Andrew Gant's Reading List

"That’s right. This is a really good book. I mean, it goes without saying that there are lots of books about Handel. He has been tremendously famous and popular — in his day, and from then on. You asked about his significance. One of the fascinating things about Handel is the way that his reputation has travelled through time, because he and his great contemporary Bach were born only about six weeks apart, and quite close together geographically. Yet they never actually met. They tried on a couple of occasions, but it never actually happened. But their reputations form a fascinating overview of how history works, or how music history works. Handel, during his lifetime, was a working professional composer, tremendously successful but with his share of problems, troubles and professional rivalries. Then, towards the end of his life and afterwards, he became this sort of national totem, which to a large extent misrepresented his work. The fascinating history of Messiah itself is the way it turned from an 18th century oratorio into this huge nationalistic celebration performed by choirs of hundreds, then later thousands, and re-orchestrated by everyone from Henry Wood to people with brass bands. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So it’s fascinating to look at a writer like Jonathan Keates reviewing not just what Handel did, but what history has done to Handel – and how we, to a large extent, reclaimed him. He begins the update of this book: “Since 1985, when the first edition of this book appeared, Handel has been dramatically reclaimed.” That’s the context in which he wrote the revision of his book. Scholarship and the Historically Informed Performance movement has stripped away two hundred years of a performance tradition which cast Handel’s music in the form and sounds of its own time, and restored it to the kind of scale and style which he would have heard himself, with wonderful and revelatory results. Yes, that’s one of the things that is so fascinating about him. He was immensely well known, had a wide circle of friends, was extremely erudite. He clearly enjoyed company; his friends often talk about him attending dinner parties, and obviously music-making is an extremely sociable activity. But it seems that at the end of the day, when all of that was done, he would go home to Brook Street and shut the door. He was an intensely private man. There are very few letters by Handel which survive, and that’s the way history works. It’s largely the same with Bach, you know. You get a lot of administrative records, stuff like that, but very little where they write about their thoughts and feelings. “Famously, there’s nothing about his emotional life, no hint of any kind of romantic attachment” Partly that’s just what’s happened to survive, but yes – as a person – it’s difficult to get close to him. Famously, there’s nothing about his emotional life, no hint of any kind of romantic attachment. That’s fair enough, but it’s a bit of a puzzle, when you bear in mind how beautifully he wrote about those things in his operas and oratorios, and in particular about father-daughter relationships. It’s a curious thing; that’s something he never knew. Just part of the mystery of creativity. All you can say is that there is simply no evidence. Of course, you then tie yourself in knots as to whether that’s because there’s no possibility of there being any evidence. But what can you say? I think we have to be cautious about that kind of inference. Not really, I don’t think so. I mean, I can’t recall offhand much reference to that kind of thing. When he arrived, the newspapers would refer to him as ‘the famous German composer Mr Handel,’ but after that he seemed to become fairly well absorbed. There’s a lot of attention given to his Italian opera, which is a good indication of his internationalism. He was a composer who was German by birth, lived in London, and wrote most of his most celebrated music in Italian. It was an extremely international business. It’s easy to think that, while we hop around Europe all the time now, in past centuries people didn’t travel. Actually, they did. There was an awful lot of travel around Europe, and the singers in particular were, to a large extent, foreign stars who were brought in as attractions. A little like football clubs today. “Singers were, to a large extent, foreign stars brought in as attractions. A little like football clubs today” For example, one of Handel’s principal duties was to go around Europe touting for the best talent. And that’s when you got these very interesting mixtures of homegrown singers and foreign talents – often the men tended to be English, and the higher voices tended to be foreign, the women and the castrati as well. That’s not always the case. There was a singer called Reinhold, one of Handel’s basses who, like him, came originally from Germany but lived in London. But his celebrated tenor was a man called John Beard, who had been a choirboy at the Chapel Royal. Then you get starry Italian sopranos who were brought in – competing superstars. They did! They had a punch-up on stage: Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni. From the evidence that there is, I would say no. I think he was one of these people who took what he did very seriously indeed – but he didn’t take himself very seriously. It’s a good combination. He was clearly absolutely committed to his art, and to high standards; there are lots of stories about him being very impatient with musicians who didn’t do things the way he wanted them to. Of course, many of these stories will have been embellished over the years, but they must have elements of truth. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s an occasion that I think is well attested where a singer was over-ornamenting a musical line and he threatened to throw her out the window. One of his collaborators was a violinist called Matthew Dubourg, who led the orchestra in the first performances of the Messiah . Part of the aesthetic of Baroque music was the performers would add ornament and embellishment and cadenzas to the line, and even then it was a matter of debate about how far you should go with this. Dubourg introduced a little cadenza into one of the pieces – which was expected – but he went off on a bit of a flight of fancy, and when he finally got back to the key of the piece, apparently Handel turned to him and said: ‘You are welcome home, Mr Dubourg!’ There’s another story where he was rehearsing a recitative in an opera, and the singer complained about the way he was playing the harpsichord and said to him: ‘Mr Handel, if you continue to play like that I shall jump on your harpsichord.’ He replied: ‘Well if you do, pray give me notice in advance and I will advertise, because I’m sure more people will pay to see you jump than to hear your sing.’ I think that’s probably not entirely true, but it’s a good story. All these anecdotes reflect aspects of character, of course."

