Journey to England, Part 1

I. Tye, Sheppard, Taverner (Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne/Christopher Watson). Navona CD NV6731.

Precision meets poetry on TYE, SHEPPARD, TAVERNER. The internationally-acclaimed Choir of Trinity College from Melbourne, Australia demonstrates exceptional, crystalline clarity, and expressive nuance.

This considerable feat is partially owed to the formidable direction by Christopher Watson. In these choral pieces by English High Renaissance masters Tye, Sheppard, and Taverner, Watson drives his ensemble to an extraordinary fusion of sensitivity and quasi architectural grandeur. The choir, with outstanding nimbleness, executes and builds on this confident lead, ensuring that every phrase, like every stone in a cathedral, finds its perfect place. A timeless, beautiful performance.

John Sheppard (c.1515–1558) was 10 years younger than Tallis, and died young, but his surviving compositions speak to him being a supreme master of the polyphonic art. In the 1540s Sheppard was Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College, Oxford (meaning Director of the Choristers, a title which has been used at Magdalen since the 1390s and is still in use today.) He was then appointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, working chiefly in London, where he remained until his death. As Sheppard’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer is in English, it must be presumed to have been written for use during the brief reign of Elizabeth’s half-brother Edward VI (1547–1553), the first Protestant ruler, for Sheppard lived for only one month after Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 and the subsequent revival of Protestant liturgy following Mary’s execution. Edward had introduced a new Prayer Book in English in 1549, and composers set most parts for the liturgy, especially the Psalms, though the Lord’s Prayer, a central text increasingly said by the congregation instead of by the priest alone, did not see many polyphonic settings. Sheppard’s is in five parts (SAATB) but only a tenor part-book and a separate bass line without text have come down to us, the rest being reconstructed from a version for viols that has survived from 1578. The text is not exactly that which we use today, nor that in King Edward’s first Book of Common Prayer of 1549. The inclusion of the doxology (“For thine is the kingdom…”) and the English “so be it” for the Hebrew/Latin “Amen,” mark it as coming from one of the several English primers (prayer books) that appeared during the 1540s.

Despite little being known of his life, and seemingly having only a short musical career, John Taverner (c.1490–1545) is regarded as among the leading English composers of his age, a generation before that of Sheppard. In 1526, Taverner was appointed as the first organist and master of the choristers at Christ Church, Oxford, founded the year before by Cardinal Wolsey, and thus originally known as Cardinal College. After Wolsey’s arrest in 1529, Taverner left the college in 1530, and there is no evidence of further compositions after that date. Christe Jesu, pastor bone is a five-voice motet with a text adapted from a votive antiphon in honor of St William of York, a 12th-century Archbishop. The statutes at Christ Church required the singing of an antiphon at the daily service of Compline, the final office sung each evening before retiring. This work survives in the Baldwin Partbooks dating from around 1575, containing 170 pieces from major composers including Sheppard, Parsons, Mundy, White, Tye, Tallis, and Byrd. During the Reformation, the second verse, devoted to William, was altered to a prayer for Henry VIII, then later still one for Elizabeth. The original has, unfortunately, been lost. The missing Tenor part has been reconstructed by Gareth Thomas.

Christopher Tye (c.1505–1573) outlived both Sheppard and Taverner and was associated with Cambridge rather than Oxford. He took his Bachelor of Music degree in 1537 and was a lay clerk at King’s College for at least two terms. In 1542, soon after Ely Cathedral was re-founded following the dissolution of the monasteries, Tye was appointed Magister Choristarum. He gained his Doctor of Music from Cambridge in 1545, and it is possible that his setting of the Mass he titled Euge bone was submitted in fulfilment of that degree. The surviving source is in the important Forrest-Heyther Partbooks now at Oxford, into which Tye’s Mass was copied by the same John Baldwin who saved Taverner’s Christe Jesu for posterity.

