Romanticism
in Retrospect –
An
overview of the music of Herbert Howells and its recent fortunes
An
Address given by the Honorary Secretary at the Society’s Annual General
Meeting
in
Cambridge on Saturday 14th July 2001
Almost
twenty years ago, the distinguished organist and composer Richard Lloyd
addressed the 1982 Annual General Meeting of this Society on The Church Music
of Herbert Howells in the year of the composer’s ninetieth birthday. His
assessment combined comprehensive consideration of the context of Howells’ music
as at that time readily available with a clear and warm affection for the man.
Mr
Lloyd’s memorable lecture began by placing Howells into the historical context
of English musical history, declaring him, definitively, as the last of the
great English Romantic composers. Published just four years after the
publication of Christopher Palmer’s trail-blazing study in 1978, the 1982 CMS
Address by Richard Lloyd remains essential reading for aspiring students of
Howells’ liturgical output. The
distinction of having produced the first published monograph on Howells accrued
to his pupil Robert Spearing, whose tribute appeared in time for the composer’s
80th birthday. The
English simply love anniversaries, and the Howells centenary in 1992 did much to
restore the fortunes of some of the composer’s less often-heard pieces,
including the second performance of the evocative Sine Nomine – seventy
years on from its politely-received, but not universally acclaimed,
première.
Christopher
Palmer’s more substantial second book: Herbert Howells – A Celebration
comprised a magnificent, lasting, and tangible centenary tribute to one of
the most famous of Gloucestershire’s many musical sons. This substantial study
has now run into a second edition, with updates to 1996, and has become a
standard work of reference on the composer.
By
no means least of such additional information is the background to the
establishment of the Herbert Howells Society and significant updates to the
Howells discography – a recorded anthology that today encompasses substantial
numbers of the composer’s chamber music and orchestral output. On a personal
note, speaking as one brought up in a generation when the only recordings of
Howells’ music were those of anthems, settings and carols with an occasional
vocal recital including the matchless King David, the current catalogues
of compact discs bespeak a burgeoning of interest by performers and listeners
alike in the music of a remarkable figure.
There
is some evidence to suggest that, like Holst, Howells perhaps regarded
composition as something of a spare-time occupation undertaken in the academic
vacations free of the cares of tutorials, lectures, examining and
adjudicating. Palmer, and more
recently Paul Spicer (in his informative 1998 book in the Border Lines
series) provide a vast amount of personal reminiscence and background. Both
authors acknowledge their great indebtedness to Herbert Howells’ beloved
daughter, the distinguished actress Ursula Howells. Few composers in musical
history can have been so richly blessed with so splendid a standard-bearer for a
parent’s artistic endeavour. The rightful and substantial debt owed by all
lovers of Howells’ music to his daughter is profound. Her selflessly generous
assistance to so many seeking enlightenment on matters of detailed study, and
her total commitment to those who have assumed the mantle of apostles for the
promulgation of Howells’ creative output. As you know, it had been our hope to
have Miss Howells as the Society’s principal guest at the 2001 Annual Meeting,
but a fortnight’s radio acting has intervened to prevent her being with us.
Admirers of her artistry as an actress, and there name is legion, will have
noticed her in the recent television serialisation of The
Cazelets.
Not
least among many signal services of Ursula Howells has been her constant
encouragement of the publishing and promotion of issues in the Church Music
Society’s Howells Series – a series brought recently to a resounding
conclusion with the publication of the 1974 West Riding Cathedrals Festival
Te Deum – a project which has also enjoyed the unstinting and generous
support of the commissioner of that neglected work, Mr Graham
Matthews.
