The Church Music Society
Registered Charity No. 290309
Church Music Society Newsletter – September 2009
Sweelinck – an ecumenical composer - Patrick Russill
It’s fair to say that most of us church musicians regard Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), the great organist of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, primarily as a keyboard composer, revering him for such works as the meltingly beautiful variations on Mein junges Leben hat ein End and Unter den Linden grüne and the majestic Fantasia cromatica. In fact, vocal music is by far the greater part of his surviving output – over 250 works as opposed to some 70 keyboard pieces. These not only place him amongst the most significant vocal composers of the late Renaissance period but leave him as the final representative of that great Netherlandish polyphonic school which stretches back through Lassus, Josquin and Ockeghem to Dufay.
Sweelinck’s vocal output is notable for its diversity of genre. First in importance is his four-volume setting of the complete Genevan psalter (1604-21) in French – a monument of Calvinist devotional music and almost certainly intended for domestic performance. He also published charming French chansons (1594, 1612) and Italian madrigals (1612). But given his apparently staunch Calvinist background, it is intriguing that he should publish a set of Latin Cantiones sacrae in 1619, which contains not just settings of Scriptural texts (which would be unexceptionable to Calvinist authorities) but settings of specifically Catholic liturgical texts too.
The Church Music Society has already published the Ascensiontide motet Viri Galilaei, which paints the Gospel story with brilliantly vivid concision and the resplendent Christmastide Gaude et laetare, whose text is found only in a pre-Reformation (thus Catholic) Amsterdam Gradual. To these we are now adding a setting of the Beatitudes, Beati pauperes, and a Communion motet O sacrum convivium (both SSATB). All Sweelinck’s Latin cantiones are for five voices (dividing either the sopranos or tenors). Although he also supplies a basso continuo part (actually a basso seguente) it is not essential to the classic polyphonic construction of these motets and can be omitted, though its inclusion could certainly add additional colour and sonority.
Beati pauperes (laid out in two sections of 42 and 44 bars) is a subtly characterised work describing the virtues of the righteous with glowing textures and serene joy. We find these same qualities in Byrd’s setting of a portion of the same text, Beati mundo corde, the last of his Propers for All Saints (also published by CMS, edited by Sally Dunkley). Both composers treat the passage ‘Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam’ (‘Blessed are those that suffer persecution for righteousness sake’) with particular intensity, Byrd utilising false relations, Sweelinck using a massively extended series of suspensions. Both composers, though of different confessions, seem to comment on the recent horrors of the Reformation’s martyrdoms with a similar humanity and compassion, apparently transcending religious differences. Both motets are suitable not just for the feast of All Saints, but for any commemoration of the faithful departed.
Many settings of the great Corpus Christi antiphon, O sacrum convivium, are slow and mystical (think Messiaen or Victoria). Sweelinck, though starting in dignified reverence, develops into a stately triple-time dance at ‘et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur’ (‘and a promise of future glory is given to us’) and concludes with bright scalic ‘alleluias’: like Byrd’s Gradualia (1604, 1607), Sweelinck’s Cantiones sacrae are notable for their wonderfully varied and inventive ‘Alleluias’. With its essentially joyful and sectional approach to this much-set text, Sweelinck’s interpretation (70 bars) is a highly attractive and distinctive addition to the repertoire for any choir already used to singing 5-part polyphony.
These motets do raise intriguing questions as to Sweelinck’s sympathy towards Catholicism. We should not forget that he was 16 years old at the time of the Reformation of Amsterdam in 1578 and perhaps retained some sympathy for the old religion of his youth. His mother certainly seems to have retained some Catholic loyalties, judging by the report that the ‘Salve Regina’ was sung at her funeral. He clearly respected the beliefs of his Catholic friend and pupil Cornelis Plemp, to whom he dedicated the Cantiones sacrae. And it seems extraordinarily open-handed of Sweelinck (to say no more) to include motets dealing with the two doctrinal subjects that would have aroused the greatest Protestant ire, the Eucharist (O sacrum convivium) and the Virgin Mary (an extended setting of the Regina caeli). For Sweelinck the post-Reformation religious fault-lines were evidently as complex and nuanced as they were for Tallis and Byrd. Sweelinck published his Cantiones sacrae in Antwerp: it is fascinating that other major Latin motet collections published in the same city and in the same decade include those by the expatriate English Catholics Richard Dering (1617, 1618) and Peter Philips (1612, 1613), both of them also well-represented in the CMS catalogue by attractive and accessible motets, as suitable for traditional liturgy as for the concert – as are Sweelinck’s.
