Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican

Before Christmas disappears entirely over the horizon, a note on a concert I attended in late Advent.  This is the time of year for Handel’s Messiah, so it was a treat to go to the Barbican Hall in London on Wednesday (20 December 2017) to hear it performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr.  This glorious evening had an unsettling beginning, though — partly as intended but partly unintended — for the concert began not with old music but with new, the première of a short cantata.  Those of us who had attended a talk before the concert had had some warning of this.  ‘A Young Known Voice’ is the result of a collaboration between the composer Hannah Conway and a group of about twenty-five pupils, all aged between eleven and fifteen, from various schools in London.

The talk preceding the concert had given Hannah Conway an opportunity to explain her approach to the project.  She had wanted to find out how young people would react to the famous oratorio.  Was Handel’s Messiah still relevant today?  The participants had been presented with the libretto and asked to create a work that responded to it in some way; then the composer wove the resulting material into a single piece of music, which they performed for us on the night.  Here is a recording of the performance itself (and its libretto can be read here):

My instinct is always to encourage and wish success to any project like this that involves young people and calls on their creative powers, not least if it brings them into the company of the great works of our musical inheritance.  And indeed I thought the music itself was powerful and well-scored, and the young people’s performance, made to a full house of nearly two thousand, was startlingly confident and vivid; their voices were clear and fearless over the microphones. Yet it was a perturbing piece to listen to.

Of course, to a large extent, this was the intended effect.  Since Hannah Conway gave her collaborators the freedom to react as they wished to the Messiah, there should be no surprise in meeting the righteous anger typical of energetic, uncynical youth.  They are rightly alive to the world’s injustices; they are understandably alert to the perils of the Internet age; they are justifiably angered by the unpleasant speech we hear around us, and so on.  They know what they are against, and to some extent what they are for.  Twice the credo is sung,  ‘Discrimination, persecution, judgement!  Broken by the power to unite’  I suppose it was also to be expected that much of the anger expressed was acutely topical and openly political, rubbing the sores of some of the rawest preoccupations of our time.  I am sure the reader can guess what they were.

Thus, in the libretto: ‘People have free will, but their choices [a]ffect our whole nation.  We chose to leave the E.U.  They elected Trump.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’  All of a sudden, we have politics in the concert hall; words are uttered that stop barely short of explicit criticism of those who voted for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in our referendum the other year, implying that a word as uncompromising as ‘trash’ could be applied to their position, and furthermore lumping them in with the electorate of an entirely different country who were the authors of an unrelated political decision.  Even as the cantata declared war on ostracism, it undermined itself by a general defensiveness against ‘a cynical audience with cynical stares’ (who, us?) and ‘an unjust system breeding frustration,’ and risked conjuring in our minds precisely the thing it cried out against: the spectre of an anonymous and indistinct mass of people, possibly including parents, to be held in suspicion rather than tolerated or understood. This text should surely have undergone some editing, as any other libretto might have done, so that the young people’s ideas could have been expressed in a more measured, more precise and more coherent way without necessarily being watered down.  As it was, we were confronted with the sort of utterance from which many in the audience had presumably hoped to find, in this very concert, momentary escape.  At a time when the national conversation is so bitter, must we taint even a musical concert with political agitation?  Alexander van Ingen, the Chief Executive of the Academy of Ancient Music, explains here that the project ‘allowed self-expression amongst those participating in it’, adding that he is ‘proud that we presented it at the Barbican without self-censor, or telling the participants that they couldn’t say this or that.’  So it was the paying audience that had to put up with the rougher edges of that self-expression.  It might be unreasonable to expect the young people to perceive how weary of such things their listeners might be already, but the organisers certainly had a responsibility to take greater care in this regard.

Yet the cantata was also unsettling in other ways that were not, I think, intended by its creators, and which became plain only when we came to the Messiah itself, to the great oratorio’s old known dawn in the strings, and those familiar words, ‘Comfort ye, my people’… only then did the uneasiness gradually crystallise.  It was suddenly clear that problem lies not so much in the substance of the political views expressed in the cantata, but in the fact that politics appear at all in a composition supposedly inspired by such a work as Handel’s Messiah.  For in the Messiah we are breathing different air, the air of transcendence.  Both Handel’s music and Charles Jennens’ richly Scriptural libretto lift their hearers out of themselves, out of the narrowness of their contemporary preoccupations, however pressing they may seem, into the great drama of humanity; into the trajectory which rises from the Old Testament, culminates in the New, and then turns to look out towards the end of the world with Heaven waiting beyond.  That is how it would have been understood by the people of Handel’s time.  Are we so different to them?  We too hunger for transcendence, even if we would not care to admit it.

We will not find in the Messiah a political solution to the problems of our age.  Neither would Handel’s audience have found any for theirs, though they were equally afflicted by their own social antagonists, crises and difficulties (what is a Foundling Hospital for if not the marginalised and downtrodden?).  This was not Handel’s purpose.  The lesson that great works of art like this teach young and old alike is that, however justifiable our anger at the current state of things, our experience is not unique and there is a higher, a greater picture to be apprehended.  We treasure music like this precisely because it is timeless.

Seen in this light, this question of ‘whether the Messiah is relevant today’ seems a severe distraction.  Yet the organisers of the youth project seem to have made it the chief yardstick by which to measure their success.  The participants ‘debated gender inequality, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, social exclusion and communities rejected by society.’  Poor Handel: I am sure he would have had sensible things to say about these matters, but his oratorio was never intended to address them directly.  Thus I fear the young people were put into a frame of mind by which they would see the Messiah not as their heirloom but as an inanimate artefact, an ancient text that might as well have been written in cuneiform, useful to us only to the extent that we can scour it for the slightest glimmer of a bearing on the problems of the present moment, much as the stones of a ruined medieval monastery might be picked over for some immediate use.

The concert programme goes on to report that the project ‘reflected upon the idea of hope, exploring why and how generations have used various metaphors, images and stories to galvanise “coming together” with strength and direction’.  This is more like it, and far closer to the right order of magnitude, yet this statement, too, with its detached tone, misses the world-encompassing meaning that we are meant to find in the narrative and the figure of the Messiah.  The idea that by the words ‘thy rebuke hath broken his heart’ might indeed be meant my rebuke, or that he hath borne our grief, carried our sorrow or was bruisèd for our transgressions, would have been understood by Handel’s contemporaries.  For them, van Ingen’s assertion that ‘the central themes of the Messiah story’ are ‘persecution, isolation, rejection; but ultimately a positive message of hope’ would have seemed inexplicably watery and vague, if not missing the mark altogether; they would have described it, perhaps, as a musical exposition of the means of their redemption.  Even someone who does not hold the Christian creed can try to imagine how Handel’s Messiah would sound to someone who does, and any intelligent young person could put their mind to it.  Yet the whole work seems to have been presented to the young collaborators in brackets, as something to pick over, rather than lose oneself in.  Who can blame them, then, for going through it forensically rather than imaginatively?  The pursuit of relevance drains away transcendence.  The libretto is reduced to a string of text that sounds just poetic enough to be ‘relevant today’, as is evident from the fragmented quotations from the original which sound good but whose full meaning, out of context, is impoverished.  The vision of humanity’s origin and redemption is reduced to a symbolic yarn by which those long-ago people in olden days figured out their problems; The Messiah, Christ, is of value to us merely as another example in our collection of an individual discriminated against ‘because he believed something different’.  An opera with a religious theme can be called an oratorio just as we can buy cheese-and-onion crisps as well as ready-salted.  Thus was the heart of the Messiah’s meaning missed.

