestrated version of Howells’ setting of the Te Deum for King’s College, Cambridge (Collegium Regale), sung by the choir and in the chapel for which it was written.

Here are some personal thoughts as to a sensible approach.  Firstly, although faith, truth and authorial intention do matter, and although it would be unjust to brush over the doubts of such thoughtful composers, the simple truth is that both Howells and Vaughan Williams definitely intended their music to enrich Christian worship and belief.  They were not being cynical: they were willing for their work to sustain in others something they did not possess themselves.  Secondly, since the music they wrote was undoubtedly good and beautiful, and since the Church always upholds whatever is truly good and beautiful whatever its source, the right response is very clear: we are to rejoice in it.  Thirdly, we should not fear that in worshipping God in their music we are press-ganging their names onto our team, so to speak, as if we were a political party or a football team.  God exists beyond us and outside us, as well as within us; He is as He is, whatever we might say or do; He does not allow himself to be co-opted into factions or camps.  (In that sense, our religion is not our own possession).  

‘Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin…’  Hear how differently Howells treats the same words, the final verses of the Te Deum, at the end of his Collegium Regale setting above, and here, in the last bars of the setting for St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Fourthly, I think this matter has something to teach us about the transcendence of great art, for, without ever coming loose from them, without ever drifting away as mere floatings of authorless ‘discourse’, artistic greatness is nevertheless capable of surpassing its creators, and their troubles or weaknesses, just as it can escape the limits of their circumstances and times.  It may indeed be the case, to repeat Michael White’s phrase, that ‘countless churchgoers who find Christian affirmation in the Howells oeuvre are hearing things he did not put there’ — but this does not mean that they are not there all the same, without him having had to put them there.  Howells may not himself have put the spirit of faith into his music, but I think it may fairly be said that he left room for it, a space where its animating force might nevertheless come to dwell.

Fifthly, I think that such composers’ doubts teach us to be grateful for our own faith, to remember that it is indeed a gift, as is even the desire for faith; and also that the gift of faith is distinct from the gift of spiritual insight through artistic sensitivity, however great a gift this too may be.  True faith, though it can rightly be approached rationally, ultimately belongs to a realm above and beyond reason, one that is mysterious even to believing folk, and one to which the point of assent or unbelief can seldom, if ever, be pinned down.  The doubts of great artists teach us the importance of generosity and humility towards those who, though without the gift of formal faith themselves, might yet have something to tell us about the eternal verities.

There is one particular work of Howells, one of his last, made in the very evening of his life, which I think it is fair to regard as his last testament.  Both the music and the words seem to encompass his whole spirit and artistic endeavour.  Here in one anthem is all that is characteristic of Howells: the radiance of creative ecstasy, the melancholic sensitivity to the fleetingness of earthly things, the ambiguity about God even as the harmonies set His name ablaze, and the adoration of beauty — except that this time the adoration is explicitly and confidently proclaimed, with all the solemnity of a Credo.  The words, by Robert Bridges, run —

I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them;

God hath no better praise,

And man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make

And joy in the making;

Altho’ to-morrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered on waking.

Both Howells and Vaughan Williams were thoughtful and serious men; they were unafraid to contend with the truth about life; they were generous with their talents and our lives are the richer for them.  The Church is bigger and deeper than we know; let us who love their music give grateful thanks for their lives and for the art that they have left to us.

Howells’ setting of Robert Bridges’ poem ‘I love all beauteous things,’ sung by the choir of St. Alban’s Cathedral under Peter Hurford, broadcast on BBC radio on the 25th May 1977.

References

1.  Boyd Tonkin, ‘O come, all ye faithless’, published in UnHerd online magazine, retrieved 13 May 2021 from <https://unherd.com/2020/12/o-come-all-ye-faithless/>

2.  Michael White, ‘The sorrow that sounds like heaven’, the Independent, Saturday 10 October 1992.  Retrieved 13 May 2021 from <https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music-the-sorrow-that-sounds-like-heaven-when-herbert-howells-lost-a-son-the-church-gained-some-immortal-music-michael-white-pays-a-centenary-tribute-1556718.html>.

