Here Is the Little Door, Again

So yesterday I was on the Son Rise Morning Show talking with Matt Swaim about the Chestertons and Christmas. In my preview to the interview I mentioned that one of Frances Chesterton's poems, "Here is the Little Door" had been set to music by Herbert Howells.

Now he's not the only one. BBC Music commissions a new carol every year. This year, composer Owain Park chose to set Frances Chesterton's poem:

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift! 
We need not wander more but enter with our gift; 
Our gift of finest gold, 
Gold that was never bought nor sold; 
Myrrh to be strewn about his bed; 
Incense in clouds about his head; 
All for the child that stirs not in his sleep, 
But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep. 

Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift; 
See how his eyes awake, lift up your hand, O lift! 
For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword 
(Defend with it thy little Lord!) 
For incense, smoke of battle red, 
Myrrh for the honoured happy dead; 
Gifts for his children, terrible and sweet, 
Touched by such tiny hands, and Oh such tiny feet.

Park comments:

One of my favourite carols [as a chorister at St Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol] was Howells’s 1918 setting of Frances Chesterton’s poem Here is the little door. Howells’s music allows the words to resonate with both choir and congregation – at St Mary’s there was always an extra few seconds of quiet after we’d finished singing it. The poem consists of two stanzas: the first is reflective and subdued while the second is more colourful and lively.

Most lines seem to end strongly after a more questioning start, and so I’ve tried to express this using tension and release in the harmony. A lot of my choral music has been in many parts and is quite difficult to sing, so I wanted to sustain a simple idea over two verses without any divided parts. My hope is that I have captured something of the wonder I felt as a young singer.

The words are key to my setting of Here is the little door. I would encourage singers to be as expressive as possible with the text, even when everyone moves together. I’ve kept one set of words throughout to keep the score as uncluttered as possible, which sometimes means that the words aren’t vertically aligned with your part. Always move with your note, and with confidence. It would be a good idea for everyone to read through the poem together, to develop a collective interpretation.

The score is available here. A preview the Christmas 2019 issue is here.

As David Faberberg said in his 2013 book's title: Chesterton is everywhere!! Both of them!

By the way: David Faberberg may not be everywhere, but he is scheduled to be here in Wichita for the 10th annual Eighth Day Institute Symposium!

William Harris' "The Hound of Heaven"

The January 2018 issue of the BBC Music Magazine features an article by Paul Spicer, who leads The English Choral Experience (ECE) and its annual week at Dore Abbey. He writes about English choral works which are not often performed and which he believes have not received their due. One of them he mentions is William Harris' setting of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" for baritone solo, chorus and orchestra. Harris is best known for "Faire is the Heaven" and "Bring Us, O Lord God". The website for the English Choral Experience promises a link to the article, but I receive a 404 error when I try to access it--perhaps you'll have better luck.

Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" is a thrilling spiritual poem depicting the soul pursued by God; Thompson published it in 1893; he died in 1907. Harris wrote his work in 1917-1918 and it has not been performed since 1948!

A doctoral student at the University of Iowa wrote his doctoral essay on Harris' choral piece, "The Danger of Disappearing Things": William Henry Harris' "The Hound of Heaven":

The aim of this essay is to provide the context and background necessary for the reader to explore and consider possible answers as to why William Henry Harris’ largest work, The Hound of Heaven, is not nearly as famous as other similarly comparable pieces. Harris is largely remembered for his Anglican church music, particularly his two most popular anthems, Faire is the Heaven and Bring Us, O Lord God. However, in the late 1910s, he composed a large-scale choral-orchestral concert work, adapting Francis Thompson’s epic religious allegory, The Hound of Heaven.

Furthermore, Harris received a significant award designed to help finance the publication of The Hound of Heaven. Beginning in 1917, The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invited British composers to submit their manuscripts of unpublished large-scale works to a contest called the Carnegie Publication Scheme. The intent of the award was to make newly composed British works available to the public and to enhance the nation’s English music heritage. Harris was among six composers chosen to receive the Carnegie Award in 1919 for his entry The Hound of Heaven.