For
church musicians, of course, the principal development since 1982 has been the
opportunity to perform and evaluate a good deal of Howells’ sacred output from
his young adulthood and early middle years. Graham Matthew’s West Riding
Cathedrals Festival Te Deum is a rare exception from its composer’s
compositional “Indian Summer” and there is great delight that this vintage essay
is now readily available and is shortly to be recorded. Unlike the Washington
Cathedral Te Deum completed recently from the composer’s sketches by John
Buttrey, the Sheffield setting survives complete in Howells’ hand. The autograph
copy has now been deposited by Mr Matthews in the library of the Royal College
of Music alongside many other Howells manuscripts.
There
is no doubt that Howells’ rare capacity for friendship – with places as well as
people – sustained a profound influence upon his compositional output. Not
withstanding an all-consuming fascination with buildings, art, craft, history
and tradition, the trouble that he himself took over his personal appearance
bespeaks an individual as much concerned with the visual as the aural. The composer’s own programme notes for
the trail-blazing King’s College Choir recording on the famous Argo LP declares
as much:
In
all my music for the Church, people and places have been a dual influence. The
Cathedral in Gloucester, St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in London, Christ
Church and New College in Oxford, St John’s and King’s College Chapels in
Cambridge – these and their recent Directors of Music have been a paramount
shaping force. Men, choir, ecclesiastical buildings have become inseparably a
part of that force. So too have exemplars and – acoustics.
At
the time he wrote this note, of course, he was only at the beginning of what we
might refer to as his “canticle pilgrimage” – a remarkable peroration which by
the time of his death had, to quote Newman in his centenary year, brought within
its “ample palm” venues including the Cathedrals of Canterbury, Coventry,
Worcester and Hereford (as well as Gloucester), Salisbury – referred to by
Howells as the Sarum Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis – and York. Among
collegiate chapels and greater churches visited in this sonic travelogue are
Magdalen, Oxford, Bristol (St Mary Redcliffe), Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal at the
Tower of London (St Peter ad Vincula), St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle,
Edgbaston St Augustine in Birmingham and – rather farther afield foundations
ecclesiastical and educational – Dallas, Columbia, New York (St John the
Divine).
Howells’
own remarks quoted earlier are interesting in failing to make any mention of
some of the Cathedrals listed, the works for which had been in his work list for
some years before he penned the note for the Argo recording. Maybe space was a
concern, or possibly it was the named settings of which he was particularly
proud.
Many choirs,
not least those of the two principal Cambridge chapels, have made anthology
recordings of Howells settings since the Argo release, but speculation over the
composer’s note in this once ubiquitous recording does not end with a survey of
what we might refer to (hopefully not in a partisan, but merely a demographic
sense) as his Anglican output. There is no mention whatever of a substantial and
very formative London influence on Howells’ early writing. Richard Runciman Terry, founder
choirmaster of Westminster Cathedral, was at the height of his considerable
powers during Howells’s student days at the Royal College of Music and it was
for Terry’s choir that Howells seems to have been inspired to produce a
considerable corpus of early liturgical compositions which have only achieved
widespread circulation during the course of the past two decades.
Musicians
of the Catholic tradition would have had something of an inkling of this
important connection by virtue of the inclusion of a fa-burden setting intended
for alternatim use at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and included
in Sir Richard’s Complete Benediction Book for Choirs of 1933. A setting
of Salve Regina, one of the early Howells pieces and the fourth of
Four Anthems to/of the Blessed Virgin Mary that comprise their creator’s
Opus 9, had been recorded in the 1930s sung by Westminster Cathedral Choir on an
HMV disc.
Earliest
of the works of what might be described as the Westminster Cathedral Connection
is the Mass in the Dorian Mode (designated perhaps more correctly, since
the composer referred to it thus, as Missa Sine Nomine) of 1912. Despite
being its composer’s first work to receive professional performance – it was
written just a few months after Howells took up his composition scholarship at
the Royal College – this notable early mass had to wait almost eighty years for
publication. Since being issued by the Society in 1990, the Mass has been
followed by another CMS issue from this early period – Haec
Dies.