Sympathy and Khachaturian

In almost everyone, it seems, there is always some curious hidden thing — a hobby, an interest, a skill or simply some aspect of their character — which, without necessarily contradicting their personality, would be hard for anyone not in the know to guess.  Almost everything about human beings resolutely defies the mere stock character (even as we still conform paradoxically and hilariously to stereotypes — which is another question).  For instance, I would never have guessed that the engineer Thomas Telford had been an enthusiastic reader and writer of poetry in his spare time, and toured the Lake District and Scotland with Robert Southey, nor that the composer Gerald Finzi had, in his spare time, saved several varieties of English apple from extinction.  I am often surprised and intrigued to discover unexpected truths about the characters and histories of my own friends (which, I add hastily, is not to say that they seem dull otherwise!).  ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think’: this is the feeling, to paraphrase Louis MacNeice, of the drunkenness of people being various.

And, in particular, it adds to the fascination of art and music to discover the biographies of creative artists.  Behind any artistic work there always lies a person with a complexity that is its own universe.  Of course, it is possible to enjoy beauty for its own sake, without rummaging too deeply in its origins, but because, through their work, we can almost befriend artists and composers, a certain curiosity about their lives seems entirely reasonable.  We want to understand the mind behind the hand that wrote the notes.

But what happens when this same human complexity seems to make things difficult and contradictory, rather than interesting? If some biographical detail tests our patience or tolerance, we find our natural instinct to friendship with the composer tempered.  Does this affect our enjoyment of the music?  And should it?  How far can we distinguish our musical sympathy from our moral sympathy?

Recently I have found my interest rekindled in the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978).  A few years ago I heard his life featured on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, and was surprised to recognise some of his music, though I hardly knew anything about him.  He is perhaps best-known for the Sabre Dance from his ballet ‘Gayaneh’, but he is also responsible for this well-known waltz (from his Masquerade Suite), and for the Adagio from his second ballet ‘Spartacus’, music which was later chosen as the theme for the television series ‘The Onedin Line’.  His concertos for piano and violin are also rather better-known, it seems, than the life of the man himself.  Donald Macleod, the presenter of Composer of the Week, certainly mentioned Khachaturian’s closeness to the elite of the Soviet Union.  But the extent of this involvement was made much more apparent in ‘Khachaturian’, an absorbing documentary of 2003 about the composer’s life and works by the American film-maker Peter Rosen.  This richly-produced film is full of archival footage, photographs, and interviews with the composer’s colleagues, relatives and friends, and has not failed to weave a lush soundtrack from his colourful music.  It is a sympathetic portrait, but also a candid examination of the entwining of Khachaturian’s career with the cogs of the Soviet political machine.

Normally a composer’s political persuasion would not have that great an effect on my enjoyment of music.  And about Khachaturian, too, there is plenty to say without having to go into politics.  Although he was born and raised in the city of Tblisi (then Tiflis) in Georgia and lived most of his adult life in Moscow, he was of Armenian descent, and it was from that culture that he drew inspiration for the melodies, rhythms and moods of his work.  He was unashamed of this heritage, and therefore an unabashed tunesmith: so much of his music has the catchiness, the immediacy, and the evocative and unaffected appeal of folk-music.  It is full of detail and little touches or dashes of colour: just one example is the delicious phrase given to a solo clarinet not far into the third movement of the violin concerto, just before the soloist enters, but there are many others.  Khachaturian’s cultural inheritance also led him to look Eastwards to experiment with harmonies and flavours even as he stuck to Western forms such as ballets and symphonies; sometimes it is possible to hear him trying to find a note too fine for Western semi-tones.  An interesting article by Paul Serotsky also discussed the Eastern idea of mugam, in which music is not built up ‘from individual notes in accordance with harmonic rules’ as in the West, but by the accumulation and interweaving of ‘pre-defined musical phrases to create a musical mosaic’: weaving together elements into a kind of magic carpet of sound.  For him, this has a powerful result: ‘certain parts of Gayne’ — Serotsky says, ‘— such as ‘Gathering of the Cotton’ or the ‘Lullaby’ — evoke a pervasive feeling of irretrievable loss, of something I treasure that is gone forever.’  In such quieter moods, Khachaturian is a master of lyrical enchantment.

