Hymnus Paradisi at 75

‘It is the blaze of a thousand suns in the Sanctus; it is a golden radiance in the penultimate chorus; and at last, to the words requiem sempiternam, it is the light of the dawn.’  So wrote the Times music critic Frank Howes after the première performance in 1950 of Hymnus Paradisi, the great choral and orchestral Requiem, and perhaps the master-work, of Herbert Howells.  This year has been the seventy-fifth anniversary of that first performance, and also the ninetieth of the bereavement which precipitated it: the death, aged only nine, of Howells’ son Michael.

‘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.

The story has been much told elsewhere: of the shock of Michael’s death — in the space of only three days, from meningitis, in the middle of a holiday — of the subsequent freezing of Howells’ inspiration, of his daughter Ursula’s suggestion that he write something in Michael’s memory, of the composer’s nevertheless keeping his work private for over a decade, until at last Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams persuaded him to have this ‘personal, almost secret document’ performed.  He was the conductor at that first performance, at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1950, the day after the fifteenth anniversary of Michael’s death.  

‘The sudden loss in 1935 of an only son, a loss essentially profound and, in its very nature, beyond argument, might naturally impel a composer, after a time, to seek release and consolation in language and terms most personal to him,’ acknowledged Howells in a BBC radio talk in 1964.  ‘Music may well have the power beyond any other medium to offer that release and comfort.  It did so in my case, and became a personal, private document.’

This year’s anniversary has been marked by a number of performances, notably in Guildford, Hereford, London and Nottingham.  These have been all the more welcome because they are so rare.  For all that this is not only Howells’ own masterpiece, but arguably one of the most extraordinary works in English music — the journalist Simon Heffer has even called it ‘one of the great works of the whole musical canon, and one that stakes a claim to be the finest piece ever written in the English choral tradition’ — it is performed with vanishing rarity, perhaps because of its technical difficulty and the large forces for which it was written.  It may also suffer because of a slight ambiguity of genre — it is meant really for the rich acoustic of a church or cathedral, not a concert hall, yet is neither liturgical in nature nor an oratorio, but a kind of sacred symphonic cantata.  In any case, to have four in a year is special.

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

I have loved this music since my mid-teens, but before this year had only heard it live once, at the Proms in 2012.  This year, impelled to seize every possible opportunity, I managed to hear it twice: at Guildford — with the Guildford Choral Society and Chichester Singers and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Willcocks — and then in Hereford Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival, with the Festival Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra under Adrian Partington.  The performance at Guildford was magnificent, but it was at Hereford, in a seat hidden away in the south transept, that I experienced the piece, I realised, for the first time as it was really meant to be heard: that is, in a cathedral acoustic, from a distance,  possibly not even in sight of the musicians (as indeed I was not), as if overhearing, achingly anticipating, the choruses of Heaven itself.  In those great soaring spaces of the nave and transepts and chancel, with July twilight lingering in the tracery and the dusk seeping in under the high vaults, the stupendous crescendoes and climaxes had room to expand to their full proportions, to rise and fall and to be only sustained and intensified, as the composer intended, by the bone body of the church.  Only in a place like this could the music expand to its full scale.  It was, I understood at last, inseparable from the setting of a great church.  The church was part of the music, and actually implicit in the score.  Howells had made the entire cathedral his instrument.

Hymnus Paradisi is a work filled with light, the ‘lux aeterna’ of the Requiem Mass, even though this is a choral not a liturgical piece.  As Howells wrote,  ‘Light indeed touches all but one of the six movements… Even the gravest verse of the 23rd Psalm reflects it; and the [Sanctus] blazes with it’.  Crucial to that luminous effect are Howells’ radiant harmonies, and therefore, in turn, the purity of tone that goes to make them.  One thing that in consequence has marred many recordings of Hymnus Paradisi for me has been the vibrato used by the soloists.  They are naturally used to taking a leading role, but Howells uses them more as individual instruments, calling for them to emerge from and retreat into the rich overall tapestry of sound.  I was resigned, this year, for the same.  But both Charlotte Bowden at Guildford and Rebecca Hardwick in Hereford surprised and delighted me with precisely the purity and evenness that I had thought so elusive.  Rebecca Hardwick in particular seemed to convey the clarity and luminosity that was needed — that Howells surely wanted — shining definitely and brilliantly, certainly, but not dominating, and making her vital, plangent contribution to the overall sound without overdoing anything.  Hers was the simple voice of the soul entering the everlasting light.  It was profoundly moving.

I have also been meaning to mention a new arrangement of Hymnus Paradisi by Iain Farrington for the reduced forces of soloists, choir, chamber orchestra and organ.  This was first performed at Yale University in America in February 2024, with David Hill conducting.  This is extraordinary because even in this pared-down version one can hear how richly-woven the music is, how deftly-crafted — one of the wonderful things about it is that with every rendition I hear something new in it, some note or phrase I had not realised was there.  The opening of the final movement, ‘Holy is the True Light’, is particularly astonishing in this regard.  Here, too, Howells’ music resembles the intricacy and craftsmanship of the great cathedrals which, as his daughter recalled, he ‘adored’.  May the whole Howells family enter the light glimpsed in this extraordinary music.

Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi, arr. Iain Farrington, performed by the Yale Schola Cantorum, 17th February 2024, introduced by the conductor, David Hill.

Reference sources:

Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells: A Study (Sevenoaks: Novello, 1978).

Paul Spicer, Herbert Howells (Bridgend: Seren, 1998).

