Sorry, I’ve missed a week – there’s been decorating to do (in my Dominic Cummings tee-shirt….).  I have been trying to avoid repeating composers, but that is going to become more difficult as time passes, and I am bound to explore more than one work each of the great composers.
I intended to keep away from choral works, but by that I mean the larger works for choir and orchestra.  There are some pieces for smaller choirs which are very special, and this week I have chosen Vaughan Williams Mass in G minor written in 1921.  It is the first unaccompanied mass since the 16th century to be written in England for liturgical use.  One of Vaughan Williams’ early teachers was C.V. Stanford, the composer of a vast amount of music mostly unperformed, though some significant settings of the canticles and anthems remain in regular use in churches and cathedrals. I am going to commit heresy now by saying that I was never that enthusiastic about any of the Stanford I sang for over ten or so years.  I don’t think Vaughan Williams was that impressed either and he eventually moved away from Stanford who criticised VW for his modern style and modalism!  Perhaps some jealousy lurking.  VW was nearer to Holst, to whom he dedicated his G minor Mass, and he was greatly influenced also by Ravel with whom he went to study orchestration for three months in 1908.  Ravel noted that everyone who went to study with him ended up sounding like him.  Certainly, Ravel helped to liberate Vaughan Williams from the stodgy English style of Stanford and Parry, and the orchestration for A Sea Symphony is one example of that.  If you listen to the wonderful song cycle On Wenlock Edge written in 1909, from its opening you can detect strains of Ravel.  On Wenlock Edge, by the way, is really worth getting to know.

The G minor Mass recalls the earlier traditions of the 16th century, with Vaughan Williams modal style embedded.  VW had collected a number of old English folk songs and hymns which influenced him a good deal and appeared in the English Hymnal which he was involved in compiling.  However, the comparison with earlier centuries can only go so far.  This is a work of outstanding beauty and conciseness, as were the masses of Byrd and his contemporaries.  With VW we have a double choir and quartet of soloists, rather similar in effect to the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for string orchestra.

The use of polyphony – independent vocal lines interweaving as was the custom of the 16th century, is evident from the outset and continues through most of the Kyrie.  The Gloria begins with everyone singing at the same time in chords of block harmony, and then with both choirs alternating and answering each other.  The solo quartet then sings in the style of plainsong answered by the rest singing ‘Miserere nobis’ in triads (and against all the rules of ‘consecutive fifths’ that one had to learn).  I have disturbing memories of the tenor solo ‘Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris’, holding on to a top A at 10 o’ clock on a Sunday morning in King’s Chapel, and which followed me round for most of my three years.  The words ‘Jesu Christe’ are sung in hushed and reverent tones, similar to how  Rachmaninoff set them in the Gloria (No.12) of his All-Night Vigil ‘I-isus Hristos’.  The final section then leaps off polyphonically before the Amens which are mainly, but not entirely, double choir blocks.

The Credo is where the music seems to notch up a gear, including two fine and touching sections for the solo quartet.  Most of the music is in block harmony with the two choirs answering each other antiphonally.  There is a particularly effective still moment ‘Et homo factus est’ (‘and was made man’).  The best is reserved for the end, the quartet leading with ‘Et in Spiritum Sanctum Dominum’ (‘and in the Holy Spirit’) which moves seamlessly on as each choir takes over their ideas.  There is then a great and striking outpouring of sound ‘Et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen’, (and the life of the world to come).  VW marks this poco piu mosso (a little more movement) and the effect can be lost if it suddenly becomes rushed. Rather like Elgar, VW here makes his intentions clear with the specific instructions regarding the interrelation between time signatures and note-lengths. The majesty and breadth of what Vaughan Williams wrote cries out in impassioned overlapping of the two choirs beginning low in the voice and climbing to a resounding finish.

The Sanctus is of the angels, sopranos and altos swirling around in the heavens as the earthly people prayerfully answer. (Very different from the Sanctus in Bach’s Mass in B minor which represented the swirling angels in his own more complex and extended way.  The ‘Heaven and Earth’ idea is also used by Handel at the beginning of the chorus ‘Glory to God’ in Messiah).   The Osanna which follows the Sanctus goes back to overlapping double choir blocks calling out.  The Benedictus alternates between the solo quartet and the full choir with a most effective ending beginning pianissimo and rising to finish with the same musical idea as the first Osanna.  Both these Osannas are marked molto maestoso and to rush them thinking only of the words rather than Vaughan Williams’ concept is to miss a great deal, as at the end of the Credo.

The final Agnus Dei is another gem and displays a spatial quality at the end of breathtaking (literally, and I mean ‘literally’ literally!) dimension.  It begins again with simple plainsong-type chanting in old-world modal sounds which recur in more agitated fashion, and then Vaughan Williams seems to lie back and release a most moving dona nobis pacem (grant us peace) ending.  (Renaissance composers often kept their tenderest moments for these final three words).  More than three octaves separate the voices on the penultimate dona, with the solo treble at the top on a top A pitted against the whole choir singing forte.  As a director you have to be dangerous here and not try too hard to balance the choir, thereby losing the impact.  Somehow the treble voice at the top comes through enough and it has to hold on with the power just for two slow notes.  It all then comes to a sublime close with the final three bars in the alto voices quoting the opening theme of the entire mass.