The
vast kaleidoscope of vocal challenges which Howells’s music presents, especially
to the amateur singer, encompasses a remarkable, chameleon-like ability to
discern what will “go well” as he himself might very well have said. Richard
Lloyd’s substantial survey took in the neglected, but complete, service in E
flat dedicated to Herbert Brewer, the Gloucester organist to whom the young
Howells had been articled as a boy. Besides the E major canticles for men’s
voices (originally featuring only tenors and basses, but now available for all
three male voices in a clever re-casting by John Buttrey, which had the
composer’s blessing), more recent CMS issues have included the ingenious evening
service for men’s voices and organ designed for war-time conditions at
Westminster Abbey. Known as Howells
in D (modally rather than tonally), this setting – now also in the CMS
Howells Series – is just as singable by equal upper voices as an
alternative to the ensemble of lower sonorities intended originally. Patrick
Russill’s edition includes a version for four trebles of the close harmony
section (the only four part music in an otherwise unison or occasionally two
part setting) at the words He, remembering his mercy. By such a means has
the appeal and inherent usefulness of this music been the more widely available
in quires and places where they sing.
The
popular myth that all Howells’s music is “difficult” is belied particularly by
his fine hymn tunes of which there are over a dozen additional to the
stupendous, and universally used, Michael to Robert Bridges’ All my
hope on God is founded. Despite its appearance in the 1936 Clarendon Hymn
Book, not until its inclusion in Hymns for Church and School (the
1964 version of The Public School Hymn Book of previous generations) and,
most importantly, 100 Hymns for Today of 1969 (a supplement to Hymns
Ancient and Modern) did this superb tune begin to “take off” in public
esteem. The composer’s descant (whose first appearance in an anthology was in
English Praise of 1975) was probably devised in response to the acclaim
that followed the hymn’s appearance in Hymns for Church and School. One
other of the composer’s four tunes contributed especially for the 1964 book
(which, with Michael, including five Howells melodies in all) has fared
particularly well – the brooding, expansive melody to Timothy Rees’ Holy
Spirit, ever dwelling. Michael and Salisbury (for Holy Spirit,
ever dwelling) demand more of the singers than their companions, which,
though clearly from their creator’s stable, are by no means what we might refer
to as thoroughbreds in quite the same way. Another tune which might have been
intended for the 1964 book, but which did not find its way there, is a fine
setting of a melody designed for Wesley’s Love Divine, which is the
eponymous item in the Society’s issue of Four Extended
Hymns.
There
survives, too, a small number of Anglican chants by Howells, most of which are
known to date from the years of his maturity. The inclusion of two in the Royal
School of Church Music Chant book has done much to popularise the chant in B
flat major, with its soaring lines calling to mind nothing so much as walking
along a cathedral aisle, with one arch giving place to the next with the same
inevitability of the glorious melodic line or underpinning harmonies. The
harmonies are all entirely diatonic - no chromatics here, for certain. Dr John
Birch obtained from Howells a complete set of chants for a calendar evening in
the Chichester Cathedral and some other collections.
It
is perhaps inevitable that the present survey should properly pay due
consideration to those items from Howells’s pen with which the Society has been
privileged to be associated. Most significant of all is the challenging set of
evening canticles in B minor produced by a greatly loved Vice President for the
Golden Jubilee of the formation of the Church Music Society in 1906 and first
heard at Evensong in Westminster Abbey on 17th May 1956.
Perhaps
neglected for some time on account of an association with a society rather than
a particular building (though the piece of course belongs to Herbert Howells’s
Westminster collection, Collegiate rather than Cathedral in this case), Howells
in B minor has achieved very widespread performance since its re-issue by the
Church Music Society in 1992 in honour of the centenary of the composer’s birth.