One striking feature of Khachaturian’s music is a tendency to hang, or linger, or insist on a particular note or repeated phrase, trying it, testing it, pinning it down, as if to get at its kernel or prize out its secret.  In his melodies it is often not enough for a note or phrase to be sounded once… it must sound again… and again and again and again and again, three, or four, or a dozen times more than seems reasonable, but as often as is needed to give voice to the sustained surge of passion the music must express.  The most famous example of this impassioned repetition is probably in the ‘Sabre Dance’, where it appears ridiculously brashly and almost manically (the ‘Sabre Dance’ is surely a candidate for the most  garish piece of music ever written), but this habit of his appears less giddily in countless other places in his music: various numbers from ‘Gayaneh’, the violin concerto, the piano concerto, the third theme of the ‘Adagio’ from ‘Spartacus’, and in the muscular desolation of his second symphony, known as the Bell Symphony.  Hear how, in the funeral-march third movement of that symphony, while the strings are occupied with (as his English-language publishers Boosey & Hawkes put it) an ‘eerily arranged’ quotation from the Dies Irae, piano and harp insist icily and persistently on the single B natural in the treble.  They relent only to allow the full-throated trumpets to take it up and blast it home.  There is a strangely enthralling Soviet bleakness and angst about this symphony which has to do with the dark times in which it was composed. In 1942 the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of horrifyingly resounding success: Leningrad was besieged, the battle of Stalingrad seemed unwinnable; only months beforehand Moscow itself had very nearly fallen; the Red Army had not yet mustered its counter-attack.  Khachaturian called this symphony ‘a requiem of wrath, a requiem of protest against war and violence’.  It is not dissimilar to Vaughan Williams’ sixth symphony, in that it is music for those with no tears left to shed.

The Dies Irae quoted in the third movement of Khachaturian's Second, or ‘Bell’ Symphony

Musically, then, this was a man who wore his heart on his sleeve: Khachaturian’s music is romantic, emotional, tuneful and sincere.  Indeed, the musicologist Daniel Jaffé even places particular emphasis on his sincerity, calling him ‘one of the most straightforward and honest composers I know’.

This is where the question of complexity and variety becomes troublesome.  Of all the biographies of prominent composers, Khachaturian’s has a political dimension so total that it cannot be ignored.  He is spoken of as a Soviet-Armenian composer: this might seem odd when we think of his contemporaries Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev as definitely Russian rather than Soviet-Russian, say.  But it is hard to peel away the ‘Soviet’ label from Khachaturian because he himself embraced it so decisively.  He was very clearly enthused about the Soviet project in the early years, and he went on to rise far higher in the cultural ranks than he would have had to if he harboured any reservations about it.  According to his obituary in the New York Times, no sooner had he left the Moscow Conservatoire than he involved himself in the upper echelons of the Union of Composers, being elected two years later as deputy chairman of its Organising Committee.  And to all outward appearances he remained loyal to the USSR for the rest of his life.  There he is, in recorded concerts in the the 1970s, stepping medal-bedecked onto the conductor’s podium: there gleams his the Order of Lenin; there sparkles his Hero of Socialist Labour medal.  He appeared to be the ideal Soviet composer, and, as the pianist Sahan Arzruni has said, ‘he did absolutely everything right, as far as the Soviet ideology is concerned.’  Does all this detract from the sincere Khachaturian, the romantic Khachaturian, the catchy Khachaturian?  Well, it is hard to reconcile this portly grandee of joyless Communism with the vigorous Caucasian rhythms and melodies of ‘Gayaneh’ or the violin concerto.  And Khachaturian’s political side is not merely circumstantial context either, for the politics do find their way into his music.  ‘Gayaneh’ itself, for all its enchanting tunes, is the tale of a woman in a collective farm who deals with her (admittedly drunken and violent) husband by ditching him for a new lover, a Soviet commander who goes on to restore happiness in the community by his vigorous re-application of the Communist system.  This really is not my cup of tea.  And apart from that, what about ‘Poem About Stalin’?  Or ‘Ode in memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’?…   Not for me, thank you.