This essay will briefly explore and detail the life of Harris; the genesis, construction, and performance history of The Hound of Heaven; and the creation of the Trust’s Publication Scheme. Most importantly, this essay will conclude with an exploration into possible reasons why The Hound of Heaven did not enjoy a lasting legacy.

More about William Harris from Naxos, including an album of his Anthems.

Of course, I must comment on Dore Abbey, the former Cistercian house where Paul Spicer holds his week long choral experience. The ECE website notes:

Dore Abbey is located in west Herefordshire in the beautiful Golden Valley just a short distance from the Welsh border. Dating from 1147 it is a former Cistercian abbey that would once have rivalled many cathedrals for size. Sadly, the nave was lost to the Dissolution of the Monastries (sic) but the remainder was restored and has been used as a parish church since the 16th century.

Settled next to the River Dore and in the shadow of the Black Mountains and Offa's Dyke, Dore Abbey is a unique and beautiful place in which to experience beautiful music-making.

Dore Abbey was suppressed in 1537; it was smaller house with a value of 101 pounds. More about Dore Abbey here.

A Suppressed Holy Week From the Former Soviet Union

The BBC Music Magazine has chosen The Clarion Choir's recording of Maximilian Steinburg's Passion Week from Naxos as its Choral Recording of the Month for December 2016 and provides an excerpt here. Providing some background, conductor Steven Fox writes:

My dear colleague Barbara Mouk had been telling me about Passion Week since I first met her in 2004. Her father, the Russian- American conductor Igor Buketoff, had given her the score shortly before he passed away. The composer of the piece, Maximilian Steinberg, was the prized student of Rimsky-Korsakov, and eventually became not only his son-in-law, but also his successor on the composition faculty of the St Petersburg Conservatory.

Steinberg composed Passion Week in secret over a three year period, 1920-23, when the Bolsheviks had just banned sacred music, so it was never performed. Barbara explained to me that she believed Shostakovich, who was Steinberg’s student, had brought the piece over to the US on one of his trips here, hoping there might be a choir here that could finally perform the piece.

But Maestro Buketoff had trouble finding an American choir that was adept at singing in Church Slavonic. So he eventually handed the mission off to Barbara, and Barbara took it to me. But I must admit that I also was (shamefully!) slow to take on the project. During my first years working with Clarion, we were almost exclusively focused on performing Baroque and Classical music. But in more recent years, we expanded into later periods, particularly with The Clarion Choir. As our repertoire started to take this new direction, Barbara re-approached me about Passion Week and said - 'you have no reason not to give this piece a serious look now!' And I am so thankful to her that she did. The piece is extraordinary, and, in my mind, deserving of a special place in the Russian choral repertoire.

The style of the work combines the rich vocal scoring and luscious Romantic palette one associates with Rachmaninov's choral works, but it also adds more modern elements of style: there are times when the rich vocal texture reverts hauntingly to a single voice and then into stark silence. The silences between phrases are a critical part of the piece, as we learned in performing and recording it. They add a sense of contemplativeness that I believe comes directly out of the Holy Week plainchants upon which the work is based.

There is another recording of this work available too:

Cappella Romana has even issued a deluxe vinyl recording!

Robert and Clara and Friedrich

A major gap in my cultural education is German Romanticism. The BBC Music Magazine CD this month is helping me fill that gap with this recording of songs by Robert and Clara Schumann, setting poems of Friedrich Ruckert. I did recognize one of the lieder, however, because I've listened often to Mahler's Ruckert Lieder: "Liebst du um Schönheit".

If I had studied German, that might help too!

Classical Net describes Robert Schumann:

Robert Schumann (June 8, 1810 - July 29, 1856) was the arch-Romantic composer, thoroughly committed intellectually and emotionally to the idea of music being composed to register the feelings, thoughts and impressions garnered by a sensitive spirit on its journey through life. . . .

