Howells and Hymnus Paradisi

Some works are written for the concert-hall and some for the drawer. The drawer-pieces are the ones a composer keeps near him, in plain manuscript, when the public life has, for a season, lost its meaning. They are not unfinished; they are simply unwilling. And sometimes, after a long fermentation in the dark, another musician walks into the room, lifts the lid, and tells the composer what the piece has quietly become.

THE LYDNEY BOY

Herbert Norman Howells was born at Lydney in Gloucestershire on the seventeenth of October 1892, the son of Oliver Howells, plumber and decorator and chapel-organist, and Elizabeth Burgham. The Howells line was Welsh by recent emigration, lately settled across the Severn into the Forest of Dean. He was schooled at Lydney and the Cathedral Choir School at Gloucester, where the long Anglican choral tradition pressed itself early into his ear: the responses at Evensong, the polyphony of Tallis and Byrd, the great verse anthems. From 1912 to 1917 he was Stanford's scholarship student at the Royal College of Music in London; by 1920 he was on its staff. For fifteen years thereafter he was a steady cathedral-music composer of the Gloucester school, a friend of Vaughan Williams and Holst, a man whose surname was beginning to belong, quietly, to the twentieth-century English liturgy.

TWINEHAM PLACE, SEPTEMBER 1935

The family kept a cottage at Twineham Place in Sussex. In the late summer of 1935 a polio outbreak moved through the southern counties. The illness took Michael Kendrick Howells on the second of September; by the sixth he was gone. Three days, from the first fever to the final failure of breath. He was nine years old. Howells went back to London with his wife Dorothy and his daughter Ursula and the small coffin and the silence of a house in which a boy had been the loudest instrument. He could not, for some weeks, sit at the keyboard. The public composer-life, which had been the whole shape of his working days, stood at the door of the upstairs music-study and could not be admitted.

THE UPSTAIRS STUDY AT BARNES

It is a Saturday evening in November 1935, twenty past nine, in the upstairs music-study of the flat at 3 Beverley Close, Barnes. Pale autumn light through the west window; the gas-fire low; on the writing-desk a sheet of the thirty-stave choral paper he has used since the College years, and beside it, in a small frame, the photograph of Michael at the Lydney churchyard in the summer of 1932, six years old, squinting against the Gloucestershire sun. He is forty-three. He has not opened the manuscript paper for nine weeks. The Requiem-tradition is at his elbow, as it has been at the elbow of every composer who has lost a person: the Latin of the Mass for the Dead, Mozart in 1791, Brahms in his German tongue in 1868, Fauré at the Madeleine in 1888. The form, he tells himself in the cathedral-school Latin that has been with him since he was a chorister at Gloucester, requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: rest eternal grant unto them, Lord. The form is the vehicle. The form is older than his grief and will carry it. He notices, half against his will, that he has begun to hear the Preludio: not a fanfare, not a lament in the German manner, but a slow climbing of strings, a long opening breath, the music of a cathedral nave at the hour before Evensong when the light is still in the clerestory and the choir has not yet come in. He notices that the piece, if he writes it, will not be for the Three Choirs Festival or for the catalogue of Boosey and Hawkes; it will be for Michael, and for himself, and for whatever God still holds the soul of a nine-year-old boy who died of a Sussex fever. He sets the pen to the top stave. He writes the title in the small hand he uses for private documents: Hymnus Paradisi. Hymn of Paradise. He writes underneath it, in the same hand, for M.K.H. He does not write a dedication for the public score, because there will be no public score.

THE SEVEN MOVEMENTS

He worked through the autumn of 1935 and the winter and spring of 1936. Preludio; Requiem aeternam; The Lord is my shepherd set to the English of the Book of Common Prayer; Sanctus; I heard a voice from heaven; Holy is the true light on the Salisbury Diurnal text; Lux aeterna. Seven movements, soprano and tenor soloists, full chorus, orchestra. By the summer of 1936 the fair copy was finished. He laid it in the lower drawer of the desk in the Royal College music-room, under a folder of unfinished anthems, and did not show it to anyone. He went on with the cathedral-music life: the Collegium Regale services, the Gloucester Service, the King's Service. The Requiem stayed in the drawer for fourteen years. Friends knew, in the way friends know, that there was a piece; no one asked to see it.

A SUNDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 1949

Ralph Vaughan Williams came to the Barnes flat on a Sunday afternoon in May 1949. He was seventy-six and the senior figure of English music; he had himself known the loss of a child within the wider family circle; he had heard the College rumour. He asked, in the doorway, with the directness that was his manner, to see it. Howells brought the score down from the upstairs drawer and laid it on the dining-table. Vaughan Williams read for about ninety minutes, turning the pages slowly, occasionally humming a line, the late-afternoon light moving across the staves. When he had finished he closed the cover with both hands and said, by Howells's later account to Christopher Palmer, that the work was a private working-out between a composer and his lost son and his God, but that the fourteen years had altered its character: the private grief, kept long enough, had become a public consolation, and Howells had no right to keep it from the choirs of England. He named the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester for the September of 1950. Howells did not answer at once. He stood at the window looking down at the small garden. The cathedral of his boyhood was waiting for the piece. He said yes.

GLOUCESTER, 7 SEPTEMBER 1950

The premiere was given at Gloucester Cathedral on the seventh of September 1950, fifteen years and a day after Michael's death. The composer conducted. Isobel Baillie sang the soprano part; William Herbert the tenor. The nave was full to capacity, which the festival's ticket-records noted as unusual for a new work. The Preludio climbed in the strings into the high vault, the choir entered on the Requiem aeternam, and by the Holy is the true light the cathedral was, by every account of the evening, in the particular stillness that an English congregation reserves for music it recognises as having cost the composer something it can name. Howells kept his back to the audience. At the close he laid the baton on the stand and stood for a long moment before turning. He bowed once. He did not speak.

THE LONG REPERTOIRE

Howells continued as the cathedral-music composer of his generation until his death at the Barnes flat on the twenty-third of February 1983, in his ninety-first year. He was buried in the cloister of Westminster Abbey, the only English composer of his century so honoured. Hymnus Paradisi entered the Three Choirs and the Anglican festival repertoire in the autumn of 1950 and has not left it; the Willcocks recording with the King's College choir of 1971 is the standard catalogue entry. Some works refuse the drawer in the end. They are written in a private room for a private reason, and the composer keeps them as long as the grief requires keeping, and then another musician comes through the door on a Sunday afternoon and the piece walks out into the public weather and does the work it could not do while it was hidden. In the lower drawer of the music-room desk at the Royal College, empty now since the score went to the printers in the summer of 1950, the folder of unfinished anthems still lies where Howells left it, with a faint pencil mark in his hand on the upper corner: M.K.H., 1926–1935.