Simon Heffer, ‘Herbert Howells and Hymnus Paradisi’, programme note, 2024: <https://londonchorus.org.uk/2024/01/08/herbert-howells-and-hymnus-paradisi/>.

Autumn Report

Kimbolton church and the Shropshire Hills, seen from near Hamnish Clifford.

My findings in Herefordshire the other week were these: red apples, blue hills, and all colours in between; oaks, August-laden still but tinged with first rust, and gold leaf in ardent proliferation at sunset.  In short, mid-October England illuminated like a manuscript.

The mysteries of the variations in flavour between the different shires and stretches of Britain, their particular characters by which each part is kept not quite like anywhere else, and their elusive boundaries that stubbornly veil where one part ends and another begins, will never be exhausted by the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen or walkers’ conversation.  They are as intangible, as fine, as endlessly surprising and as defiant of definition as the changing of the seasons.  What is it makes this part of the world so poetic, these English counties nearest Wales?  How is their character made?  Perhaps I will never work it out!  It has the tenderness of arable lowland England, but, lent a Welsh inflection, is hiraeth-tinged, by those ranges of high hills, beacons into the distance beckoning.  England and Wales mingle and shimmer against and with each other, like two misty, chromatic chords.  This is bittersweet borderland, neither quite one nor the other.  Those mythical lands, the distance and the past (the land of lost content, the blue remembered hills) are brought enticingly near.  They are almost within reach…

I am sure this is not just fancy.  Others have seen the same.  A list I once compiled of favourite composers and writers from these counties ran to two dozen.  And look at the land itself: to the north are the Shropshire hills, which are Malcolm Saville and Housman country; to the south is Gloucestershire, the land of Herbert Howells, F. W. Harvey and Ivor Gurney, along with Dymock of the five poets; to the east lie the birthplaces of Masefield and Elgar, and westwards — well, out in the west is the heart of Wales, where all speech is song.

If I had come to Leominster in search of a retreat, I was not the first: St Edfrith found it a suitable place for a priory in the year 660 A.D.  It was at the priory church — at least its second incarnation, having been suppressed not long after the Norman Conquest and refounded in the twelfth century —  that I found this anonymous poem waiting to greet me in the porch, mounted on the inside door:

  Pause — ere thou enter, traveller — and bethink thee,

  How holy, yet how homelike is this place:

  Time that thou spendest humbly here shall link thee

  With men unknown who once were of thy race.

  This is thy Father’s House: to Him address thee

  Whom here His children worship face to face.

  He at thy coming in with Peace shall bless thee,

  Thy going out make joyful with His Grace.

Peace and prosperity to all towns whose church doors are adorned with poetry, especially if the words wear their careful craftsmanship as lightly as these!

Holy and homelike indeed was the church, large as it was (the north aisle was once the Norman nave, which gives an indication of the enlargement it underwent in the Middle Ages).  I had been there for a quarter of an hour when the organist, in suit and tie, came out for practice.  It was practice which he did not really need: I found myself eavesdropping on some fine music, a serene prelude by Gordon Slater, some full-throated Bach, and some other pieces.  Some people had been around at the beginning but they had disappeared.  The music played and the sunlight streamed generously through the south windows.

Across the nave and north aisle of the priory church of St. Peter and Paul, Leominster.

Many things are good and right about the town of Leominster: its size, its nearby railway station and the easy reach of unruined countryside from the middle of town.  I fell into conversation with a few townspeople, who were very friendly.  On the other side of Eaton Hill, eastwards along the Herefordshire Trail, lies a definitive escape from the growl of the A44 and A49, land rising and falling, and boughs laden with summer-sweetened apples, for this is cider country.  And this homeliness is always ringed by the ‘blue high blade’ of hills: Titterstone Clee Hill and Shropshire are particularly visible to the north.  And no noise, apart from a hidden tractor, and one or two pheasants exploding ludicrously out of hedgerows.  On my way back westwards I came through an orchard at just the moment that the setting sun was aligned with the rows of the trees, and the rays shone straight down the aisles of apples.

Gold leaf in proliferation.

Even apart from this, it would have been worth going all the way there just to make the journey back to London.  Not via Newport, Bristol Parkway and Swindon, but by “the pretty way”, as a fellow visitor called it, from Leominster to Hereford, and then by direct train from there to London.  It took an hour longer than the Newport route, but what does an hour matter?  The start of the journey was all in mist, but a few miles east of Hereford we burst out of it into sunlit clarity, where we remained for the rest of the journey (Ledbury, Colwall and Campden tunnels excepted).  This was not only the ‘pretty way’ but the poetic way: past apple-orchards towards Ledbury, the home town of John Masefield, then tunnelling directly under the Malvern Hills, onwards through Worcestershire, within a few miles of Edward Elgar’s birthplace at Broadheath, dramatically high over the river Severn into Worcester and then, turning along Brunel’s line, past Evesham, Honeybourne, Morton-in-Marsh, over the north Cotswolds and actually through the old Adlestrop station of Edward Thomas’s famous poem, down to Oxford, thence shadowing the Thames via Reading and the high-rise-block-choked route to London.  

Great Malvern and the North Hill of the Malverns.

I have the honour, then, to report that in the manuscript of England many old things linger and are still to be seen.  What St. Edfrith, many poets and ordinary folk sought and almost found is still there for the almost-finding: something like the mythical realm of Deep England, something like the Land of Lost Content, something like home.  It might have been just over the next hill.

The river Avon near Evesham (Worcs.).