He married Clara Wieck, herself a talented pianist, but two careers in one family caused difficulties:

Throughout this period Schumann had composed almost exclusively for the piano. Now there was a tremendous outburst of lieder and the following year, much to the approval of the ambitious Clara, Schumann buckled down to compose his first symphony. Their close working relationship, and the arrival of their first child in 1841 (they produced seven in all), meant that Clara's career suffered. Although she continued her concert tours (they needed the money), she willingly suspended her other musical activities. The marriage at this time was blissfully happy. In the spring of 1841 Schumann's Spring Symphony was premiered. By the following year Clara was on tour again: as women did not travel alone at that time, Robert had to accompany her. Deeply insecure away from domestic routine, his health deteriorated and he began to resent his wife's addiction to the pleasures of concert-giving.

His professional career was still in the ascendant, and in 1843, when Mendelssohn provided the impetus for the founding of the Leipzig Conservatory, he also insisted that Schumann be given a teaching role there. Schumann, however, proved to be a diffident teacher; unable to communicate his ideas, he would often sit through an entire lesson without saying a word to his students. He resigned his post in 1844. By then his bouts of depression (he called them "melancholy") were more severe and more prolonged.

Nevertheless, he supported and encouraged his wife's efforts as a composer. They had eight children! The lieder on this disc are all about love and nature, beauty and youth, passion and and song.

Schumann died in an asylum for the insane. 

The Queen's Six at Ascot Priory

I'm looking forward to receiving the Christmas issue of the BBC Music Magazine because it features the annual Christmas music CD. This year's is by The Queen's Six:

Countertenor: Daniel Brittain, Timothy Carleston;
Tenor: Nicholas Madden, Dominic Bland; 

Baritone/Bass: Andrew Thompson, Simon Whiteley

THE QUEEN'S SIX were established in 2008, the 450th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, from whom they take their name.Elizabeth I was a great patroness of the arts, and often engaged the services of musicians to write and perform for her at court. The notable ‘six’ from this era were Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Thomas Tomkins, Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Weelkes.

Based at Windsor Castle, all the members of the 21st century 'Queen's Six' are also Lay Clerks of St George's Chapel, whose homes lie within the Castle walls. The Chapel Choir, which consists of boy trebles and twelve professional adult male singers, performs some eight services a week, as well as at private and state occasions, often before the Royal Family.

Some of the musical selections were recorded in St. George's Chapel at Windsor, others at Ascot Priory. 

Ascot Priory was the mother house of a Tractarian, Anglo-Catholic Church of England religious order for women with connections to Florence Nightingale and nursing, according to the priory's website:

For a century and a half, Ascot Priory was the mother house of the Society of the Most Holy Trinity, the first of the Religious Orders re-founded in the Church of England after the Reformation. It began as The Sisterhood of the Holy Cross in Park Village, North London, in 1845 – within just twelve years of the beginning of the Oxford Movement and the start of the revival of catholic life in the Church of England.

In 1856 the Sisterhood of the Holy Cross amalgamated with Priscilla Lydia Sellon’s Devonport Society (founded in 1848), under the title of The Congregation of Religious of the Society of the Most Holy Trinity.

The property at Ascot was purchased with the aid of gifts from Mother Lydia’s father and the Revd Dr E. B. Pusey, and the present buildings – in 40 acres of beautiful woodland and gardens – were begun in 1860, with the aim of supporting the London hospitals by providing convalescent care in healthy surroundings.

More about the organizing of religious orders for women in the Church of England here. The order ceased to exist when the last nun died in 2004; then the priory became a retreat center.

Of course I noticed the name of Blessed John Henry Newman's great friend, the Reverend Doctor E.B. Pusey. The website of Pusey House, St. Giles at the University of Oxford offers this summary of Pusey and his connection to Ascot Priory, where he died:

PUSEY is chiefly remembered as the eponymous representative of the earlier phase of a movement which carried with it no small part of the religious life of England in the latter half of the 19th century. His own chief characteristic was an almost unbounded capacity for taking pains. His chief influence was that of a preacher and a spiritual adviser. As a preacher he lacked all the graces of oratory, but compelled attention by his searching and practical earnestness. His correspondence as a spiritual adviser was enormous; his deserved reputation for piety and for solidity of character made him the chosen confessor to whom large numbers of men and women unburdened their doubts and their sins.