Even to ask whether the Messiah is relevant was to admit defeat.  The very question belies a fundamental lack of confidence in our cultural inheritance.  Never mind that every generation since 1742 has considered the work valuable enough to hand down to the next; let the possibility simply be raised that it might be irrelevant, and that it is how it will be considered.  It would surely have been better to begin by asking, ‘Why has the Messiah been considered so valuable for so long?’, approaching with humility if the reason is not immediately obvious.  Then we can study the composer’s craft, the matching of the music to the words, especially the word painting by which Handel actually illustrates, in his melodies, the valleys exalted, the mountains and hills made low, and the crooked made straight, and the magnitude of the work itself will gradually become real to us.  One of the difficulties of being young is that so many things simply have to be learnt, and there is no way around it.  With Handel’s Messiah it is no different: we have to go up to meet it, and cannot expect it to come down to us.  Still, Handel does give us plenty of assistance; nobody could accuse his music of inaccessibility or aloofness.

For all that so many opportunities seem to have been missed in this project, it is important to mention some of its aspects, perhaps easily-missed, that were evidently quite deeply thought through.  Certain details of the conversation before the concert revealed this.  For instance, Hannah Conway is very alert to the dignity and situation of her collaborators, whom she was careful to refer to as ‘young people’ and not as children; in other words, I think she wanted to give them some responsibility, raise their self-esteem and test their mettle.  Some pupils who were invited on stage spoke well, too.   One girl made the point that young people were not generally listened to; Conway wonders elsewhere ‘why so little trust seems to be placed in the instinctive younger generation’.   It may be an eternal truth that young people have much to learn about the world, but they often have sound instincts which are a reproach to their elders, ‘for,’ as G. K. Chesterton said, ‘children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’  This is indeed an age in which fairly scant attention is paid to the spiritual and moral welfare of young people.

The composer said that she thought our hearing of the Messiah would be changed by having heard A Young Known Voice beforehand.  This was certainly true in my case, not least since the young people had been invited to sit on the stage, next to the orchestra, in plain view of the audience.  I found myself wondering what would become of them and hoping that the reality of the Messiah, delight in Handel’s art and authentic beauty and truth would find their way into their hearts and spirits, to be treasured always.

‘He cam also stille’

Today is the Epiphany, and Christmas draws to a close.  I hope all readers have had a thoroughly merry feast!

All the same, while it is still in mind… does anyone else feel that Advent in general was diminished or even close to being ruined this time around?  Uglier than ever was the headlong stampede from Hallowe’en to Black Friday to Christmas-gorged-on-too-early, and, worse than this, seemingly inescapable and practically compulsory.

How wearing it all feels sometimes, the post-modern existence that is supposed to be so great, and wearing not least because so many good things are under siege, and the odds stacked so highly against their defenders.  The Church, the family, the garden of childhood, the peace of mind of the elderly, beauty in music and language, kindness in word and deed: all these are under a consistent threat.  To the castle of the mind founded on the old principles, or flying a God-fearing flag, or furnished with gentleness, is laid not a physical or explicit siege, as in other ages, but a moral siege, waged sometimes by proxy or indirectly but waged nonetheless: a war of words, a campaign of noise and the self against the old ways and manners, and laid pell-mell and piecemeal to eyes and ears and hearts.  Down it rains onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.  In it seeps by television and radio and smart-phone.  Every single household must now also be a self-contained stronghold if it is not to succumb to the contempt for all things old and the gormless glee in the new which surrounds it from without, or even to false allies offering short-cuts — or other threats from within, the unwonted doubt, the habit of suspicion which might easily become indiscriminate, or the ambush of envy, perceive the comfort of those for whom the twenty-first century is a warm bath.

And to those who hold her dear it is plainer than ever that England, always fragile, is indeed mortal.  Modern Britain is becoming more and more an unpleasant place, in which islands of goodness remain but are coming adrift from their moorings.  People of goodwill remain in their millions, but they are divided and conquered: the high places are not for them, the roads are hostile to them, the airwaves are closed to them.  Trivial evils compound great evils.  All looks prosperous and healthy at first glance, but by intangible signs and details it becomes clear that the mainstream lives by a different, new moral language which deliberately renders the everlasting one foreign.  We have known this for a while, but sometimes it flashes out with a new clarity and confidence.

Down rains the campaign of noise onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.

Does this sound gloomy?  Yes, I know it does!  Sometimes it is necessary to look squarely at the gloom, and its particular composition in our time.  The consolations, though, are the same as ever: that human nature never changes; that evil has often before foundered on the verge of triumph, and that people are as hungry as ever for the good, the true and the beautiful.  Ordinary people do in many ways seem to be bearing up quite well against all the vanities and inanities that assail them.  I am still regularly surprised by kindnesses even in London’s sullen smugness.  There are genuine smiles and unfakeable goodnesses, and children, at least, are still children.

What is the answer to a mass campaign of noise?  The same answer that once appeared in a stable no less vulnerable to its surroundings than a modern suburban terraced house is now.  For England, which in any case has been an unpleasant place before, is no more hostile now than first-century Galilee might have been.  Where all power was wielded by a bureaucratic bean-counting emperor and a power-crazed, infanticidal tyrant there appeared not armed insurrection or military force but, with shocking gentleness, the child who

[…] cam also stille
To his modres bowr
As dew in Aprylle,
That falleth on the flowr […]

and by whom the promise was made that no good or gentle thing would be lost or in vain, and indeed that to the good and the gentle would, in the end, be victory.

A carol written by Herbert Howells, the 125th anniversary of whose birth fell on the 17th October 2017.

Vows and Vocations

At three o’clock — or sometimes shortly thereafter, now that live broadcasts can be rewound — we allow the television to interrupt our merry-making on Christmas Day.  The Christmas pudding having been doused in brandy and set fire to and sung over and most assiduously devoured, we are usually just in time for one of the more unfrenetic and comforting broadcasts left on the main channels: the Queen’s Christmas message.  I find it invigoratingly traditional in spirit, and there is a rare feeling of national togetherness as the Queen invites us to look back on the year.  Gloriously heedless of the BBC’s dull secularist ethos, H.M. always makes unforceful but unambiguous (and therefore courageous) mention of her Christian faith. This year’s message was the fiftieth the Queen has made by television, so it is a well-established tradition in its own right.

