RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS was sitting down to supper in a Bayreuth restaurant when his party was advised by a waiter that Die Walküre was in fact just starting. He alone raced off to catch the Siegfried-Sieglinde duet for the first time: “I experienced no surprise, but rather that strange certainty that I had heard it all before,” he recalled later: “a feeling of recognition as of meeting an old friend. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folk-song, saw Michelangelo’s Day and Night [on the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in Florence], came upon Stonehenge, or had my first sight of New York City — the intuition that I had been there before.”
This quality made the 32-year-old Vaughan Williams the ideal music editor for The English Hymnal, whose centenary fell in 2006. His researches took him two years. He died in 1958, and his 50th anniversary has inspired the composer, pianist, and radio presenter Professor David Owen Norris to pay tribute to this hymnological landmark.
Professor Norris gathered his keyboard students at Southampton University in the Turner-Sims Concert Hall. From eight o’clock on a cold Saturday morning, he began playing through the entire English Hymnal, one verse from each hymn, sharing the task with his students, some of whom had no previous experience of hymn-playing.
A sturdy audience was already seated by eight, and a good many stayed the course. It was equally satisfying to be reminded of the quality of tunes that have fallen into abeyance, and on which Professor Norris’s commentary shed light.
In the afternoon came the main event: hymns from the English Hymnal sung by a beautifully tuned young choir, the Cantores Michaelis (choral scholars of the university), directed by Keith Davis; and hymns for the audience.
We sang, in eight parts like a round, Tallis’ Canon (EH 267, “Glory to thee, my God, this night”), one of those Tudor-period tunes that RVW resurrected in the wake of Robert Bridges’s 1898 Yattendon Hymnal. This followed an impassioned reading by the university orchestra’s string section (including a robustly turned solo for RVW’s instrument, the viola) of his 1910 Fantasia on Tallis’s Third Mode melody, used for “When rising from the bed of death” (EH 92).
RVW’s own settings White Gates, used for “Fierce raged the tempest” (EH 541), and Randolph (“God be with you till we meet again”, EH 524), were heard with Gibbons’s pure and yet sensual music for “Drop, drop slow tears”, finely tuned by sopranos and altos; and Mount Ephraim.
This (EH 196) is a 1760s tune with a charming West Gallery feel by Benjamin Milgrove, a Bond Street shop-owner who was Precentor at the Countess of Huntingdon’s chapel in Bath. Alluded to in Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Choirmaster’s Burial”, it is used by Britten in his cycle Winter Words.
There was Holst, who titled Cranham (“In the bleak mid-winter”, EH 25) after a village on the Cotswold ridge near Cheltenham; E. J. Moeran, who titled Stalham (EH 638) after his father’s parish in Norfolk; the adapted folksong Kings Lynn (EH 562; G. K. Chesterton kept Aurelia in mind as he wrote the words); and David Owen Norris’s commentary on why Dearmer tweaked the start of “He who would valiant be”, lest it seem “too vainglorious”. To offset these, the organist David Coram gave a fast-flowing reading of Vaughan Williams’s prelude on Rhosymedre (EH 303), named after a village near Wrexham.
Especially relevant to Lent was the restoration to Rockingham of the modal-sounding third line (the original by Samuel Webbe, posthumously published in 1820, and alluded to in RVW’s footnote to EH 107), for Isaac Watt’s “When I survey the wondrous cross”. The emendation seemed utterly right. The audience took to it like ducks to water.
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