"Well, as there are so many books about Handel, I tried to choose ones that cover different bases. Jonathan Keates’s book is a wonderfully evocative portrait of 18th century London, as well as of Handel the individual. Donald Burrows is an absolutely world-leading scholar and academic, and this is a very serious scholarly book. Of course, they all have their part in trying to get a picture of the man. Burrows took about 25 years to write this book, I think because Handel’s career encompasses so many aspects of music, and of performance style and context. Inevitably, there are bits that have got more attention than others. The vast majority of his music was dramatic in one sense or another – either operas or oratorios – but for the entire time of his life in London, his whole adult life from 1712, he was paid as a member of the royal household as composer to the Chapel Royal, as well as a separate pension as music master to the royal princesses. “Handel was responsible for, if not inventing the oratorio, then fashioning it into its full form” This wasn’t like when Purcell or John Blow held the same post; their job was to run the choir and to provide church music on a regular basis – Handel never did that, he didn’t write a huge amount of church music. He essentially only worked out music for special occasions: weddings, baptisms, memorials, thanksgiving services, things like that. But the relationship with the Chapel Royal provided him not only with a regular income, but with a source of singers. It was a very well-organised institution that provided great training for singers, and also for composers, and provided him with a source for choruses for his oratorios, but also soloists. A number of the men singers in his oratorios had been, and still were, members of the Chapel Royal. So it was a very close relationship, and one that went on throughout his life. Donald Burrows has gone into the detail in a fascinating way. So it provides an important thread. Also, and this is something I’m particularly interested in, it links into the time before and indeed after Handel –because the Chapel Royal was the most important musical institution in England for many centuries, and it was the training ground for all sorts of people like Byrd and Tallis and Gibbons and Morley, and then after the English Civil War, you’ve got Purcell and Blow and others. It’s easy to think of the ages of Handel and Purcell as completely different, but Purcell died in 1895, which is less than 20 years before Handel arrived. So quite a lot of singers would have known Purcell, often as boys, who then worked with Handel – like John Beard, his famous tenor, and Bernard Gates. I find this really interesting, and I think you can hear it in the music. Some of the choices of text. For example: ‘O sing unto the lord,’ as an anthem, which sets the same text that Purcell set. Okay, it’s a psalm text, plenty of people set psalm texts, but I think you can hear the influence in his setting of the English prayer book words, which Purcell did so beautifully. The alternations of solos and choruses and little instrumental interludes… I think there’s a lot of Purcell in Handel’s writing. There’s a wonderful anthem called As Pants the Hart , which Handel – typically – wrote no fewer than five different versions of, often with overlapping music. There’s a movement in there which uses a ground bass in a repeating pattern, which is a real signature of Purcell’s, and otherwise fairly unusual in Handel’s work. Well, in many ways it is. You can’t oversimplify these things, but that’s a good way of putting it. I mean, the English 18th-century oratorio was a new thing, and Handel to a very large extent was responsible for, if not inventing it, then certainly fashioning it into its full form. You can see a progression of style through his English oratorios, I think. I’ve chosen Ruth Smith’s book on Charles Jennens – – but in addition she also wrote a very, very good book called Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought , which says that each of Handel’s oratorios is… not a new form, but a new iteration of that form in its own right. So yes, I think you’re right. They are to a large extent a combination of sacred music – choruses and solos, things like fugues, old-fashioned, rather academic type of things – with drama. Of course we should remember that a large part of the reason for the oratorio coming into existence at all was the simple practical consideration that the theatres were closed in Lent, and the public wanted something to listen to. They couldn’t go to the opera because this was frivolous. So composers turned the wonderfully dramatic stories of the Old Testament – Saul and Samson and all those sorts of things –into dramas. Because they are dramas, there’s no question about that. If you listen to the last scene of Saul , with Saul visiting the Witch of Endor and the death of Jonathan… They are fantastically dramatic, personal pieces. They have often been staged. Even at the time, there was a huge amount of controversy about the extent to which sacred words, the words of the Bible , should be turned into something as light-hearted and flippant as opera. There were lots of people who objected very strongly to this; Handel had to go through all sorts of contortions to pretend that he wasn’t writing opera, when basically that was exactly what he wanted to do! One of the things you need to remember about Handel is that he was absolutely a professional. This is what opera composers did, he was working to a market. In this, he is absolutely in distinction to a composer like Bach, who pursued what, even in his own time, was becoming a slightly old-fashioned model of having a job, and writing to the job. Bach did what all of his predecessors did, which was get a job with a nobleman, or at a court, or as a town composer, something like that, where the employer would tell you what to do, and you did that. “There was a huge amount of controversy about the extent to which the words of the Bible should be turned into something as light-hearted as opera” Handel was a freelance composer. And the fact is, by the 1740s, the fad for Italian opera was on the wane. That was for the usual reasons: it was partly to do with the factions within the royal family, who were always falling out with each other. If the king went to something, the Prince of Wales wouldn’t, and vice versa. It was also – that old standby in musical history – to do with money. Opera was very expensive, as it is now. You have these divas demanding enormous fees, you get various companies having financial crises from time to time and going bankrupt, one of the famous impresarios absconding with the profits and running off to Europe… That’s partly why."