But even fifty years of Christmas broadcasts struggle to shine against the seven decades of the Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh.  There beside the Queen as she delivered her message, next to the portraits of her great-grandchildren George and Charlotte, are two photographs of Elizabeth and Prince Philip.  One was taken on their wedding day in 1947, and the other in November this year to mark their Platinum Anniversary.  Seventy years separate the pictures, but one reciprocal vow is common to both.

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Nov 19, 2017 at 2:49pm PST

This is marriage, the real thing, and this particular marriage is special because it belongs to us in much the same way as the Queen herself belongs to us.  It is one of the last lit beacons in bleak Britain, whose marital statistics show that a third of all marriages are sooner or later put asunder, and that more and more couples move in under the same roof without entering into marriage at all.  More than three million families have been begun without the security of wedlock.  It is some decades since the State showed any understanding of its proper responsibility in this field, which is to create all the right conditions for stable family life, especially for the sake of its oldest and youngest citizens, without meddling in it.  What has happened instead is that marriage has been undermined so that, from a simply practical point of view, people can hardly be blamed for choosing to set up home in co-habitation.  The social and financial benefits that marriage once brought do not now make economic sense, and to many people the law appears to set a trap, being still just tenacious enough to protract and sour any parting, yet not firm enough to banish the very idea from people’s minds, encouraging building rather than dismantling.  By Britain’s national anticulture, by spectres of the imagination and by the reality of people’s own experiences, many have come to fear the unsunderable vows.  Yet couples who are ready to found a household should surely wish for just such a bond.  Marriage helps couples, before they ever enter into it, by serving as a test or proof: if they do not feel they trust each other enough to marry, then they cannot know whether they trust each other to start and sustain a family.  On the other hand, if their mutual trust does indeed go far enough that children seem a real possibility, then why delay in giving form to the natural truth?  Marriage is for life because children join their parents for life.  The great vow is there to protect first husband and wife, and then their children, against human weakness and the evils of the world outside.

But we have also forgotten not only the practicality and common sense of marriage, but its transcendent, spiritual dimension.  This is another casualty of the dictatorship of relativism — Benedict XVI’s phrase — the tyranny of indifference that surrounds us, unctuously bidding us do as we please but offering no railings of guidance, and certainly no healing, if our desires lead us into wrongdoing and suffering.  The idea of marriage as a calling to high friendship, as a sacrificial mission that elevates the dignity of man and woman, has vanished, and along with it a sense of motherhood and fatherhood as vocations, to be honoured far above mere career or material prosperity or political engagement.  So people no longer know what to hope for, nor what to build, are therefore afraid of commitment, and so settle for too little from themselves and others.

Yet the Church insists not only on its spiritual dimension but on recognising it as a sacrament, that is, an encounter with the explicit presence of God.  Marriage is, indeed, a minor miracle.  I don’t mean this in a facetious way.  It is one of the great paradoxes of life, this unexpected, triumphant treaty of accord by which men and women, in their rival camps with their baffling, amusing, mysterious, undefinable differences, can find not merely reconciliation, nor even simply fleeting pleasure, but actually their highest earthly adventure by pairing up with a member of the other team (the rival team!), and sealing with them an all-transfiguring, world-creating pact, each a match for the other, and each the other’s match.

The impossible union is not only a wonder, but a plausible reality.  A bride will cost a man his life, but, mirabile dictu, it can come to pass that even such a wayward creature as a man will vow to pay, and keep his vow.  The hard-won reward is generous: he finds himself the beneficiary of a vow of equal magnitude, and he finds himself in a unique position to give the gift of self.  Moreover, the happiness and security this brings him overflows into any children the marriage produces, children who encounter no pit of dread in asking two of the most important questions in growing up: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whom can I trust?’, though many young people do encounter such a chasm.  And the Queen, who in her life has had to make some fearsome vows before God, to her bridegroom and to her realm, is one of our greatest living examples in this regard.  Her own family has not been untouched by the turmoil of marriage in late twentieth-century Britain, but she and her husband have kept their faith and their vows, and quietly encouraged the rest of us to do the same.

In marriage is found, and from marriage comes, the ‘home’ of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas message.  I think it would be a good challenge for the Church and all people of good will to make this a year of promoting marriage, simply the idea, in our tired culture.  The Coalition for Marriage is already doing an excellent job in keeping an eye on the state of things, informing public opinion and encouraging the Government to do the right thing.  But marriage ought to be an urgent topic of conversation.  It needs to be allowed to set alight the imaginations of young people (I write as one) who are hungry for a mission, and the message needs to be proclaimed that marriage is a good thing from alpha to omega and at every scale: national, local and in the innermostnesses of the soul.  It ought to be given a place near the heart of the New Evangelisation; to solve the marriage crisis would be to ease many of the other social, moral and spiritual problems that afflict us.  Along with the other sacraments of mission (Holy Orders and Confirmation), it is the antidote to the dictatorship of relativism’s shrugs of indifference, and the soundest, least wasteful vessel into which to pour, with generosity and joy, the fruit of one’s sacrifices.

Meanwhile… Merry Christmas!  Keep feasting!

(Malcolm Archer’s setting of the Linden Tree Carol)

Merry Christmas!

Just a brief note to wish all or any readers a very happy Christmas indeed!  This evening our Youth Choir sang the music for the Vigil Mass and led our parish in south London into the feast.  Now our waiting is at an end; make you merry as our ancestors did!  Pour brandy over the Christmas pudding and set it alight, put the radio on for the Nine Lessons and Carols, and don’t forget the Queen at three!   May the feast glow with the same world-surprising wonder that first brought the rough-hewn shepherds of old to their knees.  We have as much cause to kneel, and to wonder, as they did.

Here’s an ancient hymn — this isn’t our choir! — from the choristers of Ely Cathedral.

A Festival for Archivists

‘Saint Catherine. Line engraving by F. Knolle after Domenichino.’ by F. Knolle. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Today is the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, a patroness of archivists.  Holy and scholarly St. Catherine!  Respectress of fonds, guardian of original order, protectrix of strong-rooms, intercede for us for us poor ‘devotees of Truth’ in our work deep down at the coal-face of ignorance, our own and mankind’s in general, and our humble fortification of our memory against the attrition of time, that we may be preserved from nineteenth-century paper, twentieth-century handwriting, yellowed sellotape, rusted staples, mould, dust, soot, dust and soot indistinguishable from each other, ‘original chaos’, ‘disasters in the archives’, spillages of ink in the reading-rooms, and above all our own folly in its sobering magnitude.  May the words ‘Miscellaneous’ or ‘Other Items’ or indeed ‘?’ never pass through our fingers!  Keepers of records, compilers of cataloguers, arrangers and describers of archives and manuscripts, let us all with one voice toast our patroness.

Happy Feast of All Saints!

As we must one day die they also died,
But live now as we hope we too shall live:
O keep in prayer all souls; O gladly give
Your saints your greeting at Allhallowstide!

