Music and History: 1554-1555

From Gallicantus and Gabriel Crouch comes another historically themed CD of music at the Court during Queen Mary I's phantom pregnancy of 1554-1555:

Long-awaited news of a Tudor royal birth winged its way to London on 30 April 1555. A male heir had been born: a pledge of dynastic fertility after decades of royal stillbirths, miscarriages and marital misadventures. This was surely a sign of God’s pleasure with Mary I (1516-1558) and a vindication of her mission to restore Catholic religion, reverse the doctrinal experiments of the previous two decades, and return England to its historic place in Europe. The bells of London accordingly rang out while Te Deum laudamus, the traditional hymn of thanksgiving, was sung by the city’s choirs.

The festivities came to an abrupt end on 1 May. Yesterday’s news had been a mere rumour: there was to be no royal birth, not yet at least. ‘It turned out otherwise to the pleasure of God’, wrote the merchant-tailor Henry Machyn, assuring himself that the birth would happen ‘whenever it pleases God’. At thirty-nine years old Queen Mary was superannuated by sixteenth-century obstetric standards, but her pregnancy was generally deemed credible and she had not yet come to term by 1 May. The summer months drew on, but still no news. Long after the original due date, Mary eventually gave up hope, withdrawing from Hampton Court to Oatlands Palace in the first days of August.

There would be no apotheosis in 1555, but it had been tantalizingly imminent. This disc explores the musical traces of an extraordinary year of hopes raised and dashed. The music performed here resonates with the circumstances of the mid-1550s, even if some of the items were composed outside Mary’s own reign; some pieces stemmed from the royal ceremonies in which Mary participated as queen; and some of the music sung here can be directly tied to the specific events of 1554-5, including a newly-reconstructed Litany which was performed during Mary’s assumed pregnancy. The viewpoint shifts from the streets of London and its suburbs, through the ceremonial grandeur of the royal palaces and their chapels, to the intimacy of the queen’s birthing chamber.

You may listen to samples here and read the entire booklet here. Several of the compositions are by John Sheppard, and Hyperion offers this biography:

John Sheppard (c1515–1558) is thought to have been a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in or around 1530, although information supporting this theory has proved difficult to come by. By Michaelmas 1543 he is known to have been Informator Choristarum (director of music) at Magdalen College Oxford, where he is reputed to have blotted his copybook through various misdeeds. On further investigation, this mistaken allegation has arisen from a misreading of the college’s records: it was Richard Sheppar (and not Sheppard) who was the culprit. Sheppard later appears in the records of the Chapel Royal (from 1547).

Sadly, much of Sheppard’s music has been lost. His compositions survive in partbooks at Christ Church Oxford, and testify to the elaborate style of church music from the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558). . . . 

He is best known today for his Media Vita ("In the midst of life"), an appropriate antiphon for Lent.

Absalom and Prince Henry; David and King James

This new recording by The Sixteen and Harry Christophers includes four versions of "When David Heard that Absalom was Slain" by Thomas Weelkes, Robert Ramsey, Michael East, and Thomas Tomkins. The lyrics:

When David heard that Absalom was slain, 
he went up to his chamber over the gate and wept; 
and thus he said: 

O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom, 
would God I had died for thee! 
O Absalom, Absalom, my son, O my son.

As the liner notes explain:

The verse in slightly modified form proved irresistible to a generation of English composers, yielding over a dozen settings of "When David heard that Absalom was slain". Scholars have conjectured that such an extraordinary proliferation of pieces was triggered by the death in 1612 of Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales and heir to his father’s kingdoms. While little direct evidence supports their theory, we know that contemporary authors often described James I as David and that a few, one of the king’s counsellors among them, associated his precocious eldest son with Absalom. Prince Henry was certainly critical of his austere father’s reign and, for a time before his premature death, displayed impressive leadership skills. The many poems and mourning songs written in Henry’s memory, including works by Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne and Thomas Campion, contain more favourable biblical references to the prince, comparing him, for example, to Abner, the mighty cousin of Saul and eventual ally of David. And yet it is possible that 2 Samuel 18:33, with its unequivocal expression of grief, offered composers a strong rhetorical device to carry their reflections on Henry’s death.