What we have here, as with some other works I have chosen for the earlier blogs, is a one-off masterpiece.  'Vaughan Williams means Vaughan Williams'.  Others may have copied but no-one preceded his idiosyncratic world.  Beethoven wrote at the beginning of his overwhelming Missa Solemnis, ‘From the heart; may it go to the heart’.  He then added markings saying ‘with devotion’ and, in the Agnus Dei final section Dona nobis pacem, ‘Prayer for inner and outer peace’.  Was he concerned that after so much he had demanded of his exhausted performers that they might miss the point?  As the Beethoven scholar Martin Cooper wrote, he had written ‘a personal document without parallel in the history of music’.  In its own considerably more modest way, Vaughan Williams’ Mass is from the heart and connects in a heartfelt way.  That is a very special talent and not given to many.

Composers of the 16th century did also ‘get it’.  The climactic conclusions to Byrd’s 4- and 5-part masses, and Christopher Tye’s Missa Euge Bone, give an insight into Vaughan Williams’ Mass 350 years later.  Listen to the opening of the Tye Benedictus on this great recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HTO0MC4BLA, and then listen to the four sections of the Agnus Dei https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvGam-l6gSo.  The rising melodic 4ths coming back down a semitone and the rich early harmony shine through and are as heartfelt as anything from later times - unbearably almost!

As last week, I had intended to write about the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, but I ran out of time.  Perhaps that would be superfluous anyway, but why not just listen for a short while to the Tallis Fantasia and pretend it is a choir singing (it is a hymn tune, after all!), and then to the G minor Mass and pretend it is a double string orchestra with string quartet.  You could get something of the idea.  By the way, the Tallis Fantasia is for full string orchestra with a smaller ensemble of nine players, not actually a solo quartet.

A great memory of my earlier choir days was singing this Mass.  It stood out from the very beginning and continues to grow, though I fear our performances at St Paul’s Cathedral were not good (and in English). For me there was a treble solo quoniam tu solos sanctus, though not as terrifying as the tenor qui sedes with its top A!  It is difficult to achieve a great performance of this work. Perhaps it is too much to expect of a cathedral choir with young treble voices, wonderful and world-class as they are.  It needs the best and most controlled voices, the best breath control, completely accurate pitch and then sustained expansiveness and understanding applied to it by a conductor who dares (and has the resources) to give it that.  It’s like trying to grasp something which is always just slightly out of reach, but I love striving for it, and I take nothing away from those choirs who perform it so well in the cathedrals and chapels.  Gustav Holst wrote when he received it to be sung by his occasional Whitsuntide Singers: 'It is quite beyond us, but still further beyond us is the idea that we are not going to do it'.  R.R. Terry, the organist and choirmaster of Westminster cathedral and who had revived the works of Taverner, Tye, Tallis, Byrd etc., said, after he had been sent a copy: 'This is the work we have all been waiting for'. 

I will finish with a complete diversion of an event at St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, which at that time had a headmaster who ‘had a taste for corporal punishment, which he inflicted with little provocation’*.  We used to make an annual visit to play cricket against Wycombe Abbey Girls School.  Our team was aged about 12-13, and the girls were about 16-18.  They thrashed us each year but how we loved it, and how embarrassed we were (with the girls – we knew we were going to lose the cricket match).  In my final year it was raining and there was some doubt about whether we would be able to go.  This was depressing, but as I descended and reached the final 180-degree turn on the wide front staircase of the choir school, news came through that we were going to go anyway as a day out.  Much jubilation, and I threw my cricket bag containing all my kit down the rest of the stairs intending it to land on the small lower staircase, ready for me to pick it up later at the main front door.  Unfortunately, between myself and the door, and too late for me to check myself, stood the school’s 2nd Master, who hailed by the name of Anthony ‘Dan’ Dare.  The bag hit him full in the face and divided his glasses left and right at the bridge of his nose.  Glass all over the floor. He lifted me by the back of my collar and carried me vertically, feet just off the ground through two rooms to the headmaster, who duly delivered what was inevitable.  One redeeming feature of the headmaster was that he was quite good at cricket and taught me and others a good deal about how to play (not that that led to anything at all).
*A quote from a book which I will tell you about another time.

Footnote
I am a week behind but will not attempt to catch up.  It’s been half term holiday week and there are many distractions – decorating, and hospital waiting rooms with offspring coming off bikes rather nastily…fortunately bruising only!  These blogs take up rather a lot of time, but I am enjoying that time because I have never written anything before in my life since university.  Anything from those university days is lost, fortunately.  Apart from checking a few facts and historic references, I am enjoying writing ‘from the heart’, not what some other person with a sharper mind and more research and knowledge has told me to think.
I may take the odd week off writing in the summer holidays, lying back and pretending I am in the Cornish sea on my surfboard (= bodyboard in new-speak).  There is a lot to be pessimistic about and I suspect we all have periods contemplating what has hit us and what will come next.  Maybe, and I hope, that is a bit separate from coping as best we can to keep our spirits up, and I do hope we can all manage that somehow.
The month of June would have seen Beethoven Missa Solemnis and Mozart Requiem etc.  Oh dear.  I miss it.
All best wishes and hoping you are well,
Richard