"So much of Handel’s music is setting of words – like all composers of drama. The pieces are very much collaborations, and how a composer chooses their wordsmiths – their librettists – is a key feature of musical history. Some have chosen to do it themselves, like Wagner , so they have complete control over the artwork. But most haven’t. In that case, they are to a certain extent at the mercy of their librettists, and composers haven’t always been as scrupulous as they might be about getting the best results. Handel’s librettists do vary, there’s no doubt about that. Again, often this is a question of practicality. He worked with a man called Miller on Joseph and His Brethren , one of his lesser-known oratorios, but Miller then died. So he turned back to Jennens. Jennens was a fascinating character, again revealing a different side of 18th century thought. He was much more high class than Handel, he was landed gentry with a beautiful big house. He was well-travelled, highly educated, but he also had a rather checkered background: he was a Non-Juror, so he refused to accept the legitimacy of the Hanoverian kings, which meant he wasn’t able to have any official position in Court or anything of that kind; he was essentially a man of leisure. “Jennens said Handel wrote Messiah too quickly, and that parts of it were no good, and the overture was no good” He was also – though clearly you have to be a bit careful about making medical diagnoses from 200 years’ distance – probably a depressive. He clearly had significant mood swings, he was very prickly and his letters are kind of funny sometimes in how readily he takes offence. He sees plots against him all the time. Handel is well-known himself to be short-tempered and rather grumpy, but comes across in their correspondence as rather more diplomatic. Jennens was a great letter writer. There’s lots of correspondence from Jennens to his friend Edward Holdsworth, who travelled to Europe a lot. On one occasion Jennens described Handel ‘having maggots in his brain,’ a great expression. They worked together on an oratorio on the subject of Saul, which is one of my favourite Handel works. It’s absolutely wonderful. But Jennens said Handel wrote Messiah too quickly, and he would take a whole year over it, and parts of it are no good, and the overture’s no good, and ‘I told him what bits he needs to change,’ all this kind of stuff. Handel wrote to Jennens from Dublin, where Messiah was performed; he said ‘your oratorio Messiah has been a great success’ – being very diplomatic in referring to it as your oratorio. But the important thing about Jennens was that he was a very good poet. The libretto of Saul is terrific, it’s very dramatic and it moves from this corporate universal expression to these moments of intense personal expression. In Messiah , he didn’t write the libretto, but he selected it from the scriptures. It’s important to recognise that this is completely unlike anything else, really, before or since. It’s called Messiah , and it tells the story of Christ. But it’s not a narrative; it’s not like the Passions of Bach . The name of Jesus is hardly mentioned at all. It assumes that the listener already knows the story, and what it provides is a sort of commentary on the meaning and the significance of this story. And it does it in a beautiful, very moving and well-structured way. Which suited Handel’s musical genius perfectly. It is an extraordinary achievement. There’s lots of little details, like how he would combine together two bits of text from different parts of the Bible, and maybe he might have to change a verb… For example, in the alto aria, the emotional centre of the piece is – He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Then the middle section is: He gave his back to the smiters Which comes from a different place in the book of psalms, where it reads, “ I gave my back to the smiters.” So he’s changed it to make it fit with the other piece of text that he’s chosen. That’s right. Yes. He wrote it first, then sent it to Handel. There’s correspondence where Handel acknowledges receiving it, and says he will take it on a trip to Tunbridge Wells, of all places. Well, as I say, her background is that she wrote about 18th century thought. The oratorio is a crucial link into the whole current of Enlightenment thought. Presenting sacred stories as human dramas, I see that as a key aspect of Enlightenment thinking, rather than the older, more old-fashioned, wholesome, catholic – if you like – presentation of fixed texts. She describes the character of the man so well, his wide circle of friendship, and puts him in the context of the Enlightenment, politics and finance, his family. Also, she brings out the importance of Jennens to Messiah . It really brought home to me the extent to which this work is by Handel and Jennens , even though Jennens didn’t actually write the words – because the whole shape, the whole direction was Jennens’s creation. And it is a remarkable one. That’s what that book has done so well. It’s also beautifully produced. One of the wonderful things about reading about the 18th century is that you have such an enormous wealth of visual artefacts that go with it. There are some wonderful portraits of Handel by Thomas Hudson – actually, one of them commissioned by Jennens, who could afford it – and indeed of Jennens himself, and pictures of the wonderful houses and the churches and the places that they worked. That’s important to me in a book, it brings the whole atmosphere of the kind of circles that these people moved in to life. And, again, another contrast with Bach, actually, who lived in the small town of Leipzig. Therefore there is only one portrait of Bach, and it’s not very good. It affects how we think about him, because we can’t see him. He was certainly well-off, yes. I mean, typical musician, he had his ups and downs, that’s for sure. He was very much at the mercy of fashion, and changes of pace, things like that. There were periods when his finances went into a bit of a tailspin, but by the end of his life, he was certainly comfortably off. His house in Brook Street, now a museum , is a very fine Georgian townhouse."