Like the earlier F sharp minor setting for the Collegiate Church of St Peter
in Westminster the 1956 setting is less expansive than some. Though
rhapsodic in the best Howells sense, the momentum is continuing. The CMS setting
unfolds from a section for full trebles, who are also deployed for a brief
passage at He hath filled the hungry with good things. Apart from those
two places, the vocal scoring is full throughout. The organ is used sparingly,
especially in Nunc Dimittis – but always tellingly; at the close of
Magnificat the organ quits the final chord prior to the singers. The
close of Gloria after Nunc dimittis (a setting almost identical to
that with which Magnificat closes) the organ sustains to the end. Though
the smallest of adjustments, the contrast achieved is
electrifying.
What
we might refer to as the “war-time economy” setting in D mentioned earlier, also
first heard in Westminster Abbey, was completed in the same Holy Week, 1941, as
the last of its composer’s Four Anthems dedicated to Thomas Armstrong.
Scoring of these is, in like manner, reasonably economical; one of their number
has become one of the great classics of sacred music of any period.
Like as the hart – a slow blues with a broad two, rather than four, beats
to the bar is one of very few standard repertoire works capable of being tackled
by a novice choral group as equally by the finest choirs in the land. The
tessitura of the tenor part, for instance, is readily practicable for the
adolescent voices of a four-part school choir and the sustained soprano descant
towards the end (doubled by the organ part), though devastatingly beautiful in
its impact, can without undue loss be omitted and is, in any event, marked as
ad lib by the composer in the score.
The
comparative neglect of O pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the first of
the set, and arguably even more straightforward than Like as the hart, is
hard to understand and the virile vividness of Let God arise and,
particularly, the extraordinarily powerful We have heard with our ears, O God
argue for far greater prominence for the remaining duo of the quartet. The
passion Howells engenders in We have heard with our ears gives emphasis
to his deeply-felt deploring of war and violence. We know from his writings the
deep and sometimes overriding sense of anxiety experienced by Howells during and
after the Second World War. It will be remembered that his family were bombed
out of their home in September of 1940. It may well have been that experience
which focused Howells’ attention on providing his inherently useful war-time
setting for Sir Ernest Bullock at Westminster Abbey who had suffered the same
fate in losing his home.
Further
neglect in matters of repertoire attaches itself to the Coventry Mass of
1968, a work heard, memorably, under the direction of John Bertalot in the
Cathedral during a 1972 summer course of the Royal School of Church Music. The
length of the piece, especially of the sections around the Canon of the Mass, is
certainly in some arenas an impediment to the more streamlined utterance
demanded by modern liturgical practice which envisages the whole of the
Thanksgiving as one continuous whole. The Dorian mass of 1912 has,
after decades of neglect, established its place not merely liturgically but also
as a recital work for a cappella performance. The quality of the music of
the Coventry Mass makes for a similar duality of opportunity. Maybe
someone, somewhere, will respond to that challenge – and to assisting in the
rehabilitation of the English Mass of 1956 composed for the
Jubilee of Dr Harold Darke’s appointment to St Michael’s Cornhill in
1916.
More
greatly to be deplored even than these cases is the lack of good fortune enjoyed
by the brilliant cento textual compilation and musical setting known as
Exultate Deo commissioned in 1975 by Lincoln Minster for the enthronement
of the new diocesan bishop, The Right Reverend Simon Phipps. Howells’ vivid correspondence and
burgeoning friendship between himself and Dr Philip Marshall (cathedral organist
at Lincoln from 1966 to retirement twenty years later) makes for splendid
reading. Not least of the interest in this superb, yet concise setting – the
words of the eponymous psalm begin Sing we merrily – is the
extraordinary, and economical, series of musical panels of word-painting each so
marvellous depictive of the chosen stanzas. In just a few dozen bars and some
sixteen pages of music, Howells turns in fanfares, solemnity, awesome
invocation, dance, tenderness, compassionate love, requiem for the
departed who “praise not Thee, O Lord” before the music of the opening is
reprised prior to a briefly exultant coda with which the work concludes. Philip
Marshall’s superb penmanship of the piece for choir usage was of such quality
that the publishers merely reproduced his script lithographically on the printed
copy.
