Lux aeterna

Today (6th September) is the eightieth anniversary of the death, at the age of nine, of Michael Kendrick Howells.  A form of polio or meningitis felled him in only three days; his father Herbert Howells, in the nearly fifty years by which he outlived his son, never overcame this loss.  

Herbert Howells had been, before the Great War, a promising young composer of mainly orchestral work; he was Stanford’s favourite at the Royal College of Music and shone among the brightest in that fascinating constellation, darkened forever by the 1914-1918 war, of Edwardian and Georgian composers and writers with some connection to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire or the Marches.  He was a close friend of Ivor Gurney and the poet F.W. Harvey; all three had Gloucester connections.  During the war he had narrowly avoided death not in the trenches but from Graves’ disease, and become the first person in the country to undergo radium treatment.  Afterwards his career had flagged rather, especially after the unfavourable reception of his (sublime!) second piano concerto, about which more here.  His son’s death in 1935 silenced him utterly.

Only his daughter Ursula was able to persuade him to compose again; she suggested that he ‘write something for Michael’.  The work that resulted remained untouched for thirty years, before Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams found out about it and persuaded him to allow it to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival.  Hymnus Paradisi is a monumental work, a Requiem with various additions from the Psalms and the Sarum Book of Hours.  It is performed rarely mainly because it calls for two soloists, an enormous orchestra, two choirs and organ, but these were mustered during the Proms in 2012, and I was very fortunate indeed to be there in the Royal Albert Hall to hear it.  I will never forget looking up from the arena to see a wall of singers rise up to sing, nor feeling the organ’s low bellow through my feet, nor indeed the thirty seconds of silence before Martyn Brabbins lowered the baton and unfettered the applause, during which he held the score aloft for us to applaud.

Howells is one of those composers whose work, listened to the first time, often seems to be thoroughly difficult and complex but for a few striking moments which demand a second listen, and then a third, and so on, until its beauty can be heard properly.  This might be said of Hymnus Paradisi, but even a first hearing cannot miss the crescendo of grief just before the three minute mark, nor the audible light which brightens and brightens until it fills the whole work from the Sanctus (22 min) onwards: 

The loss of his son is generally regarded as a clear rupture in Howells’ compositional career as well as in his life.  The music he wrote after 1935 was almost all intended for the Anglican choral tradition (in all he wrote twenty settings of the Evening Canticles), more melismatic and often more searing.  However, Howells did occasionally return to the past for material.  The Hymnus Paradisi itself draws heavily on the Requiem that he had already written.  And I have an idea that the final movement (Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful…), which begins like this:

…might be a more magnificent, a heavier, yet also a more luminous version, in which wistfulness has hardened into grief, of the opening of the old Howells’ Piano Quartet of 1916 (itself perhaps a response to death, since Howells himself was gravely ill at this point)?

While I am on the subject, I wonder if the second theme of the Shropshire Lad rhapsody of George Butterworth (killed in action in 1916)…

… is quoted in the 1925 piano concerto, by the clarinet once only, at the point below?

To return to this post’s original subject, I would like to record another thought about Hymnus Paradisi: all the luminous chords, the massed choirs and the thundering organ were summoned all for the sake of a child of nine years.  It is too easy to forget, not least in a Britain which I find hardly heeds children, that this is entirely fitting; that is a lesson for us all.

Further reading and listening: 

• B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on Herbert Howells.
• An article by Simon Heffer about Hymnus Paradisi

Destructive criticism

Lately I have been listening my way through the podcast editions of B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’.  They are wonderful programmes and Donald Macleod’s warm, clear and conversational voice welcomes in even those unversed in musical theory or history, bringing the composers to life in the ear.

One effect of hearing several editions in fairly quick succession is a growing sensation that this calling to write music, made as it is to people of all kinds of circumstances and characters, as ‘Composer of the Week’ shows, is felt remarkably similarly by all those who hear it.  There are outbursts of fruitfulness followed by dry patches; there are projects carried off triumphantly or abandoned in despair; there are works forged in weeks or left unfinished even after a lifetime.  And there is never any barometer: changes of scene or fallings in love sometimes produce a great harvest, and sometimes not, and of course it is the same with sorrow and despair. 

That said, there is one fairly reliable threat to a composer’s muse, and that is unfavourable criticism.  The effects of an ill-received performance seem often quite extreme, to the extent that composers have fallen into weeks, months, even years of silence or sparseness: this happened to Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Herbert Howells. Almost the only composer completely immune to this seems to have been Gustav Holst, who cared not a jot either way!

Howells’ second piano concerto (second movement below; here are the first and third) had been a strong candidate for my Desert Island for some time before I discovered that, at its premiere in 1925, a critic evidently forgot the second commandment and audibly thanked God that the performance was over.  For all that the man in question apparently had a reputation for this sort of conduct, Howells could not overcome the block that followed, which was to be redoubled in 1933 by the sudden and unforeseeable death of his son, aged nine, from polio.  When he did return to composing, it was not to orchestral music as before, but to the choral music for which he is now best known.  The second piano concerto — this mellow, shadowy, tender music! — was left to gather the dust of oblivion until after his death.

Does this happen because of petulance, spoiledness or childishness?  The last is closest, I think: I would say that it is a kind of childlikeness that is in fact excusable, understandable, and even essential to the artist’s calling.   G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said (though I cannot just find where) that a composer cannot merely ‘get his music out of his head’, but has also to ‘get it into somebody else’s’.  (This is a godsend for those of us flummoxed by the question, ‘What is art?’!).  Just as a child lavishes pictures and other creations on parents, the artist’s vocation is not only to set down beauty but also to share it with others; this is what the composer does in allowing a work to be performed.  

If a performance ‘fails’, it is because the exchange of beauty is not made and something has misfired between composer, musicians and audience.  Whichever of these three is to blame, it the composer (of good will) who feels the wound most personally and most keenly.  In spite of a concert’s ceremonial and public nature, the listeners are really the composer’s guests, for whose delight he has generously provided heart-felt music.  They are gathered by the very mind’s hearth.  No wonder careless words can wreak such damage.