(D. Newman, Feast of All Saints, 1 November 2017)

8,894,355

In the end I have decided I cannot in good conscience let this day pass without a note, however sombre it must be, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act.  This week the Catholic Herald’s front cover announces that this law has now cost us nearly nine million lives.  This does not take account of almost the same number of mothers to whom it will have caused suffering without mercy, one way or another, sooner or later.  Nor the abortions funded by the British government abroad, especially in developing countries.

Lord Alton’s tour de force in the same issue of the Herald, which contained as much compassion as it did force, sets out the situation as well as anyone else could.  The fundamental question remains whether the sanctity of human life is irreducible, or merely negotiable.  I say with the Church that it is the former, by Heaven, and therefore that its deliberate destruction is out of the question.  I am unconvinced by any argument that life does not begin at conception.  Even those who are not sure should feel hesitant to to take the risk.  We may and must move mountains to help any expectant mother in a crisis, but we have no right to extinguish the new life being knit within her.  How can one unborn child be revered, and another deemed unfit for life?

I should think, and at least hope, that many of the Members of Parliament who voted in favour of the 1967 Act did so with compassionate intentions, and in the sincere belief that an abortion would remain a regrettable last resort to rare and extreme crises.  What would they make of the incomputable figure at which we have now arrived, though?  Is this moral landscape of 2017 really what most of them intended?

The pro-life movement now faces two different fronts.  One is the explicitly pro-choice movement, with which I have very little patience: forthright and sinister, understanding women’s independence of mind and body through a particularly contorted prism, sloganising, resorting to intimidation and accordingly unafraid to requisition the law in the promotion of such slogans.  Abortion, for them, is not regrettable in the slightest, but a positive political ideal; their claim is to the symbolic liberation of all women.  Well, their questions deserve answering, but bluntly.   The pro-life generation holds the life of the mother and the life of the child to be equal.  Both lives must be preserved.  If the growing being is a child, then it is a child, and its life is sacrosanct, just as the mother’s life is sacrosanct.  Meanwhile, the proclamations of ‘choice’ are, for all their vehemence, quite vacuous: for instance there is no acknowledgement of women who have felt precisely that they have had no choice at all but to see an abortionist, often under pressure from families withholding material or moral support, or from men unwilling to face their responsibilities.  While such men are certainly liberated in their wickedness, there is no liberation for the women concerned.

On the other hand, there is is the other front of people with whom I hope my tone would be quite different.  They are the plain folk of Britain, who I suppose are not so different from the House of Commons of 1967.  Surely most of them, if asked, otherwise preferring not to think about abortion, would regret its existence but, meaning to be compassionate, express a view along lines that under extreme circumstances it must be considered a necessary evil.  They are people of good will.  So they might well understand justice and mercy; they might reasonably expect the pro-life movement’s mettle to be shown in action as well as in words, and want proof that a culture of life they propose will abound in practical and merciful help to those in difficulties.  And indeed it already does precisely this where it is not prevented from doing so: the Life Charity provides moral and material support to mothers in crisis, and until recently the Catholic Church was free to run adoption services and thereby bring help to mothers in distress and happiness to childless couples.

Much is said, too, about sitting in judgment on women who seek abortions.  I think the pro-life movement makes it very clear that, certainly in these days of commonplace abortion, the moral culpability of a mother who has recourse to this avenue is often, even generally, significantly diminished.  The abortion is always wrong, but the mother is not always guilty.  There is, however, surely seldom a guiltier party than the abortionist, who in sober mind and cold blood has devoted all that precious medical knowledge to the opposite of its purpose, to the destruction of life.  Yet when we say that the Church, in obedience to its Founder, is as rich in mercy as it is resolute in justice, we mean it.  Even for the abortionist.

If Martin Luther King’s niece, Alveda King, calls the pro-life cause ‘the new civil rights movement’, then I think we had better take notice.  Lord Alton’s estimation that ‘the tide is turning’ may well be correct: the pro-choice quarters are powerful but they are beginning to bluster and lash out, which is a sign of an awareness of losing ground.  They are going to try very hard to persuade the Irish people to repeal the Eighth Amendment of their constitution next year, but those slogans cannot last forever, and at some point they will have to ask themselves more carefully what really motivates the defenders of life, and why they will not give up.  The sooner they do so the better, and the sooner we can turn our attention to the real business of helping women and the unborn in need, rather than numbing our consciences to a dangerous compromise and wounding short-cut.  Let there rise up a proliferation of pro-lifers, holding aloft the twin lanterns of justice and mercy, in this as in all things!

Alas, that great city

It was only because it was so clearly with Englishness that Vaughan Williams aligned his art, and only because he seems to have understood England as well as anyone else has, that a while ago I felt I could make so bold as to suggest that his fourth and sixth symphonies articulate something about England’s loss of heart in the twentieth century.  I know that Vaughan Williams was famously impatient with others’ attempts to apply authoritative interpretations to his works; still, the music forebodes something, and I like the idea that, in the opening of the Sixth particularly — the interplay of violence, fidgety addiction, impatience, parodied beauty and a single cloudburst of authentic beauty — he foresaw the spiritual and moral upheavals that his death only just preceded, but which were already rumbling.

So I was interested by an observation made in passing by James Day, in his book on Vaughan Williams (London: Dent, 1961), while actually discussing a completely different work, another favourite of mine: Sancta Civitas (1929), a setting of texts from the Book of Revelation.  On page 100, Day describes the ‘weird and unnerving’ lament for the fall of Babylon which, he notes ‘in outline […] foreshadows one of the themes in the Moderato of the sixth Symphony’.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet it is possible to hear straightaway how, indeed, the sinister second movement ought to have sounded familiar at 9' 19":

Meanwhile here (emptying the Albert Hall of one orchestra and replacing it with another!) in a memorable performance that I was fortunate enough to hear live, is the lament for the fall of Babylon from Sancta Civitas.  Day is surely right: there is a distinct similarity between these sets of descending chords, though they were written fifteen years apart:

It is astonishing how this music evokes both Babylon’s over-sated greed and its desolation.  As if the music were not clear enough, these are the words sung by the choir:

Babylon the great is fallen.  Alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city!  For in one hour is thy judgement come.  The kings of the earth shall bewail her and lament over her.  And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her.

And the fruits thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.  Babylon the great is fallen. Alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and precious stones.  What city is like unto this great city!  Alas, for in one hour art thou made desolate.

Rejoice over her, O heavens; for God hath avenged you on her.  And a mighty angel took up a millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, ‘Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.’  And the voice of the harpers shall be heard no more at all in thee.  And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee.  Babylon the great is fallen.

Of course it would be too far, by a country mile, to conclude from this that Vaughan Williams’s Sixth paints England as Babylon.  But it is not unreasonable to suppose that he was aiming to evoke a similar mood, of utter and unsuspected desolation.  And certainly, in modern Britain, there are not many harpers, or candles, or bridegrooms and brides.