With
the active promulgation in sound, and other proselytising of his muse by the
Herbert Howells Society, HH perhaps needs no other apologist today, yet
the neglect of some his finest (and by no means most technically challenging)
works – music readily available in print – seems
surprising.
In
terms of those items from the more famous evening canticles, which would fall
all too easily into Dr Judith Blezzard’s category of music’s untrodden paths
– the Westminster service of 1957 – issued just months after the CMS
setting of the year previous, but almost certainly written several years earlier
– is probably the most surprising. Concise of length, vocally mostly homophonic
and with a thrilling Gloria Patri (the same setting for each of the two
canticles) – it has everything going for it. A fabulous French impressionist
close to Magnificat is followed by an arresting beginning to Gloria
certainly the equal of Coll Reg or Gloucester settings earlier. The
choral entries in the Westminster service follow a brief girding of loins
on the organ, and a favourite Howells direction which has sent generations of
musicians and singers to their dictionary of musical terms – risvegliato
– awaking as though from sleep. Maybe this was a direction inserted as a
result of direct experience of sluggish children to an erstwhile choral director
striving to keep alert his own choristers at Salisbury, where he briefly
assisted the great Sir Walter Alcock, or Cambridge’s St John’s College where
Howells acted for Robin Orr during his war service.
What
Dame Janet Baker did in rehabilitating Howells’s finest song in an EMI recital –
and what a rehabilitation it was – the collegiate choirs of Cambridge and a
number of similarly superb ensembles including choruses of mixed rather than
male voices have continued to do – and to do magnificently – for Howells’ church
music. But, at the outset of a new century, this is, very happily, not the whole
of the story – though it was very much was the whole truth and nothing but the
truth back in 1982. Three Choirs’ Festival and other public revivals have
heightened attention on Howells’ orchestral and chamber output as well as
focussing, more understandably, on some of the neglected choral masterworks. The
current recording catalogues contain two superlative performances of Hymnus
Paradisi and, rather more surprisingly, CDs of the complex Missa
Sabriensis and the glorious Stabat Mater – both these latter works
under the direction of a Russian maestro, no less.
Choral
pieces – liturgical and non liturgical alike – have received wonderful attention
from cathedral choirs and from the Cambridge Singers, the Collegiate Singers,
the Corydon Singers, the Finzi Singers and the Donald Hunt Singers – to name but
a few such groups.
Despite,
or perhaps because of, the fact that so much of his musical output is cast in a
realms mystical, spiritual or even fantastic Howells’s sheer artistic
common-sense, pragmatism and practical knowledge of what “will work” well can
come as something of a surprise to the aspiring student of Howells’s muse. One
of his most instantly recognisable choral miniatures, the central panel of the
triptych of Carol-Anthems entitled A Spotless Rose seems to the
hearer to have been if not composed in a religious trance then certainly the
work of a believer. The origins of the piece cannot in any respect be described
as “other-worldly”. Its genesis at the desk of a bedroom window overlooking a
railway line is recalled by the creator of this glorious enhancement of Advent
and the Nativity the world over. It is of A Spotless Rose that the
composer wrote
This I sat down and wrote after idly watching some
shunting
from the window of a cottage in Gloucester…which overlooked the Midland Railway.
In an
upstairs
room I looked out on iron railings and the main Bristol-Gloucester railway line,
with shunting trucks bumping and banging. I wrote it for and dedicated it to my
mother….
Still
more significant, as a clue to some small part of Howells’s very complex
personality, he concludes of the piece that:
it always moves me when I hear it, just as if it were written by someone
else.
Such
revelations are a very small part of an immense debt that all lovers of Howells
and his music owe to the late Christopher Palmer, and more recently to Paul
Spicer, for it was in their conversations with the composer and his intimates
that such insights came into play which otherwise might for ever have been
lost.