"That’s right, although he was younger than Handel. The reason I chose Burney was that, again, I wanted to cover the variety of sources that you have available when looking at Handel. The books we’ve talked about so far are written by modern scholars, but clearly contemporary sources are absolutely vital. One of the interesting things about the 18th century is that it was the era which, in a sense, invented the idea of the music scholar, the music historian. The first serious attempts at writing scholarly music history and biographies of composers date from the 18th century. You have the biography of Bach written by Nikolaus Forkel , who didn’t know him personally, but knew Bach’s son. A friend of Bach’s called Johann Mattheson wrote an extremely engaging and witty series of accounts of contemporary composers. Not always reliable, but funny. He knew Bach and Handel, and lots of people. He’s the one who told the story of Handel and him having a duel; they had a row over who was supposed to be playing the recitative in the opera in Hamburg. If that story is true – it doesn’t sound terribly likely. “Burney was probably the greatest of the 18th century musical historians” Handel was, in fact, the subject of the first book-length biography of a composer ever published, which is an interesting indication. It was written after his death by John Manwairing. It’s a useful source, but unfortunately has been shown to be not very accurate. For example, it gets the year of his birth wrong, which also appears on the monument to him in the nave of Westminster Abbey. But Burney, I think it’s fair to say, was probably the greatest of the 18th century musical historians and took his subject extremely seriously. He was himself a composer and musician, a little bit younger than Handel – the people he knew were more of the circle of Mozart, later in the 18th century. He was a member of a very musical family. His sister Fanny Burney was a celebrated performer. He travelled widely and he wrote a large number of books about music in Europe and an extremely important book for Handel scholars about the centenary celebrations when Messiah was performed in Westminster Abbey, along with some other works. But his General History , which is extremely long, detailed and pretty engaged in the written history of music, talks about Handel’s life and work in London, and is an extremely useful source. Not just about the details, but about the reception of the music, which I think is extremely interesting. I think this is where someone like Burney became significant, because there is a sense that this is something that hadn’t been done before. The answer to your question is that, to a large extent, Handel and Bach regarded themselves as professionals, as serious composers, but what they were doing was writing music for now . The assumption that was implicit was that in 10, 20 years’ time, somebody else would be doing something new. It was assumed that each generation would move on from the one before. Handel would revive old pieces, but this idea about writing for posterity is quite a new idea, and not really one that I think was in the forefront of their minds. It’s the late 18th century that really started to do this. In London, you had something called the ‘Society for the Performance of Ancient Music’, which was set up deliberately to keep old music in the repertoire. Before that, it was assumed that each generation made its own music and would move on from the music of the past. Interestingly, ‘ancient’ music was defined as anything more than 20 years old. So, you know, if you’re in the 1780s or 1790s, and you’re listening to J.C. Bach and Haydn, then the music of Handel and J.S. Bach is ‘old music.’ Why would you listen to that? It would be like, you know, travelling by horse and cart when you could get the train. What would be the point of that? Why would you play an old fashioned recorder when you could play on a modern flute? It would just be a daft thing to do. “‘Ancient’ music was defined as anything more than 20 years old” But people began to take the idea of looking at the past seriously. This is a very interesting moment in music, because it then also affects the role of new music. You’re no longer assuming that each generation moves on and progresses from one to the other. In which case, what does new music do – what is it for? There’s another 18th century writer called Sir John Hawkins who was a very good, interesting writer about music, who said something like: ‘It is axiomatic that you search for perfection in music. Each generation will make improvements on the one before.’ I’ll just mention one more thing before we go on. Burney did claim to have met Handel once, when he was a schoolboy in Chester, and actually it was when Handel was on the way to Dublin to perform Messiah. He has this rather good story about Handel’s boat being delayed by bad weather, and he was laid over in Chester for a few days. He had the manuscript of the script of Messiah with him, so he got in touch with the local cathedral organist, and gathered some singers together for a sing-through. The bass, apparently, was a good singer but couldn’t sight-read. Burney tells a story about how Handel lost his temper and shouted, ‘you told me you could sing music at sight!’ And the singer said, ‘Yes! So I can, sir. But not at first sight.’ Burney writes this in this comic mock-German accent – it was said that Handel never lost his accent – although I should say that quite a lot of people question whether that anecdote is actually true or not. But it’s a good story."