It is worth letting Sancta Civitas run on, though.  For having brought the desolation of Babylon to our ears, Vaughan Williams then sets the following words to radiant, ethereal, hopeful music:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first earth and the first heaven were passed away; and there was no more sea.  And I saw the holy city coming down from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, having the Glory of God.  And her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; and had twelve gates, and on the gates twelve angels, and the twelve gates were twelve pearls; and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.  And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty is the temple of it.  And the city had no need of the sun, neither the moon, to lighten her: for the glory of God did lighten her.  And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.  And they shall bring the glory and the honour of the nations into it.

A Gipps Symphony in Seattle: thank you, America!

Some excellent news from America: the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première of Ruth Gipps’ Symphony No. 2 on the 31st March, 2018.  

This news should be music to many ears, including for those for whom Seattle is out of reach by quite some distance.  For Ruth Gipps’ name has been, as the orchestra’s announcement points out, ‘inexplicably ignored in her homeland and abroad’ and this concert is bound to do something to remedy this.   I have written elsewhere (here, here, here and here) about this composer, whose life should be much better known and music far more easily heard.  It might seem remarkable that a work written in 1945 (and performed in Britain shortly afterwards) is only now being heard in the United States, but in fact this second symphony has received rather more attention than most of her music.  There are four other symphonies, all without a modern recording, for instance.  The scarceness of recordings of her work can be told from my attempt at a discography here.

That Ruth Gipps should remain so neglected ‘in her homeland’ is particularly lamentable.  A thoroughly interesting and necessary article by the musicologist Simon Brackenborough has recently provided a chronicle of her life and a review of Jill Halstead’s biography.  In the early part of Gipps’ career she found the wind against her on the grounds of her womanhood.  From the 1960s onwards, however, her career faced a different obstacle: her traditional, tonal idiom (‘a direct follow-on from Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton’) was suddenly at odds with the tide of modernism and atonalism.  To this tide she refused to give in for the rest of her life, and her uncompromising position and strong character perhaps did not, in her own lifetime, help her cause.

I sense that Brackenborough puts Ruth Gipps’ neglect down to the former prejudice; that it is as a woman composer that she has suffered most.  This may have been true for the first part of her career, but my impression is that she has paid more heftily for her tonalism and her traditionalism; the anti-traditionalist prejudice, in other words, was the more severe (and she is not the only composer to have been side-lined in this way).  In any case, the main thing for us is to re-invigorate her reputation; there is no excuse now for depriving ourselves of her unsung, unheard, unbroadcast music.

It is very heartening that, from across the Atlantic, America has caught sight of a composer shamefully overlooked in her own country and has, with characteristic gumption, decided to do something about it.  We ought to follow suit, with the help of British orchestras, the BBC and the record companies, and the impetus of some approaching anniversaries.  There is still plenty of time to organise, for example, a proper recording of her other symphonies to mark the twentieth anniversary of her death (2019), and, say, a performance of her piano concerto at the Proms for the centenary of her birth in 2021.

The World Needs More Trams

Thought for the day: the world needs more trams.  Their dignified passage enhances any street; cities are ennobled by their benevolent trundle.  (‘Discuss’!)

Munich

 I’ve nothing against buses and their ponderous elephantine lumber.  But trams never burden the air with pollution; they don’t judder or throb, their bogies’ progress is relatively unobtrusive, and their operation is entirely in accordance with the standards of the Clean Air Act 1951 and the encyclical Laudato Si’.

Croydon Tramlink

 They bring cities within reach of their suburbs, offer practical movement around its centre, and then there is the simple enjoyment of riding them and sight-seeing from them.  They run above ground, so are cheaper to build than underground systems, and are lighter than main-line trains, so need only lightly-engineered infrastructure and relatively uncostly maintenance.

Grenoble

And they are fitted with bells that spice the soundscape, setting tintinnabulation echoing across squares and down alleys and from cliff to cliff of masonry.

Mainz

One of the principles I have learned in life so far is to pay attention, at all times, to what the French are doing.  As far as trams are concerned, there is a lot going on!  They have a total of twenty-five modern tram networks; three more are under construction and more are in the pipe-line.  And they often tinker with what has already been built, adding new lines and extensions to existing networks.

Lyon

We in this country have only seven modern systems.  We should be clamouring for more!

On Englishness

Begging pardon for its unseasonableness, here is a Christmas carol:

­  Adam lay ybounden,

­  Bounden in a bond;
  Four thousand winter
  Thought he not too long.

­  And all was for an apple,
  An apple that he took.
­  As clerkes finden
­  Written in their book.

­  Ne had the apple taken been,
­  The apple taken been,
­  Ne had never our ladie,
­  Abeen heav’ne queen.

­  Blessed be the time
­  That apple taken was,
­  Therefore we moun singen,
­  Deo gratias!

And here is an exchange with some uninvited (though not unwelcome) guests at Mole’s and Ratty’s riverside picnic:

  A broad glistening muzzle showed itself above the edge of the bank, and the Otter hauled himself out and shook the water from his coat.
­  “Greedy beggars!” he observed, making for the provender. “Why didn’t you invite me, Ratty?”
­  “This was an impromptu affair,” explained the Rat. “By the way — my friend Mr. Mole.”
­  “Proud, I’m sure,” said the Otter, and the two animals were friends forthwith.
  “Such a rumpus everywhere!” continued the Otter.  “All the world seems out on the river to-day.  I came up this backwater to try and get a moment’s peace, and then stumble upon you fellows!  — At least — I don’t exactly mean that, you know.”
­  There was a rustle behind them proceeding from a hedge wherein last year’s leaves still clung thick, and a stripy head, with high shoulders behind it, peered forth on them.
­  “Come on, old Badger!” shouted the Rat.
­  The Badger trotted forward forward a pace or two; then grunted, “H’m! Company,” and turned his back and disappeared from view.
­  “That’s just the sort of fellow he is!” observed the disappointed Rat. “Simply hates Society!  Now we shan’t see any more of him to-day […]”

… And thirdly a vignette from a swimming lesson at Linbury Court Preparatory School, Dunhambury, East Sussex, in which C. E. J. Darbishire is demonstrating his accomplishment as a life-guard and J. C. T. Jennings, whose idea it was, is pretending to be in difficulties:

  “All right, I’ve got you now,” gasped the lifesaver, grabbing at Jennings’ ears like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

I need hardly ask what these three pieces of writing all have in common.  They are all English, of course! — and English not simply by virtue of having been written in England, in English or by English authors, but because, quite un-self-consciously I think, they radiate the English character.  In other words, they wear their Englishness not merely as a fact, but as a quality.