In private life Pusey's habits were simple almost to austerity. Though fierce with his opponents, he was gentle to those who knew him, and his munificent charities gave him a warm place in the hearts of many to whom he was personally unknown. He financed the building of St Saviour's Church, Leeds, and was instrumental in the foundation of Ascot Priory. In his domestic life he had some severe trials; his wife died, after eleven years of married life, in 1839; only one of his daughters survived into adulthood, and his only son, who was a scholar like-minded with himself, who had shared many of his literary labours, and who had edited an excellent edition of St Cyril's commentary on the minor prophets, died in 1880, after many years of suffering. From that time Pusey was seen by only a few people. His strength gradually declined, and he left Oxford to be cared for by the community of nuns he had founded at Ascot, where he died on the 16th September 1882. He was buried at Christ Church in the cathedral of which he had been for fifty-four years a canon, his body being placed in the vault which already held the bodies of his wife and daughters. In his memory his friends purchased his library, and bought for it a house in Oxford, which they endowed with sufficient funds to maintain three librarians, who were charged with the duty of perpetuating the memory of the principles which he taught, the maintenance of the Catholic Faith, and the preaching of the Gospel. Their work continues today.

Catherine of Aragon's Aria

The June issue of the BBC Music magazine features Verdi's Don Carlos/Don Carlo, suggesting the best recordings of the French and Italian versions. Then it mentions other operas to explore after Don Carlos, including Saint-Saens' Henry VIII, based on plays by Calderon de la Barca and William Shakespeare. In Catherine of Aragon's final aria she remembers Spain, to which she will never return but will never forget. There are several performances available on youtube, and I've linked the one by Veronique Gens.

Ô cruel souvenir!
Là-bas, dans ma patrie
Le nom du roi mon père était ainsi fêté!
Tout me parle de toi dans ma captivité,
Ô berceau de mes jours, mon Espagne chérie!
Je ne te reverrai jamais,
Ô douce terre où je suis née!
Au destin qui m’a condamnée
Sans révolte je me soumets.
Mais du moins garde à ma mémoire
Un souvenir plein de pitié,
Ô pays d’amour et de gloire
Que je n’ai jamais oublié!
La mort m’eût été moins amère
Si, comme autrefois, le sommeil,
Je l’avais trouvée, ô ma mère,
Sur ton sein fécond et vermeil.
Comme un soldat vaincu je tombe
Sur une terre de douleurs…
Ceux-là sont heureux dont la tombe
De leur berceau garde des fleurs.

Here is another performance from the blog which provided the lyrics above. UPDATE: Thinking about this more, the subject of never seeing her homeland seems a strange selection for Catherine of Aragon--when she left Spain to marry Arthur, the Prince of Wales, she probably knew she would never return home; England was her new home. Never seeing her husband and her daughter again would be more likely subjects, I think.

Baroque Pearls

Because the December 2014 issue of the BBC Music Magazine included a CD by Rachel Podger playing CPE Bach chamber works and a review of her latest CD, Perla Barocca, I ordered the latter for my husband as a Christmas gift. (The BBC Music Magazine has both a December AND a Christmas issue each year.)

Perla Barocca presents works by Fontana, Frescobaldi, Uccellini, Castello, Marini, Pandolfi Mealli,Leonarda, Gabrieli, Cima, and Bertali. We listened to this CD often during our Christmas/New Year break. The music is often festive and vibrant, with Rachel Podger's violin, Marcin Swiatkiewicz's harpsichord and organ, and Daniele Cammiti's Theorbo collaborating--the chaconne (chiaconne) by Bertali at the end of the CD is particularly rhythmic and exciting.

The Gramaphone reviewer liked the CD too:

It would be hard to imagine a more enticing introduction to the delights of 17th-century Italian violin music. The composers represented in this programme were all fascinated by the violin’s technical possibilities but, more than that, were absorbed by the task of creating viable forms for instrumental music. Starting from vocal models, the Cima is like a madrigal in the way each sentence presents a new variant, whereas the later sonatas by Fontana, Castello, Marini and Uccellini take their cue from the highly expressive vocal monody. By the time we reach Isabella Leonarda’s captivating sonata, the succession of ideas has coalesced into a sequence of short, distinct movements.