"The thing about Delany is that she lived pretty much the whole of the 18th century. She was born in 1700, and she died at a great age. She was also a voluminous letter writer, very well-educated, absolutely passionate about music, but also personally well connected. She was a neighbour of Handel’s. She knew him well and was a great supporter and friend. So was her brother, Bernard Granville. The two of them corresponded about Handel. She was married twice and her second husband was a man called Patrick Delany, the Chancellor of Christ Church Cathedral at the time of the first performance of Messiah. So her links with Handel were very close, and she’s a wonderful first-hand witness. She’s clearly very fond of him. This is what’s so nice about reading these letters, you’re getting a sort of real-time experience because she’s writing a letter. She also wrote several autobiographical fragments, which are more formal, but where she’s just writing to her brother or a friend, she’s not thinking that anybody else is ever going to read this, it’s just chit-chat. Let me see if I can find one. Here: I hope you find Mr Handel well. I bid compliments to him. He has no more real admirer of his great work than myself. His wonderful Messiah will never be out of my head. This is just two friends, writing about another friend. When Handel lost his sight towards the end of his life, Mrs Delany writes: Poor Handel. How feelingly must he recollect the ‘total eclipse’ This is a reference to the aria from the oratorio Samson, because Samson, of course, went blind, and there’s this beautiful aria reflecting on the loss of sight, which of course was a very personal thing to Handel. So it’s all there, he really comes across as a real person. And indeed so do many other friends. Here’s a bit from her autobiography: In the year 1710, I first saw Mr Handel. He was introduced to my uncle Stanley by Mr Heidegger, the famous manager of the opera, and the most ugly man that ever was formed. Then she plays the spinnet to Handel, a small domestic keyboard instrument, and her uncle asks if she thinks she will ever play as well as Mr Handel. ‘If I did not think I should,’ cried I, ‘I would burn my instrument!’ such was the innocent presumption of childish ignorance. She’s wonderful. This is the great thing about the 17th century. You get a lot of very colourful, feisty characters – men and women. There’s a vein of eccentricity and strong views. They’re great fun to spend time with. The onset of blindness was, I think, towards the end of the 1740s, and he lived to 1759. So certainly by the last five years of his life, he was totally blind. There are accounts of him going to dinners, and people talking to him when he’s completely lost his sight. He had to give up active participation in performances, although he did still play the organ. But he could no longer direct performances, and handed over those duties to his assistants. So it came on gradually, but over the last ten years of his life – and total loss of sight in the last five years or so. Absolutely. Yes. There was a public monument to him in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which is not there anymore, and the same sculptor, a Frenchman called Roubiliac, made the one that was put up in the nave at Westminster Abbey. This is a good indication of his standing and his status at the time of his death. I don’t want to duck the question, but one of the most remarkable things about Handel is the range of his achievement. No two pieces are alike, which means that there are so many pieces which have a wonderful appeal in their own right. Messiah is not like anything else. It has held its place at the absolute heart of… not just musical life, but of British culture since it was written. It has changed in that time, and the way we engage with it has changed, but the work itself has been able to encompass that. It’s one of the things that makes it so remarkable. At the same time, think of the coronation anthems, one of which has been sung at every coronation since 1727. I’m immensely fond of the dramatic oratorios; I think the final scenes of Saul and Samson and Esther are among the most wonderful dramatic music ever composed, and they stand alongside Mozart and Verdi and Wagner as theatre, as drama. No question about that. Then the church music as well contains great beauties. But I think Messiah has earned its place at the heart of British culture."