The choral group Gallicantus released a CD of  many other compositions written upon Prince Henry's death:

In 1612, Prince Henry Frederick, son of James I and heir to the thrones of England and Scotland, died from a suspected bout of typhoid fever. His untimely death inspired a massive outpouring of artistic tributes in both verse and music, reflecting the mood of a nation mourning the loss of this popular future king at just 18 years of age. 

Prince Henry was James I's heir, but there was a rivalry between father and son. One reason for Prince Henry's popularity was that he was absolutely Protestant--he would not consider marriage to a Catholic princess; his court at St. James was more chivalrous, highly cultured, and the prince insisted on clean language and attendance at chapel services. The English people had high hopes of King Henry IX as he would reign upon his father's death, but Henry Frederick, the Prince of Wales died of typhoid fever on November 6, 1612. His younger brother Charles, took his place in the line of succession, but his uncertain health led to concerns that the Stuart Dynasty was in danger:

The unexpected death at the age of eighteen of the heir to the thrones of England and Scotland was a major blow to the Stuart dynasty, just as the equally sudden death of the fifteen year old Arthur, Prince of Wales in April 1502 had been to the first of the Tudors, Henry VII. James’s dynastic hopes now rested on the shoulders of a single surviving son, Charles, Duke of York, just as Henry VII’s focus had necessarily shifted to Arthur’s only brother. However, whereas the future Henry VIII had been a robust young man, Charles was a physically poor specimen: his legs and ankles were so weak that as an infant he preferred to crawl, and as a child he had been required to wear specially made reinforced iron boots. His condition was almost certainly hereditary, since his father had not learned to walk until he was five. Many contemporaries clearly expected that Charles, who was not quite eleven when his brother died, would not survive to reach manhood let alone marry and produce heirs of his own. . . .

In the wake of Henry’s death, the Stuart dynasty was faced with the frightening prospect of imminent extinction in the immediate male line. Were James and Charles to die within the next few years, the thrones of England and Scotland would pass to James’s sole surviving daughter Elizabeth, whose marriage at the age of sixteen in February 1613 to the Elector Palatine Frederick V raised the prospect of a foreign succession. . . .

Extinction in the immediate male line was not the only possibility which confronted James in the aftermath of the death of Prince Henry. There was also the possibility that James, who did not enjoy the best of health, would die while Charles was still a minor, necessitating the formation of a regency government.

Alternative history speculations include the conjecture that King Henry IX would have dealt more effectively with Parliament and thus averted the English Civil War.

Between Conscience and Duty: William Byrd and Thomas Tallis at Princeton

Gallicantus, the group that recorded The Word Unspoken: Sacred Music by William Byrd and Philippe de Monte, is performing two concerts at Princeton University this weekend--one on Saturday, based on the album and the other on Sunday, featuring several "lamentable" compositions. Here is a link to the programs for the concerts.

The first concert is all about Byrd's dilemma, which I've described before of how to be a faithful musical servant to Elizabeth I and be a faithful Catholic at the same time. Gallicantus explores Byrd's motets that serve as coded lamentations over the fall of Catholicism in England (his conscience), then some English works written for Protestant audiences, praising Elizabeth I (his duty), and finally juxtapose the settings of Psalm 136 he and Philippe de Monte exchanged in 1583.

The second concert is all about Thomas Tallis' survival as a Catholic throughout the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, but seems to set an elegaic and dark tone, as works chosen for the concert are settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah (for Lenten Tenebrae), and hymns for night prayer (Te Lucis Ante Terminum and Christe Quui Lux es et Dies)--"Sweet Laments of the English Renaissance" could be a Lenten concert, but is being performed on the Octave Day of Easter! And it much resembles the program of Latin works recorded by Magnificat on Linn Records' Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang!

Read more about the concerts here and here.