Howells’s
own musical loves encompassed a great range of individuals and artists – first
in Gloucester, later in London, Cambridge and throughout the world. Many of the
personal friendships he sustained with such tenacity brought their own reward to
the fortunate recipient in compositional terms. Others proved merely catalysts
or enablers. Promise, commitment, fulfilment – emotional as well as creative –
were important to Howells. Whether he was, as Lloyd suggests, the last of
the great English Romantic composers remains to be seen. But he was a
great Romantic imbued with a strong dose of sentiment for good measure. A
fabulous memory (which his students, colleagues and friends recall as being not
without its selective elements) would recall anniversaries in a way far more
reliable than most of us charged with just a few familiar family birthdays in
all conscience challenging enough with which to deal.
Not
until a creative artist is taken from us does society, artistically and in
general terms, come to value that artist’s contribution the more fully. In
Howells’ case, unlike that of Elgar, his re-assessment by posterity has been
rapid, urgent and compelling. To take one comparable instance at random, only
now, nearly seventy years after the composer’s death, are violinists beginning
fully to appreciate the riches of Elgar’s early output for that
instrument.
As
church musicians, we have in our turn experienced leadership within the Howells
revival in terms of the enthusiasm and commitment of scholars such as Brompton
Oratory’s Patrick Russill and the Church Music Society’s discerningly
indefatigable Honorary General Editor, Richard Lyne. There is, indeed, much for
which we do well to give thanks. The West Riding Cathedrals Festival Te Deum
is the last of a line of important issues. With that publication – at least,
for the present – the Howells series concludes.
The
adjective romantic defines a period as well as an attitude and, of
course, that vastly abused designation classical even more
so!
It
was Mendelssohn who counselled regarding the subject matter of music as of
greater moment than its outward form, and Liszt who declared that Romanticism to
exact only that
the
form should be adequate to the expression of the sentiment
At
the same time, this sentiment must –
if it is the essence of romance – be able, as Beethoven
said
to strike fire from the souls of men
to
show
the aspiration after the ideal.
Indeed,
it must (as Herbert Westerby in his Complete Organ Recitalist memorably
reminds us) be
a veritable pouring out of
new wine into old bottles, a surging of the emotions over the confines of
form
We
know and love Howells as a romantic through and through – in matters of the
language of words as much as that of music. His quintessential turn of a verbal
phrase or sentence could be as florid as his effortlessly and seemingly entirely
natural melismata. Details of his spoken adjudications at competitive
music festivals linger long in the memory of those fortunate enough to have
experienced them, while his penmanship in words and music is, again, very
particularly characteristic – florid, yet disciplined in
shape.
The decorative
expansion of so many of his musical motifs and themes combine to make a Howells
sonority as instantly recognisable in aural terms as the embellishment of a
column in a Grinling Gibbons carving. Nor is a Gibbons metaphor lost on the
lover of Howells’ music, for more than one authority has suggested that, in many
ways, Howells’ artistic muse comprised a kind of re-incarnation of an
Elizabethan clavincist. Certainly the debt Howells owed to his English
inheritance was amply repaid.
His
use of arch forms – in dynamic terracing particularly – is nowhere more
impressive than in his Gloucester service to be heard later this
afternoon. The febrile interweaving of the two treble parts during the course of
the sonic balm that abounds in the second page of the score is very
special. A sense of bravura
and rhetoric springs out from every page of Howells’s music. Before him,
only S S Wesley had the nerve to begin a canticle Gloria in a distant
key. Howells does so particularly spectacularly in both the Gloucester
service and the earlier setting in G.
Like
Holst, Ireland, Percy Fletcher and Vaughan Williams, Howells found himself drawn
to the composition of music for brass band. So stirring is the first movement of
his evocative Pageantry that a version for orchestra and organ, entitled
King’s Herald was included in the 1937 Coronation. This is
ceremonial music par-excellence and conjures in the mind very much the image
of swords and uniforms in just the same way that the openings of Coll: Reg:
and Gloucester canticles speak of candlelight and starched
surplices.