It is known that complex polyphonic settings were commonly sung at King’s during the 1530s, especially after 1536 when the choir moved to the new chapel (which had been completed in 1515) following the collapse of the temporary chapel that they had still been using. Tye’s six-voice Missa Euge Bone may have been written there or conceived for Ely. Its name has long been a source of puzzlement, as there is no existing motet with that text known in England, and the only plainchant that remotely matches it in name (though not in music) is Euge serve bone (“Well done faithful servant”). It is now agreed that Tye’s own motet Quæsumus ominipotens is the musical model that he used as source material for the Mass, and that the plainsong text provided an appropriate sentiment. Tye sets the “Gloria,” “Credo,” “Sanctus,” “Benedictus,” and “Agnus Dei” movements (the Kyrie was rarely set in England at the time as it was substituted by a trope including specific prayers), making frequent use of reduced parts, in higher and lower trios, instead of solo lines. One unusual feature is an additional setting of the “Agnus Dei” petitions, the middle one being split into two, first for a lower-voice quartet and then again for a high quartet of divided sopranos (trebles) and divided altos.

— Peter Campbell

II. Begin the Song! A Purcell Academy Paul-Antoine Benos-Dijan, ct./Le Consort). Harmonia Mundi  HMM 902741.

For his debut recording, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian and his friends from Le Consort invite us to rediscover a 17th-century repertoire for which they have a particular love, drawn from the Golden Age of English music. Half a century after Alfred Deller's legendary revivals, they have placed their art entirely at the service of the sense of wonder they continually experience when confronted by these sublime works.

In the seventeenth century, the Anglican church generally paid little attention to the saints. Indeed, many would have viewed their veneration as little short of pagan idolatry. Yet ultimately the position was a good deal more ambiguous. When in 1683 a group of London musicians calling themselves the ‘Musical Society’ joined forces to honour the patron saint of music by commemorating Saint Cecilia’s feast day, 22 November, nobody seems to have offered any objection, and soon the celebrations became a regular fixture in the city’s calendar of entertainments. ‘This feast is one of the genteelest in the world,’ wrote a contributor to The Gentleman’s Journal, praising the lavish banquet, always preceded by ‘a performance of music by the best voices and hands in town’, taking place in the hall of the Stationers’ Company. Among those ‘best hands’ was that of Dr John Blow, choirmaster of the Chapel Royal, the teacher and mentor of Henry Purcell, for whom he had stepped aside as organist of Westminster Abbey, so that the younger and more gifted composer could take his place. In 1684 Blow was chosen to write that year’s Cecilia ode. He was lucky enough to be setting words by John Oldham, a poet of genuine quality whose lines exalt music’s universal power as a spur to the soul’s finest impulses. Its opening number – Begin the Song! – scored for alto and a supporting quartet of voices, summons the assembled musicians to their festive task.

Temperamentally a very different character from Dr Blow was John Eccles: wayward, eccentric, yet undoubtedly one of the Restoration era’s finest song writers. Deeply involved in the mercurial world of London theatre, he became part of a circle of admirers surrounding the glamorous actress Anne Bracegirdle, for whom some of his choicest airs were written. As the goddess Venus she led the cast in performances of The Judgment of Paris at Dorset Garden Theatre in 1701. With a libretto by William Congreve, the era’s leading dramatist, this was designed as a competition between four composers, Eccles himself, John Weldon, the Moravian musician Gottfried Finger and Daniel Purcell, with the idea of launching English-language opera as a rival to its Italian counterpart.

All four treatments of Congreve’s libretto, based on the Greek myth of the beauty contest between Venus, Juno and Pallas Athene, were given separately before being presented in sequence on a single evening. The winner was John Weldon. Eccles’s setting came second, but modern revivals suggest that his colourful and skilfully characterized score should definitely have won. The lyrical elegance of Paris’s air O Ravishing Delight, sung as he beholds the three Olympian goddesses ‘descending in several machines’, offers a taste of the composer’s deftness in the setting of an English text within an operatic context.

Earlier, Eccles had honed his craft alongside no less a figure than Henry Purcell in The Comical History of Don Quixote, a trilogy of musical plays by Thomas D’Urfey presented at Dorset Garden in 1694. By then Purcell had gained a wealth of experience in the widest possible range of musical fields, as a church composer for the Chapel Royal, a writer of viol consort fantasies, trio sonatas and keyboard music, and as the provider of incidental music for plays, whether as individual songs or as overtures, dances and ‘curtain tunes’ between successive scenes.