Samuel Sebastian Wesley - Peter Horton
Purcell, Handel, Haydn, Spohr, Mendelssohn: 2009 has seen a plethora of musical anniversaries, but 2010 will bring its own share, among them those composers born two hundred years ago, Fréderic Chopin, Robert Schumann and Samuel Sebastian Wesley. While two are known and loved the world over, the third was a composer and organist who spent most of his life in the English provinces. Does he justify a place alongside such illustrious counterparts? At first sight, perhaps not, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that in at least two respects – his musical style and his overall approach to music – he was indeed a paid-up member of the romantic movement. And the story of how this came about is a fascinating one.
Son of the organist and composer Samuel Wesley, Samuel Sebastian was born in London and began his musical career as a chorister at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. On leaving the choir in March 1826, he almost immediately obtained his first organist’s post, at St James’s Chapel, Hampstead Road, and began to put together what would today be called a ‘portfolio career’, combining work as an organist, pianist, teacher and composer. But more important than what he did was where he did it – London, one of the three great centres of European music at that time. Notwithstanding the lack of native composers of the front rank, the city was a strong magnet for foreign musicians, many of whom settled here or returned repeatedly, and was keen to programme the latest works from the continent. A young musician could thus become familiar with the latest fashions in music written for the home, concert hall or stage, and it was an opportunity that Wesley grasped wholeheartedly. Working as rehearsal pianist at the English Opera House and as organist to the Lent Oratorio Concerts, he was introduced to the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Ries, Spohr, Weber and others, and instinctively incorporated elements into his own compositions. But what is generally forgotten today is that at the beginning of his career he set out to establish himself as a composer for the concert hall and theatre, not the church, with the work that preceded his move to Hereford as cathedral organist in September 1832 being a melodrama, The Dilosk Gatherer! With this move the future direction of his career was sealed. Never again would he hold a post in the capital and the remainder of his life would be spent as a provincial organist, moving restlessly around the country: from Hereford to Exeter, thence to Leeds, Winchester and finally Gloucester, and forced by his circumstances to become the a composer of church par excellence. And it was in the surprising surroundings of organ lofts in Herefordshire, Devon and Yorkshire that the seeds of romanticism sown in London developed.
The evidence is to be found in Wesley’s compositions and writings – works such as the anthems ‘The Wilderness’, ‘Blessed be the God and Father’, ‘Let us lift up our heart’, ‘To my request and earnest cry’, ‘Wash me thoroughly’ and ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace’, or the Andante in F and Larghetto in F sharp minor for organ. Wesley’s romantic idiom, use of harmonic colour and innate sense of drama would, a contemporary commented, appeal to the ‘modern Germans’ who ‘would perceive that their present composers must bestir themselves to compete successfully with the rising talent in England’. While the decorative chromaticism of his earlier compositions frequently reveals a debt to the music of Spohr, his later works are characterised by an increasingly dissonant and contrapuntal idiom whose roots can be found in the music of Bach. Indeed, his fondness for such Bach-inspired diatonic dissonance provides an unexpected link with the music of his contemporaries Chopin and Schumann. But it was with his unique vision of the Anglican choral service as an art-form uniting the liturgy, music, architecture and ceremonial, that his wider links with romantic ideals become apparent. The reality, as he knew only too well, was very different. Inefficient and poorly paid choirs, a shortage of first class music, a lack of encouragement from his clerical superiors and his own ‘difficult’ personality, all conspired to make his vision difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and led to the publication of his famous pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music and the Musical System of Church (1849). But he had set the ball rolling and later generations of cathedral musicians were able to reap the fruit of his labours.
Looking back on Wesley’s life and career one can indeed see a frustrated visionary, but one can also see a composer whose full achievement is all too often still not fully recognised. Their inordinate length has contributed to the neglect of the three great double choir anthems of the late 1830s, ‘O Lord, thou art my God’, ‘Let us lift up our heart’ and ‘To my request and earnest cry’, and his morning service in E, while his early works for the concert hall – overtures, vocal and choral works – are still almost unknown.[1] The bicentenary of his birth will, I hope, provide an opportunity to look again at a major – and fascinating – figure in English music.
[1] All Wesley’s anthems will shortly be available in the Musica Britannica series (offprints obtainable from Stainer & Bell), while the Te Deum and Jubilate from his Service will be re-published by the CMS. Peter Horton is also preparing editions of his early works for the concert hall.