These are only examples from the furniture of my own mind (a mind which ‘England bore, shaped, made aware’) — of course others, better-read than I am, could have made a keener selection and a finer distillation.  But at any rate, I can tell the Englishnesses in these extracts as an astronomer might point out constellations in the night sky.  Out they flash, even though the author is in the middle of doing something else entirely (catechising us, diverting us, making us laugh).  In the first, for instance, the slightly-modernised text of a fifteenth-century carol (from the Sloane manuscript 2593 at the British Library, and set masterfully to music by various composers, such as Philip Ledger), there, miraculously, amid pre-Reformation English piety, is recognisable English humour.  Adam, the first man and the first sinner, is given due blame for the ‘bond’ we share with him, our inherited weakness and woe — ‘Four thousand winter / Thought he not too long’ —  but it is a brotherly, even teasing rebuke.  Likewise there is something familiar, something eye-to-eye-seeing, about the words ‘all was for an apple’.  (I have written here about the power of this carol, amazing the catechist with his own catechesis).  Next there is Exhibit B, whose origin in Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’ is instantly recognisable.  Here in an English riverside idyll are the intricate, over-scrupulous niceties of English manners and the minor perils of speaking one’s mind in company.  There is the gentle fun made of Badger’s benign curmudgeonliness and the Otter’s forwardness, along with its logical result, his hasty back-pedalling from even the shadow of an implication (and it is no more than that) that Rat and Mole might be disturbing his peace.  Also ‘a hedge wherein last year’s leaves still clung thick’, which needs no comment.  And then in the third specimen, from Anthony Buckeridge’s According to Jennings, there is the dead-pan earnest meticulousness with which the serious business of English humour is set about (indeed, in a book for children).  See how carefully the hilarity has been coiled up so that its unfolding is as ticklish as possible.

How does this strike any readers, wherever you are from?  There’s nothing objective about these observations: I offer all this just as one Englishman’s thoughts on his own Englishness.  I know very well that, just as it is very easy to proclaim with such certainty “That’s English!”, it is very hard to pin down why.  What defines any nation’s character?  I could give examples until the cows come home, but what about a definition?

What is it about this music (RVW, Symphony 8, third movement) that is so English?

Many in Western Europe now find this question fraught with difficulty.  Knowing that, in the past, people have often tried rather too hard to pin it down: to blood, to territory, to language, to religious faith alone, to temperament, or to rather too narrow combinations of these, there has been in the past seventy years a rather strong counter-reaction.  Those in England who now are uncomfortable with and even suspicious of expressions of Englishness (and there are many) are right that none of those things, by themselves, are absolute conditions for nationality, but go too far, I think, in asserting that Englishness itself is meaningless, if not harmful.  All of those measurements surely have their bearing, to greater or lesser extents.

Englishness is not monolithic: the best-known division is between the highland North and the lowland South (and my perspective, I acknowledge, is Southern).  It is not unchanging: English history has its twists and turns.  Nor is it infallible (shall I ever see an end to the lack of interest in Wales or the reluctance to learn foreign languages?).  But it is something.  It is something that I have missed when I have (twice) spent time living away from England, and have met on returning; it is something that has been sharpened and strengthened precisely by (certainly not in spite of) my efforts to learn the languages and cultures of France and Germany.  More objectively, it is something rather tough and persistent, over a thousand years old.  It is something, too, in spite of being in many ways intangible.  Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, the ever-prolific and ever-readable Irish Papist, who has hammered out some interesting thoughts here about his own (Irish) romantic nationalism, suggests that mythology makes a nation and binds it together as much as, if not more than ethnic or geographical fact.  (It is worth noting in passing that the strength of England’s physical borders have perhaps blinded her to any detachment of nationality from territory: Poland, for example, disappeared as a political entity during the nineteenth century, and appeared to undergo a territorial shunt westwards during the course of the twentieth, but has emerged with a strong sense of national identity.  Yet even English kings, before and after the Norman Conquest, called themselves rex Anglorum, King of the English, until the twelfth century; Henry II was the first to adopt as his official title rex Anglie, King of England).  Maolsheachlann’s point is that a nation is spiritual as much as it is physical:

[…] the organizing principle of romantic nationalism is something intangible, otherworldly, spiritual. The further up you go in the scale of intangibility — folklore, language, literature, mythology, the arts — the closer you come to it. But the principle itself can’t be grasped, can’t be described — maybe it’s even quasi-fictional.

I know that in the past many have taken advantage of that spirituality, elevating it to the altars and thus too high.  This happened not least in the nineteenth-century projects to unify and centralise European principalities or dukedoms into more concrete nations like Italy or Prussia (by the way, those misunderstood words of the German national anthem, Deutschland über alles, actually mean ‘Germany above all’, that is, a call to loyalty to a united, transcendent German nation above more local identities, and not, as I think is sometimes assumed, a braggadocio ‘Germany above everyone [else]’).  The mistakes of that century are many: the effort to transcend narrower, regional loyalties often rode rough-shod over them, and often nationhood inspired churchgoing, rather than the other way around.   But that isn’t the case today.  Rather, the idea of national feeling is being eroded in two ways.  The first is the globalisation and homogenisation of commerce and culture and much else, which is often praised without qualification as a unifying force (which was surely precisely a principal motive for the nationalism of the nineteenth century, now criticised).  The second is the general anti-romantic and anti-spiritual mood of the age, which is not only eroding the semi-spirituality of the nation but gnawing prolifically at the deeper, underlying Christian foundations of Western Europe and indeed any idea of Christendom.  With assumptions abroad that such things as patriotism are merely the fruit of jealousy-soured tribalism, the mystery of mythology is more likely to be mocked or disparaged or, possibly worse still, simply abandoned and forgotten altogether.

But that would be a catastrophe, brought on ourselves by a blundering misunderstanding of nationality and national feeling.  I suppose it is time for me to attempt a definition, and here it is: that the nation is a larger, but looser and less important version of the family.  Like the family, the nation gives us soil for our roots and our place in the world; like the family, a nation is bonded in the first place by blood but others, formerly outsiders, can be welcomed to a rightful place in it by marriage and adoption.  From both family and nation we inherit a home, spiritual and physical, which we are to guard and pass on.  Both, too, have room for contradictions and twin-truths: it is possible to call oneself Anglo-Welsh, or English and British, or to descend from various quite different nations, and distinguish between Scousers and Londoners and Yorkshiremen, and so on, just as it is possible to have several simultaneous identities, so to speak, as a mother, daughter, sister and wife, and to belong to two different families at once.  Nations, like families, have identities which are continuous but not fixed.  No wonder, then, that with the widespread weakening of the vows and bonds that hold families together, nations too are losing their nerve.

Maolsheachlann's idea of romantic nationalism has a bearing on this, too.  ‘Mythology,’ he writes, ‘is set partly in the real world and partly in a never-never land; in fact, the real world itself becomes mingled with a never-never land.’  Reading this, it occurred to me that the nation is a fascinating mingling of ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’.  For most of us there is a discrepancy between the everyday, mundane, probably drizzly part of England where we live, and the vision, in literature or the imagination, of a more peaceful, rural, sunlit England.  The first is both a physical ‘home’ and an ‘elsewhere’ in which we feel we are to some extent exiled; the second is a true, yearned-for ‘home’ that is ‘elsewhere’ even to the point of the realm of the imagination.  (There is a greater difference than we might think between the ‘everyday’ and the ‘familiar’).  Yet the mythology not only draws on the real world but then writes itself back into reality: hence the quest, on physical English soil, for the mythological, unfindable ‘deep England’, a home that lies elsewhere, or an elsewhere that is home.  Hence the reaction of the poet Edward Thomas when asked what he was going out to the Front to fight for: he picked up a clod of earth and answered “This.”  And that mythology is unabashed in the face of reality, which remains unequivocally that Tilbury Docks are no less a part of England than Bourton-on-the-Water.