From early in his career Purcell gained commissions for the odes and ‘welcome songs’ marking special occasions within England’s royal family. In 1683, when King Charles II and his brother James Duke of York were at Newmarket races, they were warned of a plot to assassinate them both on their way back to London. The conspirators were arrested, a day of public thanksgiving for the king’s deliverance was ordained, and Purcell composed the ode Fly, bold rebellion in celebration. Its most arresting movement is undoubtedly the alto solo Be welcome then, great Sir, in which the serene ground bass seems designed to emphasize the endurance of loyalty and fidelity proclaimed by the vocal line, with the prevailing mood taken up by the delectable string ritornello concluding the piece. In that same year of 1683 Purcell would return still more triumphantly to this particular form in Here the Deities approve, part of the very first Cecilia ode commissioned by that same Musical Society who would call on John Blow for its successor.

A chance for the mature composer to assert his mastery over this kind of courtly festivity came when Queen Mary II and King William III were crowned joint sovereigns of Great Britain in 1689. Until the Queen’s tragically early death in 1694 (for which he would write her funeral music) Purcell was asked each year to write a birthday ode for her, transcending the often rather banal texts supplied to him with his supremely imaginative and varied musical treatment of their verses. The layout of these pieces, in which London’s best available singers were hired for the occasion, is a mixture of choral and solo numbers, often incorporating instruments such as trumpet, oboe and recorder, in addition to a string ensemble with continuo.

The most ornate of the Queen Mary odes is Come ye sons of art away, to words by Nahum Tate, with whom Purcell had earlier collaborated on Dido and Aeneas. Here the alto voice makes a striking contribution in the duet Sound the trumpet, in which the singers rather than the instrument itself do the trumpeting, and in the gorgeous Strike the viol, where the scoring, over a busy ground bass, is coloured by a pair of recorders. That the fusion of this particular voice with the ground bass was especially dear to Purcell is shown in an earlier birthday ode for the Queen, Now does the glorious day appear. Here the air By Beauteous Softness is surely touched by the composer’s personal regard for his new sovereign, who was quickly winning her subjects’ acclaim and respect.

The singers of these royal odes were often hired from the London stage, which was keeping Purcell busy as a composer of incidental music. Among his theatre songs the most popular was Music for a while, written for Oedipus by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, based on Sophocles’ Greek tragedy. The piece forms part of a scene in which a chorus of ghosts is summoned up by the blind prophet Tiresias, who asks them for ‘such sounds as Hell ne’er heard since Orpheus bribed the shades’. Here Purcell employs a double ground bass to sustain the pledge that music will both charm care away yet simultaneously raise infernal spectres.

Did he compose O let me weep, known as ‘The Plaint’? This extended lament certainly uses that favourite alto-ground pairing of his, and although it does not exist in any autograph manuscript, it was inserted in a posthumous 1698 revival of The Fairy Queen, an anonymous version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring masques, dances and operatic scenes, all in Purcell’s own hand. A convincing suggestion is that ‘The Plaint’ was actually the work of his brother Daniel, adopting the idiom of his more famous sibling, though nowadays it is always performed under Henry’s name.

The authentic Henry Purcell is eloquently represented here by his setting of O Solitude, my sweetest choice, using an English version of La Solitude (‘Ô que j’aime la solitude…’) by the French poet Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant. The translator was Katherine Philips, known as ‘the Matchless Orinda’, one of the era’s finest women poets. A hymn to friendship and landscape, the poem sits perfectly above the twelve-note ground, and we can sense the composer’s delight in playing with the verse’s rhythms and imagery as the ostinato bass inexorably persists.

Among younger musicians the composer had many imitators, few more accomplished than William Croft, as gifted in writing for the theatre as for the church. His Ye Tuneful numbers is an obvious homage to Purcell, both in its subtle use of the hallowed alto-and-ground-bass module and in the elegance of its string accompaniment. As late as 1713 Croft would invoke this form once more in his Musicus Apparatus Academicus, a submission for an Oxford university doctorate in the guise of two celebratory odes on the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the decade-long War of the Spanish Succession.

Henry Purcell’s untimely death in 1695, aged only 36, proved devastating to musical London. His fellow musicians ‘together with all the lovers of that noble science’, gave him a splendid funeral in Westminster Abbey and various composers wrote commemorative odes to the lost genius. From one of these, by his teacher John Blow, comes the highly Purcellian So ceas’d the rival crew, while from another, Jeremiah Clarke’s strikingly dramatic ‘Come, come along for a dance and a song’, given at Drury Lane theatre, we hear The Glory of the Arcadian Groves. Both works suggest that Cecilia has been newly joined in heaven by another musical saint.

JONATHAN KEATES