"It is a history of the whole of Christianity, but he has a wonderful subtitle: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years . It takes a little bit of thinking about because you think, “Hang on, surely he means two thousand years?” He doesn’t, of course, because he refers back to the Old Testament, and the history of Christianity before Christ. It’s a hugely ambitious book, but it’s just wonderfully told, and it’s full of such variety and colour, but also a tremendous amount of sympathy. He’s a very erudite, cultured writer, and I enjoyed this book very much. Music has been around as part of the celebration of Christianity since there has been Christianity, which, to follow MacCulloch’s idea, means long before Christ. The Old Testament liturgy would be chanted. If you think of the Book of Psalms, for example, it’s full of references to music, and quite detailed and elaborate references to music: “Praise him in the cymbals and dances, praise him on the strings and pipes,” the loud organs, all of this kind of thing. This is an English translation, of course, that was made in the middle of the 16th century but it’s there in the Latin vulgate, and it’s there in the original Hebrew (I don’t read Hebrew but so I’m led to understand). What you don’t have, of course, is any music. There’s no written music, there’s no obvious evidence what the music was. But there is enough evidence that there was music, MacCulloch talks about this: there are indications that it was sung, and some indications about how it was sung. For example, certain words are picked out in a certain way, which he takes to indicate that they were treated to a certain kind of emphasis when the liturgy was sung. You’re working in this fascinating field of having to imagine something from a very disparate collection of clues. MacCulloch has identified a church in Aleppo, which he describes as perhaps the best survival of the very earliest Christian tradition, and he suggests that the way that the liturgy is sung there is not dissimilar to the way it would have been sung in the days of St Paul. You can hear this online. Then, of course, you have to go a thousand years on before you start to get any notes written down on paper, even then the earliest kind of notation is pretty difficult to interpret with any kind of scholarly authority. You have plainsong, and plainsong lasted for a very long time and became extremely elaborate and varied, to the extent that some scores of plainsong are full of little squiggles, and lines, and dots, and dashes which, even now, people don’t understand. Then the first two part music is written in the form of the Winchester Troper, from the 11th century, before the Norman conquest. Here, you have a written text, words, with what look like musical symbols over the top. Some of them look quite like modern symbols—like the tails of quavers—but there are no stave lines. You can see that the musical line goes up and down, but you don’t know exactly where, or by how much. Now, what’s happening there is that one singer would be singing that text to the Plainsong tune, which all the monks in the monastery already knew, because they learnt it as children, and had sung it from memory, and were singing it all their lives, and the other guy would be reading from this Troper, and would be improvising or adding a kind of embellished second line over the top by following these little dots, and dashes, and squiggles. So, you’ve got two part music which has been composed by somebody, but you don’t really know how it goes. This is another thing that I try to look at in my book: the extent to which the tradition of church music is affected by the social, and political, and intellectual currents that are going on around it and the extent to which it reflects back the lives of ordinary people, and it really does. In France, for example, before the French Revolution there was a wonderfully rich tradition of art music in the Church, composers like Lully, and Rameau, and Charpentier, during the reign of Louis XIV and beyond, which ended at the Revolution, which was passionately anti-clerical, very against the Church. So that was that, it really didn’t find its feet again until the late 19th century with the great French organ composers, Vierne, and Widor, and others, writing Mass settings for those enormous cavernous churches with enormous organs, or usually two organs. But England somehow managed to hang on to its tradition."

"This book deals with a rather distinct and contained historical period. He looks at how the Reformation affected composition for the English Church from the day that it started, effectively, from the day the Henry VIII decided to make himself head of the Church, through the reign of Elizabeth I, and into the Jacobean period. It’s what you might call an old-fashioned work of scholarship. It looks at every source, at every piece, and it puts them into context. Again, he writes with the sort of compassion and understanding of a scholar, a musician, a practitioner, and a human being, if I can put it like that. Yes, absolutely. Le Huray deliberately writes only about music for the Reformed Church. So, for example, he would refer—in the context of Tallis—to the English service music that he composed, and he doesn’t concern himself with the Latin music. But what happened before these texts were produced is absolutely fascinating, and that’s something that this book really opened my eyes to. Before the Book of Common Prayer in 1549, there had already been some moves towards writing music in English, the very earliest settings of the Communion in English, for example, from books like the Wanley Partbooks. You can look at these in facsimile and see the composers trying to find their way. You can see them sitting down with this blank piece of paper and thinking, “Well, how do we do this, this is new, we’ve never done this before.” They’re having a go. Some of it works, and some of it doesn’t. It’s a real window into working people, working musicians trying to provide something for people to use. Well, radically, and fundamentally, and totally, and completely. But, this is now getting on to another of my books, The Stripping of the Altars by Duffy. There are fascinating accounts of how some people are told, “You must stop singing in Latin, and you must now sing in English.” So they say, “OK, yes sir,” and they sing in English, but they sing it to the same tunes, and they sing it with a kind of funny accent so they make it sound as much like the Latin as they possibly can, and it sounds funny now, but there are several accounts of this."