The term "baroque pearl" refers to a pearl that is not uniformly round. During the Renaissance era, they were highly prized for their natural beauty and uniqueness, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

A Requiem for Today?

When Colin Davis died earlier this year, I posted several movements from Mozart's Requiem on facebook, because I have enjoyed listening to his recording of Mozart's Requiem for years. Last month's BBC Music Magazine featured a free disc of Brahms' A German Requiem, which is not based upon the Catholic Mass at all, but upon texts Brahms selected from Luther's Bible. The booklet with the CD notes that Brahms wrote the Requiem after his mother's death, but that he did not believe in an afterlife at all. The Catholic Requiem Mass is offered for the repose of the soul of the deceased, but Brahms wrote for the consolation of the living, the surviving, mourning, relatives and friends of the deceased--there's no Judgment, and no resurrection of the dead, either; no Heaven or Hell.

Listening to Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem for the first time, I did not really hear the words, but the music is beautiful, so often serene. This site notes that the work did not succeed very well when performed in Catholic countries, but was accepted in England and the USA immediately:

Following the paradigm of reception that we have set up for Germany -- the fact that Catholic towns were far more resistant to the Requiem than their Protestant counterparts -- it comes as no surprise to learn that the Requiem was considerably better received in England and the United States than in Catholic countries such as France and Italy. Indeed, we have little documentation of any reception whatsoever in these countries; in England, on the other hand, reviews, commentary, and performances were abundant from 1871 onwards. There is some statistical disagreement about the number of performances of the Requiem in Europe during Brahms' lifetime: while Musgrave cites the figure of 79 performances outside Germany between 1869 and 1876, Kalbeck reports 85 performances between 1867 and 1876 [22]; in any event, the work was most certainly performed in most major European cities, and subject to repeats on demand on several occasions. In Britain, which had by far the strongest and most positive reception (as was typical for choral and religious music, Musgrave notes), the Requiem premiered in a private performance in London in July 1871, conducted by Julius Stockhausen himself, on one of his frequent visits to Sir Henry Thompson. The public premiere, also in London, was in April of 1873, and was the subject of great critical attention -- most of it quite positive. The work was immediately recognized as difficult, but esteemed at the same time as a work of a great composer, already seen as the successor in the German tradition of Bach and Beethoven. The only major criticism came from those who felt, like Hanslick's original commentary, that the concert hall was the wrong place for such a religious funeral service; others also echoed their Continental counterparts and claimed, alternately, that the work was either too "contemplative" or that it was "unemotional." The second public performance in Britain, in 1876, was similarly received: critics remarked in glowing terms of the great masterpiece, and the only major flaw, they felt, was that English singers were not well-trained to sing the contrapuntal German passages. Not surprisingly, when the London Bach Choir began performing the Requiem on a semi-regular basis, the reviewers raved: vocalists trained for Bach, they agreed, were by far the best-equipped to handle Brahms' difficult demands.

Because it does not pray for the dead or cover those issues of judgment and eternity, Brahms' work is very suited to a more secular age--note this story about the MIT community gathering to perform it after the Boston Marathon bombings:

Unlike other requiems, Brahms wrote his as a comfort for the living. That’s another reason why Buckley wanted to perform it. She said traditional requiems are based on the Latin Mass for the dead.

“One of those texts is about the day of judgment, the day of wrath. So they’re beautiful pieces of music — I mean who doesn’t love the Mozart Requiem? But I think that the Brahms is extra special,” Buckley said. “The connection to his mother is important, and the fact that he chose the text from Luther’s translation of the bible. He believed no text is in judgment of the dead.”

So plans for this massive singing event were set midweek.

Reading the texts Brahms selected does emphasize the comfort, peace and assurance Ein Deutsches Requiem offers--but I did see that he does mention the Resurrection of the Dead:

Behold, I show you a mystery:
We shall not all sleep,
but we all shall be changed
and suddenly, in a moment,
at the sound of the last trombone.
For the trombone shall sound,
and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.
Then shall be fulfilled
The word that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O Death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Fascinating. I'll have to listen to it again.