It
is always interesting to see Howells’s music from a non-British perspective.
Continentals often assume works of his to be the work of a Frenchman – the
output of what that country touchingly refers to as a petit maître.
Certainly there is at times in Howells an affinity with the music of Maurice
Duruflé – especially with regard to both men’s instinctive handling of rhythmic
inflexion as an aid to melodic progress.
As
a broadcaster and writer on matters musical, Howells was a natural heir to great
communicators of a previous generation – notably Shropshire born Sir Walford
Davies – Organist of The Temple Church and the RCM professor in charge of the
choir-training class during Howells’ student days. It is, perhaps, very
considerably to Sir Walford that we may owe the Howells Requiem and, in
consequence, something of the visionary Hymnus Paradisi also. Walford
Davies’s Short Requiem of 1917 almost certainly, whether consciously or
unconsciously, provided the textual prototype for Howells’ two deeply felt
choral elegies that are the Requiem and Hymnus.
The
Requiem of 1932, intended originally for Boris Ord and the Choir of King’s
College Cambridge but apparently never sent to Ord and his singers, was not made
readily available until publication almost half a century later. Many
authorities have suggested that the Requiem had been composed by Howells
as an outpouring of grief following upon the grievous loss of his own greatly
beloved son, Michael. It now appears that the work actually pre-dates Michael’s
death by two years and could well be a late tribute to the dead of World War
One, known and unknown. Still more arresting could be the thought that perhaps
Howells’ reluctance to release the Requiem earlier than he did arose from
the terrible thought that in composing it at all, he had in some way tempted
fate. Who knows? It has to be almost certain that Michael’s death again played a
part as a driving force behind the expansive Stabat Mater of his later
years. Howells related emotionally and extraordinarily to the deeply felt
anguish of the Mother of God for her dying Son.
Maybe
Howells just wrote the Requiem because he felt compelled to do so. His
much-quoted comment in a radio interview springs to mind:
I
love music as a man can love a woman….
I
have composed out of sheer loving of trying to make
nice
sounds. I have written really, to put it simply, the
music
I would like to write and for no other reason.
At
least this touching sincerity is not imbued with the arrogance shown by other
composers when making similar remarks. Not entirely lacking in self-confidence,
Saint-Saëns is alleged to have declared that he composed music as an apple tree
produces apples.
Despite
his large-scale choral and orchestral canvases, Howells’ legacy is not to be
seen merely in the substantial things he left to us. Consummate craftsman and
visionary artist at one and the same time, Howells – like his celebrated RCM
tutors Stanford and Wood before him – scorned not the efforts of singers and
players of modest resources, as something of the present overview will,
hopefully, have shown. At the same time, it is arguable that at least part
of the neglect that has affected the artistic fortunes of two out of three
of his choral masterworks attaches to the not inconsiderable complexity and
technical difficulty facing any chorus wishing with success to tackle them. Hymnus Paradisi is not, of
course, easy. But its unique combination of personal testament and tapestry-like
macaronic verbal texts provides an added stimulus to the vocal challenges
inherent in the vast majority of Howells’ scores.
The
traditions of the world of painting frequently involve what gallery staff would
refer to as retrospectives. To some extent, Howells enjoys a daily
retrospective in choral foundations all over the English-speaking world and
beyond it. But to increasing
numbers of folk beyond the boundaries of sacred choral repertoire, Howells has
begun, at last, to take his rightful place in the affections of music lovers of
a great diversity of enthusiasms and affinities. Importantly, too his name is
more and more on the lips and in the planning lists of orchestra managers,
chamber ensemble players, concert promoters and recording companies as well as
organists and those in quires and places where they
sing.