"Duffy is a Catholic and he is writing very much from the point of view of Catholic England. This book, The Stripping of the Altars is, in a phrase that he uses, a description of the funeral rites of Catholic England. The basic thesis of his book is that we have come to accept this idea that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was corrupt, and was venal, and was full of fat friars feathering their own nests and rich people paying for indulgences to buy their soul into heaven so they didn’t have to do any good works. He says there’s more to it than that, that this was an extremely rich cultural tradition that ran through every strand of English life. Yes, absolutely it was, and here you start to move away from music written by professionals, or written for professionals, and into music that exists for ordinary people: parish ceremonies, beating the bounds, going around the parish with a banner of your local saint, singing hymns as you go. Again, of course, we don’t know what the music was, nobody wrote it down. This was all folk song, there’d be no point writing it down because nobody could read it. They learnt it from each other; it’s an oral tradition. This is English church music in exactly the same way that ‘Stanford’ in G, or the Byrd Masses are English church music. They come from different places, but they’re all part of the tradition. Yes, it would indeed. Certainly for trained professional composers. I mean you’re talking about losing everything, your livelihood, your job, sometimes your home if you had a job working in a monastery. That happened to Tallis at Waltham Abbey. Perhaps more importantly than that, you had spent your life, from a very early age as a small child, learning these skills that had been handed down to you by your forefathers, built up over hundreds of years, and suddenly they weren’t needed anymore, nobody wanted them, so what were you going to do? “A great many leading composers of music for the English Church during the 20th century would by no means have described themselves as Orthodox believers.” But an interesting part of this story is the way that people dealt with that. They were very creative, a lot of these people were obviously very clever, and very able operators. People like Tallis and Byrd, who lived through these periods of change, always found a way. They actually ended up doing very well out of it. It didn’t always go in a straight line, but they made it work. That is one of the staggering things about it. Take a composer like Tallis, he was faced with so many challenges which came completely out of the blue. Tallis not only managed all the changes, but he contributed music to each period of change which is just perfect. That’s the thing that I think is just dazzling and mind-boggling about Tallis. You go from the early medieval type music, like an early piece, the ‘Alleluia’ for example, through those perfect little miniatures, ‘If Ye Love Me’ and ‘Hear The Voice And Prayer’, you’ve got the ‘Missa Puer Natus Est’ and the big Marian antiphons of Queen Mary’s reign, and then on into the ‘Cantiones Sacrae’ which he composed with Byrd in the 1570s when he was an old man. Not to mention pieces like ‘Spem In Alium’, and the English service music. Here was a composer who just had the rulebooks of his art torn up in front of his eyes every four or five years, and just did it better."

