Good Friday 2010

Programme Notes

Howells Requiem

Herbert Howells studied the piano and organ with Sir Herbert Brewer, organist of Gloucester Cathedral, and composition with Sir Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music. His anthems, and in particular his many wonderful settings of the canticles, place him as probably the greatest composer of Anglican church music.

In 1935 Howells’ son Michael died at the age of nine, a tragedy which inevitably cast an immense shadow over the composer’s life. Until quite recently it was thought that the Requiem was composed in response to Michael’s death, but we now know that Howells composed it in 1932 or 1933, originally intending it for the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. For some reason the music was never sent to King’s, and its existence remained unknown until its eventual publication in 1980, only three years before the composer’s own death. After the tragic events of 1935, Howells increasingly associated the Requiem with his lost son, so much so that a few years later, when he was composing Hymnus Paradisi, a work specifically intended as Michael’s memorial and without doubt Howells’ masterpiece, he used substantial parts of the earlier Requiem, re-scoring it for soloists, large chorus and orchestra.

Fauré and Duruflé did not adhere strictly to the standard liturgy in their Requiems, and before them Brahms had gone even further in Ein Deutsches Requiem by using his own selection of texts taken from the Lutheran Bible and the Apocrypha. Though musically Howells’ Requiem could scarcely be more different from the Brahms, there is perhaps a similar spirit at work in the composer’s very personal choice of devotional psalms and scriptural passages from both the Catholic and Anglican liturgies for the dead.

Howells’ music is much more complex than other choral music of the period, most of which still followed in the Austro-German tradition that had dominated English music for two centuries. Long, unfolding melodies are seamlessly woven into the overall textures; the harmonic language is modal, chromatic, often dissonant and deliberately ambiguous. The overall style is free-flowing, impassioned and impressionistic, all of which gives Howells’ music a distinctive visionary quality.

The Requiem is written for unaccompanied chorus, which in places divides into double choir. There are six short movements which are organised in a carefully balanced structure. The two outer movements frame two settings of the Latin ‘Requiem aeternam’ and two psalm-settings. Howells reserves his most complex music for the Latin movements, in which he uses poly-tonality, chord-clusters and the simultaneous use of major and minor keys. In contrast, the psalm-settings are simple and direct, the speech-rhythms of the plain chordal writing arising out of the textual inflections.

One of the earliest and most fundamental influences on Howells was Gloucester Cathedral, with its immense, vaulted spaces and glorious east window. Howells wrote of it as ‘a pillar of fire in my imagination.’ He consciously set out to mirror these essentially architectural elements of spaciousness and luminosity in his music, and these characteristics can clearly be heard in the Requiem. Significantly, the main climax of the work occurs at the words ‘et lux perpetua luceat eis’ – ‘let light perpetual shine upon them’ – a symbol of hope and comfort, confirmed in the closing pages by the final release of tension and the gradual transition to a simple, peaceful D major.

John Bawden

from http://www.choirs.org.uk/prognotes/howells%20requiem1.htm

Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem 
(8th Station from The Way of the Cross)

Marcel Dupre (1886–1971)

Dupre's passionate musical settings to each of the fourteen Stations of the Cross were first heard in February 1932. Alternating with poetry readings, the music was improvised and later written down. Much of the music reflects the agony of the crucifixion with great vividness but the movement you will hear in this performance demonstrates the quieter side of this great work.

John Wells

Duruflé Requiem

Maurice Duruflé (1902 - 1986) was a compositional perfectionist who had a thorough musical training throughout his adolescence and into his twenties. At the age of ten he became a chorister at Rouen Cathedral Choir School, where he also studied piano and organ. At age seventeen he moved to Paris where he undertook further organ studies, and in 1920 he entered the Conservatoire de Paris where he won first prizes in composition, organ, harmony and piano accompaniment.

He held a number of musical posts throughout his life including his appointment as Assistant Organist to Louis Vierne at Notre Dame in 1927, and some positions, such as that of titular organist at the church of St Etienne-du-Mont in Paris from 1929 until his death, stretched over several decades; he shared this role with his second wife, Marie-Madeleine Chevalier-Duruflé after their marriage in 1953, until he stopped performing following a car accident in 1975, after which she took over, even though he was still the titular organist. He was also appointed in 1943 as professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris, a position he held until 1970.  

Duruflé was heavily influenced in his compositional style for the Requiem by his early training at Rouen Cathedral, where there was a focus on Gregorian chant. There had been a resurgence in interest in this monastic musical style in France in the 19th century, spearheaded for Duruflé by a group of Benedictine monks at Solesmes Abbey in north-western France. Here a theory was developed that liturgical chant rhythms were basically a series of notes of approximately equal value, in groups of two or three. His intention was to incorporate this arhythmic chant style into his writing, and create a feeling of natural rather than measured meter. Duruflé chose the Gregorian plainchant “Mass for the Dead” as the basis for his composition and, with much of the music here based on Gregorian chant, by using frequently changing time signatures he has achieved a lilting, irregularly patterned flow most noticeably in the opening Introit movement of the Requiem, and in the Lux aeterna.

Duruflé wrote his Requiem in 1947, following a commission from publishers Durand & Cie; this could have been a gamble on their part, as among the small amount of music that Duruflé had had published by then, he had not written any vocal music. They need not have feared though, as throughout the work there are extremely rich, and very French, harmonies, with beautifully sculpted vocal writing which Duruflé took great pains to finalise. A notable omission from his Requiem is a complete Dies irae movement that other composers such as Mozart and Verdi included prominently; Duruflé wanted to focus on the human aspect of forgiveness in the texts, so although the text including "Dies illa, dies irae" does appear, it is confined to a small but stirring part of the Libera me movement, similarly to Fauré's Requiem of about sixty years earlier.

Iain Tetley