There is something like this in families too.  Surely most people might be tempted to say that every-day life cramps family life to some extent, or that is only half flourishing, always postponing each other’s company and leisure, and that families are only really fully alive at gatherings and feasts and weddings and baptisms.  Of course those high points (the German for ‘wedding’ is ‘Hochzeit’, literally ‘high time’) are as wonderful and necessary as they are meant to be, and make family history, which is also mythology after all.  But then the reality is that a family is no less itself, no less at the real work of being a family, at 8 a.m. on a November school morning than it is around the baptismal font or the Christmas roast.

There is much more that could be said on this subject, but I have remembered that this is a blog, not a ten-volume treatise.  For now I will leave off by saying that I find the appropriation or vilification or other misunderstanding of authentic national feeling sorely annoying, because, authentically felt and authentically understood, as long as it is for itself rather than against anything else, it is a good thing to be savoured, and a gift to rejoice in. We in England need to rediscover it; it is, after all, our inheritance.

A glimpse of ‘Deep England’: St Mary’s, Itteringham, Norfolk.

Duruflé and the pursuit of beauty

Somewhere — I think in a short biography — I remember reading a remark of the composer Edward Elgar, that he thought had always really been ‘a literary man’: in other words, that although his gift was undoubtedly for music, he felt that literature drew on him with a more instinctive or immediate power.  Perhaps he would have supposed of himself that his talents would have reflected this, but, curiously, they did not.

I think I know what he meant.  Even if I flatter myself that my ‘definite service’ really does include foisting blog-posts upon the Internet and so on, it certainly doesn’t involve musical composition.  So it’s a funny thing that I probably listen to more music than I read works of literature.  Not that I am an inverted Elgar — but beauty flashes out at me more boldly from music than from most literature, even from most poetry, and music, slight as my actual musical competence is, informs my writing.  My hope for my aspiring verse, and to a great extent for my prose, is for it to sound musical, or more precisely for it to be beautiful for similar reasons to those for which a piece of music is beautiful.

So I find that I am easily as much in sympathy with the ideas, and simply enjoy the company of favourite composers as much as I do those of writers.  Composers, then, spark off the muse as much as poets and authors.  Do many writers, I wonder, wish they could hammer out words capable of bringing about a mood or making an utterance heard first from notes on staves?  In many cases this is too ambitious an enterprise, not least because a composer’s language is not limited by borders, and a poet’s is, but I don’t believe it is altogether hopeless, since I believe that all beauty, along with all truth and all goodness, has one source.  So on I go thinking it over and over.

As a treat I recently bought myself a new CD of the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, singing music by the French composer Maurice Duruflé, the thirtieth anniversary of whose death was last Friday (16th June).  He was the organist (titulaire) at the church of St-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris, a vocation which makes itself heard in most of his compositions, written as they generally are for organ or choir and under the roof of the Catholic liturgical tradition.  

Duruflé is notable for the small volume and intricacy of his compositional output, the result of a ferocious self-criticism and scrupulous perfectionism.  He left only fourteen opus numbers, all meticulously-crafted works.  Against the insincerity and irony of much twentieth-century art he is an antidote, a quiet but determined anti-fraud who knew that the talent given to workers of beauty is precisely that, a gift, not to be thrown away or misused or squandered in pride; he knew, too, that artistic beauty is hard-won and that truth and beauty are intertwined.

But it is not only the perfectionism of the composer that appeals to me.  It has always been the mood and texture of his work.  Here, perhaps, is a clue as to why:  Frédéric Blanc, author of the CD’s sleeve notes, and referring to the Requiem, speaks of the composer’s blending of Gregorian plain-chant with a ‘touche impressioniste’.  Duruflé was working within a tradition that he revered, but it was also, without contradiction, his tool, to be used for new purposes and new beauty.  He took the best of the old and the best of the new, working shimmering and scintillating impressionist wraiths around unambiguous, familiar Latin plainsong melodies seven centuries old.  He marshalled the full strength of the symphony orchestra even as he called for the medieval human voice.

In general I love music, and poetry, that is full and rich and resplendent — not heavy and cumbersome for the sake of it, but luminous and misty — full of details and treasures to be found, plainly the fruit of a labour of love, that can be read or heard again and again, each time with something different to pick out and savour.  (Thus I like Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi and Larkin’s poem Whitsun Weddings for largely the same reason)  But at the same time it can’t be frothy or over-elaborated.  I think it must have a plain heart and possibly also a simple message: in other words, that a work should be easily reducible to its essentials, but also easily embellished and decorated and elaborated upon if need be, much as a church building, whether built in simplicity or in a dazzling proliferation of ornament, is always a church, neither more nor less.  I feel that there ought to be something to hold onto: for the melody, or the words, or the subject, to be ardent and disarming.  In any case, to strain and labour to enunciate the simplest message is itself, I think, to strike at a truth about man’s weakness and humbleness in art, as in much else.

Duruflé does the same thing in his Prélude et Fugue sur le Nom d’Alain (Jehan Alain, organist and composer, fell in the Second World War).  Here it is, played by the German organist Lisa Hummel with skill beyond my understanding.  It is ethereal, mysterious music, but it hangs around a single theme.  The loveliest part of the Prélude in my view is the reappearance of the theme in simple sincerity, at 5'04", as if it were plainsong, but it is only that lovely because it is a reappearance, its previous iterations having been made amid an outpouring of richly-wrought lace-fine harmonies and flourishes. 

Well, I’m no more a Duruflé than I am an Elgar, but if I asked myself about my literary ambitions (or pretensions!), I would perhaps decide that I would like, one day, to write poetry as comparable to music by Duruflé’s music as it would be to actual poetry by Betjeman, or Larkin, or Masefield, or Jennings.  And, by the way, one reason it is so difficult is that it all requires balance, I think: between new and old, between candour and ornament, between richness and austerity, between humility and ambition.  But we persevere because the reward is to have been allowed, by the author of all beauty, to have ‘had a go’ at creation, and to have seen that it is good.

Incidentally, the fact of Duruflé’s having only fourteen opus numbers to his name makes it all the more baffling that this orchestral piece, the Andante et Scherzo, seems so little-known.  There are no professional recordings.  (How?!)  Here is an old recording which someone has gone to the trouble of uploading —

— and here is another rendition by the participants in a music school, the Semaine Musicale de Clairac, under the baton of Jean-Pierre Ballon, who did not beat about the bush with explanations or reasonings: ‘Il a fallu le faire’.