"I wanted to feature Erik Routley because he’s been a bit of a discovery of mine since I started writing these books. He was a priest, he lived and worked in the latter half of the 20th century, he was a hymnologist, he was very interested in English hymns. He wrote about the Wesley family—John and Charles, through Charles’ two sons, Samuel and Charles junior, and then Samuel Sebastian—and he wrote this book called The English Carol . He is my kind of writer, and I think he should be read more today. He not only knows his subject inside out he also just loves it, but not uncritically. He is passionately committed to it, but he is aware of its oddities and its inconsistencies. Above all he writes with this wonderful twinkle in his eye. There’s the occasional little joke creeping in. When he’s talking about two different versions of one particular carol he says that one of them has the atmosphere of the town, it’s a kind of constructed thing, and the other one has very much the feeling of a country carol. So he describes going from one to the other as like approaching Wolverhampton from the North by train. There’s no doubt it is true, yes. MacCulloch writes rather movingly about this actually, and I quoted from him at the end of my book. Certainly in the last 150 years or so—before that it’s difficult to say because the matter of belief was rather less equivocal, effectively there was no such thing as an atheist, that’s not entirely true, of course, because during the Enlightenment there were—it begins to be possible for establishment figures to be openly free-thinkers—to use the term of the time—and, of course, musicians and composers are by definition people who think freely about things, they are creative spirits. A great many of the leading composers of music for the English Church during the 20th century have been people who would by no means have described themselves as Orthodox believers, including some in whose cases this might be rather surprising, like Parry, for example. Well, Britten had a very conventional upbringing: churchgoing, small town, East Anglia. I think as a young man he would have considered himself to be a fairly conventional Christian, but I don’t think he would as an adult. Certainly Vaughan Williams, whose father was a vicar, wasn’t. Michael Tippett very much wasn’t, nor was Herbert Howells, and there you have some very important contributors to the tradition. That’s an interesting question. We’re getting into rather philosophical territory here, but I feel it’s possible to hear these composers using the liturgy and the words of the Church of England as a work of art. The point of a work of art is to try and explore the human condition. I think that you’ve got composers here who are saying these words, this tradition, represents a monumental, very profound, very moving, and beautifully expressed attempt to make sense of what it means to be human. Now I, as an individual, can’t pretend that I think that it has found the answers, but I find that the manner of the investigation is worth my while, worth being part of, I think that’s partly how I see it. I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies about this, and he very kindly allowed me to quote from this in my book. He said “I admire the Church as a work of art, but I find it very difficult to believe.” There will be some who find that statement difficult, possibly even unwelcome, but he has contributed some wonderful music. Well, it’s all down to the individual isn’t it? A more extreme example would be Michael Tippett, who was clearly a free-thinker in all sorts of ways, not by any means a conventional believer in any kind of orthodox system. But it didn’t stop him writing church music. He wouldn’t write anything that contained any statement of belief, but he was able to compose a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis for my old college: St John’s, Cambridge. But when he was asked to write a piece for Canterbury Cathedral, he tied himself into knots trying to find a text that he could live with, and he ended up with a Latin medieval poem about angels, which is great, why not? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But let’s be clear, this isn’t everybody. You say, do you think that is a creative thing, that sort of tension inside the personality, and yes, in the case of these people, absolutely it is. But at the same time you’ve got a composer like James MacMillan for example, whose faith permeates every aspect of his creativity, and, again, with absolutely wonderful musical results."

"The interesting thing about this book is that it deals very deliberately with a side of English church music which is fascinating, and important, and wonderful, and rich, but largely ignored. That’s to say, not music for professional choirs, written by professional trained composers that we’ve all heard of, but music for the ordinary man, and woman, and children in the pew: music for the parish church. Temperley says in his introduction that he got interested in this and started reading about it, and was astonished to discover that nobody had actually studied it systematically, so he decided that’s what he was going to do, and he came up with what is clearly the defining work on that subject. Practicality, I think, more than anything else. This is music that had to be written for use by ordinary people, people who at some periods had some musical knowledge, but not terribly much, so it had to be accessible. It had to be liturgically acceptable, which meant obviously it was in English. But it was music that had to fit with what you had. For example, in music for the ‘musickers’ as they were known—the people who made music in a choir up to the middle of the 18th century—the tune was in the tenor, because you had mostly men and your farm labourers would bellow out the tune and that was all fine. Then when you get into the 19th century you start to get the vicar’s wife training up the children of the Sunday school, and the girls, to sing tunes. Then the tune migrates into the treble. These little details in the score tell you something about society, and the way things were changing. Some of it is, yes. Our English church music tradition has been able to absorb anything and everything. Our hymn tradition comes from all over the place. A hymn like ‘The Spacious Firmament On High’ for example, was originally composed with this treble-type setup. Whereas the hymns that are often in three-time like the tune Rockingham, ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross’, was originally written in one of these country songbooks—of which there were a great many at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century—with the tune in the tenor. A fascinating aspect of parish church music is when the choir started to develop, and a separate group of people would make a piece of music on their own. You get some wonderfully characterful bands of singers and instrumentalists, in particular in the West Gallery tradition at the turn of the 19th century, described tremendously vividly by Thomas Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree , and elsewhere. There’s a huge amount of it in church cupboards all over the country, particularly in the South and West of England, but it’s only in the last 30 years or so that people have started to dig it up and have a look at it. Hymn singing? Well, there have always been challenges, and people have always risen to them. There are still companies which put a lot of time and effort into producing hymn books. I’ve worked a little bit over the years with Kevin Mayhew who runs a publishing company which is dedicated to providing music for parish church use, so you’ll write a piece and then be asked to arrange it for organ with no pedals, and an organ with one note in the pedals, and then an organ with slightly more elaborate pedals. He has produced a hymn book, Hymns Old and New , which seems to address exactly that; what key should it be in, where should the tune be, how many parts should it be in, all of this kind of thing, so the debate goes on."