Howells · 1950
Howells and *Hymnus Paradisi*
From the autumn of 1935 to the summer of 1936, in the upstairs music-study of the Howells family flat at 3 Beverley Close, Barnes, in south-west London, Herbert Howells, in his forty-fourth year, composed a Latin-language Requiem-style choral-orchestral setting of seven movements he called *Hymnus Paradisi* (*Hymn of Paradise*) in private grief for his nine-year-old son Michael, who had died at the family Sussex cottage of poliomyelitis on the sixth of September 1935 after a three-day illness. Howells refused to perform or publish the piece for the next fourteen years. By his own statement to his biographer Christopher Palmer, *the work was a private working-out, between a composer and his lost son and his God; it was not for the public ear*. It was Howells's fellow English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who had himself lost a son and who came to look at the manuscript on a 1949 visit to the Howells flat, who persuaded him to allow the Three Choirs Festival to perform *Hymnus Paradisi* at the Gloucester Cathedral festival of September 1950. The premiere on the seventh of September 1950, conducted by the composer, was, by every contemporary report, the most-affecting public musical event of the immediate-post-war English-cathedral-music tradition. *Hymnus Paradisi* has been continuously in the Anglican choral-festival repertoire since.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of an unrecorded Saturday in November 1935, in the upstairs music-study of the family flat at 3 Beverley Close, Barnes, in south-west London, in pale autumn light through the west window. He is forty-three years old. He is Herbert Norman Howells, born at Lydney in Gloucestershire on the seventeenth of October 1892, son of the Lydney plumber-and-decorator Oliver Howells (the Lydney chapel-organist; a Welsh-Howells of recent Gloucestershire emigration) and Elizabeth Burgham, schooled at Lydney and the Cathedral Choir School at Gloucester, scholarship student of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music 1912–17, organist-and-composer at the Royal College since 1920.
On the writing-desk in front of him is the blank manuscript paper of the Howells-and-Co music-stationer's thirty-stave choral-score paper. Beside it, in a frame, is the photograph of his son Michael Kendrick Howells, taken at the Lydney churchyard in the summer of 1932 when Michael was six. Michael had died on the sixth of September 1935 at the family's Sussex cottage at Twineham Place, of poliomyelitis (the Sussex polio outbreak of the late-summer of 1935; the illness took three days from the first fever to the final respiratory failure). Michael was nine years old.
He thinks: the public composer-life I have been running for fifteen years is, at this moment, not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether I am still a composer, or whether the loss of Michael has, in plain reading, ended the composer-life.
He thinks: the Requiem-tradition of the Latin liturgy is the form in which composers have, since the fifteenth century, worked through grief. The Mozart Requiem of 1791. The Brahms German Requiem of 1868. The Fauré Requiem of 1888. The Britten War Requiem of 1962 (which has not yet been written, but the form is the form). The form is the vehicle.
He thinks: I will write the Requiem for Michael. I will not publish it. The Requiem is between me and Michael and God. The public composer-life is a separate question that I will, on the completion of the Requiem, return to.
He worked on Hymnus Paradisi through the autumn of 1935 and the winter of 1936. He completed the seven movements (Preludio; Requiem aeternam; The Lord is my shepherd; Sanctus; I heard a voice from heaven; Holy is the true light; Lux aeterna) by the summer of 1936. He laid the finished score in a drawer of the Royal College music-room and did not show it to anyone for the next fourteen years.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, the English composer of the Howells generation (born 1872, twenty years Howells's senior), had himself lost a son (the Vaughan-Williams household had been bereaved of the stepson Adeline Fisher's child in the 1930 generation, though the exact biographical-circumstances are private to the Vaughan-Williams family). He had heard, in the late-1940s Royal College gossip, that Howells had written but not published a Requiem. He came to the Howells flat at Barnes on a Sunday afternoon in May 1949 and asked to see the score.
Howells brought the score down from the upstairs drawer. Vaughan Williams read through it on the Howells dining-table for about ninety minutes. He said, by Howells's later memoir to Christopher Palmer: Herbert, you must let the Three Choirs have this. The piece is, in plain reading, the finest English-cathedral-music writing of the twentieth century. The private grief has, by the fourteen-year fermentation, become the public consolation. You must release it.
Hymnus Paradisi was premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester Cathedral on the seventh of September 1950, exactly fifteen years and a day after Michael's death, conducted by the composer. The soloists were the soprano Isobel Baillie and the tenor William Herbert. The cathedral was, by the Three Choirs Festival's ticket-record of the day, full to capacity for the first time in the festival's twentieth-century history. The performance was, by every contemporary report, the most-affecting public musical event of the immediate post-war English cathedral-music tradition.
Herbert Howells continued as the English-cathedral-music composer until his death at his Barnes flat on the twenty-third of February 1983, ninety years old. He is buried in the Westminster Abbey choir-school cloister, the only twentieth-century English composer buried at the Abbey. Hymnus Paradisi has been continuously in the Anglican choral-festival repertoire since 1950; the recording by Sir David Willcocks and the King's College Cambridge choir of 1971 is the standard catalogue recording. The family Sussex cottage at Twineham Place is, since 1985, a small private memorial to Michael Howells.