Estuary Thoughts

Coming down England by a different line the other week, aiming south-west for Wales, I had an excuse for a journey over a stretch of railway I have long wanted to travel.  The train, bereft of most passengers at Cheltenham and after Gloucester nearly empty altogether, turned to wind on towards Newport along the far, western bank of the river Severn (the far bank from my point of view), with the Forest of Dean unseen to our right, and the widening water always somewhere, sometimes immediately, on the left.

A glimpse of Broadoak, with the A48 road and the river Severn meeting in the distance.

This stretch of Gloucestershire, between the county city and the Welsh border at Chepstow,  belongs to the corner of England that produced, in the early twentieth century, a great flourishing of art and music, and some of our greatest poets and writers.  The railway runs straight through the land of Herbert Howells, Ivor Gurney and Frederick William Harvey, three friends who came of age in that brief sunlit window of the early twentieth century that was shattered by the First World War.  Gurney, the poet and composer whose life had such a long and sad ending, was born in the city of Gloucester itself.  Howells was a son of Lydney, through which we rushed non-stop; it was this line that took him, by way of Gloucester, to the heights of his musical career.  And perhaps some of the depths, as well — it was also along here, a century before my own journey, that he had managed to leave the first score of his Piano Quartet on the train by mistake.  F. W. Harvey, too, was of this earth — not long after Gloucester, the train had skimmed past his birthplace at Minsterworth, and, a few miles downstream, cut straight through the hamlet of Broadoak, where he recorded winter’s ending in his psalm-like, rhapsodic poem ‘Spring 1924’:

     Spring came by water to Broadoak this year,

     I saw her clear.
     Though on the earth a sprinkling
     Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
     Bright curve of the Severn River
     Was of her gospel first giver […]

In the unthinking safety of those years on the eve of the Great War, this landscape was not simply the setting but in some ways the foundation of the trio’s friendship.  It was their native Gloucestershire that led them into artistic and temperamental sympathy with each other, and Gloucestershire that moved each to their arts: Howells to music, Harvey to poetry and Gurney, remarkably, to both, with equal passion.  Hence Gurney’s Gloucestershire Rhapsody; hence  the melody of Howells’ Chosen Tune, whose line on the staves mirrors the shape of the same hills of which Harvey exclaimed, ‘Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain! / My hills again!’.  (Harvey was incidentally a Catholic convert, though Anthony Boden’s generally excellent biography does not shed much light on this aspect of his life).  So in tune were these men with each other that when Gurney and Howells heard the first performance, in Gloucester Cathedral, of Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia, the piece had the same effect on them: it so overwhelmed them that had to spend the whole night pacing round the city’s streets in deep conversation to work it out of them.  I struggle to imagine this depth of companionship and artistic togetherness of spirit between any two people, let alone men: it seems foreign and almost incomprehensible only a century later.  Though their friendship — which is also described in a superb documentary on Gurney, The Poet who Loved the War — never failed, it was to be transformed by forces that had lain unsuspected beyond the Gloucestershire horizon, but called them out of their home county and into new lives.  Who knows how else their lives and careers would have gone on, had Gurney’s mind held out, had Howells not lost his son to an ambush of meningitis in 1935, emerging from the trauma a changed man and a composer of changed music, and had the war not cost Harvey some of his prime years in a German prison camp.

The ‘Sanctus’ of Herbert Howells’ monumental Missa Sabrinensis (Mass of the Severn)

When I came past on my incidental pilgrimage the weather was murky and damp, with the tinge of nearing dusk.  My sight was not nearly as clear as Harvey’s was when he beheld spring heralded in the Severn.  But certainly visible, as we persevered towards Chepstow, was the grey expanse of river, with the tide in, cutting off this part of England from the rest and, I like to think, leaving it benignly open to Welsh influence, both in landscape and mood.  Then the train, parting company slightly with the main estuary, slowed to a pace stately enough for a fitting, dignified passage across the Wye flowing in from the north, and over the border into Wales.  (Chepstow station, not far beyond the bridge, was a riot of Welsh signage amid the drizzle).

After Chepstow the line shadows the Wye all the way to its confluence with the Severn.  Gloucestershire, on the opposite bank, has tapered away to the curious Beachley peninsula, a last stubborn sliver of England between the two rivers.  Here the white parabola of the first Severn Bridge hurtles serenely in to land from across the main estuary, which is two miles wide at this point.  The BBC’s excellent Timeshift series includes a thoroughly enjoyable documentary about the construction of this bridge (Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge was Built), chronicling the colossal undertaking year by year from the start of work in 1961 to the opening in 1966.   It combines superbly-chosen archive film with recent interviews of some of those actually involved: I was struck by their literate, measured speech — engineers, workmen and locals alike — and by their boyish octogenarian grins — and by the clarity with which they explained the fairly complicated principles and mechanisms by which the bridge was made to stand.  Due time was also given to those who died in its construction: six men, which I think may still fairly be called a relatively small number for a project of this scale, not least given that it was generally the water, rather than the structure itself, that claimed their lives.  It must have taken a good deal of research and editing to put the programme together, though somebody has clearly enjoyed compiling an early Sixties sound-track to set the mood.  I have known this bridge all my life, and watching this programme I was fascinated to learn in so much detail how it was built, and by whom.

Gathering pace again, we converged with the Great Western main line as it emerges at Caldicot from the Severn Tunnel (an earlier triumph of engineering, opened in 1886) and thence ran along the flat towards Newport.   But there is something about estuaries: once in mind they will drain away only sluggishly.  The previous Sunday having been Pentecost, my thoughts drifted to someone else’s memorable journey by rail, involving another river’s ‘level drifting breadth’, which had been made on the other side of the country.  Philip Larkin’s intricate and atmospheric poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ — one of my ‘Desert Island’ lyrics — begins, like the journey it describes, in Hull (‘all windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone’) and gathers pace alongside the Humber estuary ‘where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet’.  Its description of a ‘sunlit Saturday’ in 1955 — when Whitsun was a known, universal holiday — when it was customary to marry on Whitsun — when it was the custom to aspire to marriage at all — stirs up in me the same momentary ache or dizziness as I feel when looking at the 1947 series of one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, at the sight of those lost expanses of untrashed, unmotorwayed England.  Yet perhaps it was all already slipping away, as slowly, massively and unstoppably as the ebb of an estuary tide.  Perhaps what moved Larkin to his symphonic utterance of sights and sounds was the urge to record and capture not only the ‘frail travelling coincidence’, but the whole civilisation in which it took place.  I who come later am glad he did.

Like many modern buildings in Wales, Newport’s recently rebuilt station was not wearing well.  While sensible terraces of older, hardier houses climbed sturdily uphill in the distance, the station’s futuristic ceilings and space-age gutters were dripping with rain and the Thunderbirdsesque roof was smudged with moss.   Hadn’t they known there is no present in Wales, and no future; there is only the past?  But that’s another poet, and another country, for another time…