It may be that the public image really is a true manifestation of the man’s sincerely-held beliefs.  Perhaps wearing his heart on his sleeve did indeed mean pinning the Order of Lenin to his lapel.  It is true that he felt indebted to the October Revolution, which arguably opened up to him the social possibility of studying music in Moscow.  (He believed that he would otherwise have remained in Tblisi, untrained and unheard of.)  To rise high in the cultural elite of the new order, he might have felt, was to repay this debt in some measure.  And of course, composers and musicians have always felt the need to seek patronage in corridors of power.

But the nature of the USSR was in any case to subsume individual conscience into a political and cultural monolith.  It scarcely mattered to the system whether or not this was the real Aram Ilyich.  After all, his loyalty turned out to offer little guarantee of protection from the sting of its nasty side.  The greatest shock of his career, in January 1948, was to find himself denounced — he, Khachaturian, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, denounced by the Composers’ Union on the charge of ‘formalism’: the crime of composing music that was not in touch with the people, as Stalin had decreed it should be.  Khachaturian was reduced to a fulsome apology, and even agreed to be sent to Armenia for ‘re-education’.  His reputation was gradually restored, especially after the triumph of his ballet ‘Spartacus’ (1954).  But he had had a terrible blow and he cannot afterwards have been altogether the same person, nor quite the contented personage he seemed to be.

And, to go even further, was he the atheist the USSR wanted him to be, and he professed to be, in spite of the transcendence of the beauty and passion of his art?  Did he really mean his words in the Eternal City: “I’m an atheist, but I’m a son of the [Armenian] people who were the first to officially adopt Christianity, and thus visiting the Vatican was my duty”?  Or, on the other hand, is it true that, when his friend Tigran Mansurian asked him if he believed in Christ, he retreated behind a curtain and crossed himself?  Once we get to these questions we might feel perhaps that we are prying too far.  But the Soviet Russia’s sheer murkiness leaves almost nothing out in the open; there can be no answers without seeking or working them out.  “His opposition to the Soviet Union never appeared externally", says his nephew Emin Khachaturian, “He was a member of the Party.  He had a high post and a number of decorations from the Soviet system.  Perhaps deep inside his soul he, like thousands of others, understood the depravity of that system.”  But we cannot know now.

Embed from Getty Images

Aram Khachaturian conducting in the Grand Hall of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, 1972.

Yet, for all these doubts, I warm to this compromised man — for who in Russia, in those days, amid the ruins and the shattered commandments, apart from saints, martyrs and infants, was not compromised?  Perhaps, then, Khachaturian is not to blame for the political tainting of his life so much as the USSR itself and the circumstances of his career.  Perhaps it was simply the case that the one absolute was his music, and that he would do anything to protect it: if this meant consenting to its nationalisation the USSR, then so be it.   His music was at least preserved, even if this surrender to the state was to be so total that, to this day, and in spite of his enthusiastic adoption as a hero in Armenia and the exotically Caucasian flavour of his music, there remains a Soviet tinge to him.  It is just frustrating that he had to align himself with one of the least savoury courts ever held on earth.  One YouTube member, commenting on a recording of the ‘Gayeneh’ ballet, wrote: ‘I love this music so much — but I find it difficult to listen to without mentally seeing Stalin’s stupid face and wanting to punch it (just like the composer himself undoubtedly).’  That is one way of putting it.

It is both disconcerting and heartening to realise how well beautiful music can conceal our compromised humanity.  It is heartening because it proves that music can forge bonds between people who would otherwise have little in common: the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is one important example of this.  But it should also alert us to the risks of the Midas touch that artists have, as well as its glories.  They can make hallowed whatever they touch.  Music composed by agnostics can, quite in spite of intention, convert listeners to belief in God; and music written for the sake of flawed ideas can lend legitimacy to ignoble things.   It is given to artists to wield powers that far transcend themselves; they had better be careful what they consecrate.