It started for me about two years previously when I was appointed Administrator. I couldn’t believe my luck at the time and I suspect that it fell to my lot by default. I had been on the periphery for some years, first as a Door Keeper for two seasons and then as Cathedral Operations Manager and at each stage, even then, I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be involved.
We come to these times and places by circuitous ways, paying for tickets, working with or performing in them and as with Eliot in Little Gidding, “If you came this way taking any route, starting from anywhere....it would always be the same: you would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid” Eliot came upon his place of pilgrimage that had been, perhaps, a unique Anglican community in the 1600s. We come to these three cities annually as our forebears have done for nearly three hundred years and these three ancient cathedrals have stood for many centuries more as testament to the great religious truths that they represent. We come in homage to these places, homage to the music engendered in its origin by the three choirs to support the widows and orphans of clergy. So it is peculiarly English and in its essence Anglican, but even so it has drawn to it composers of other denominations and of none. Do we “follow an antique drum”, we pilgrims in an English summer? Perhaps so, but Eliot’s drum had not been beaten for centuries and ours has never ceased to have been beaten. Our festival, the oldest one still surviving, may be venerable in the extreme, but it is as vibrant now as it was then and we do not seek to revive traditions or policies since we have maintained their use and they have developed organically as the centuries roll on.
The festival has always nurtured and encouraged new work; now we commission works from avant-garde composers and in doing so earn valued grant-aid from the Arts Council and other bodies who seek to invest in artistic risk. In latter years many of this country’s finest composers were closely associated with it and when you consider that then, Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Bath were merely places on a map, the Three Choirs Festival was pre-eminent. The big industrial cities joined in with triennial festivals and although they have ceased, our festival survives.
What is unique with the Three Choirs Festival is its structure; there is a an overall body that controls it, but it is down to the local musical director and committee for the staging of each one and each has its own idiosyncratic character just as each city and county is different. But, overriding all of this is the fact that Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester lie on the western side of England. I was sent a long treatise from a visitor from Sweden about his visit to the 2005 Worcester festival and he wrote in the most flawless and, indeed, idiomatic, English about his journey to and his thoughts on that occasion. He opened by telling us that his true journey started not from Gothenburg, but when arriving at Paddington, and he quoted liberally from John Masefield. If you came by this route, by train, you would come from Paddington and pace Mr. Eliot, although there are many, this really is the best route, it is the road to the west, then you would be likely to take “The Cathedrals Express”, redolent of British Rail, and although passing through Worcester on the way to Hereford, it ignores Gloucester; so, two cathedrals instead of three, we have to forgive the omission. And when you come to Paddington and turn your face to the west as inevitably you must do, then your pilgrimage begins. Am I an incurable romantic? Well, perhaps I am. But you do pass through the most romantic scenery, through the Gloucestershire of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Parry and Ivor Gurney into the Worcestershire of Elgar and A.E. Housman and finally into Herefordshire, also a home of Elgar, William Langland and Traherne. When you leave Worcester Foregate Street the next stop is Great Malvern, all Victorian wrought-iron and then, under the Hills through two tunnels, you emerge past the Royal Mineral Water factory into Herefordshire. As a young boy, I remember looking east from Herefordshire Beacon and thinking, “Ah! Those are the Cotswolds.” And then, in later years, as a resident of the Cotswolds, I would look longingly westwards and think, yes, those are the Malverns and one day I will cross them and go home.
The Three Choirs Festival stands on its own; an organic development over nearly three centuries. It is not the product of one man’s initiative; it is not the product of a brain-storming session; it arose to support those who had no other help and such an origin can be no less than admirable. In essence, it retains its original structure and is characterised by an endearing Englishness with its committees of friends and its festival clubs, but it has achieved the stature of total excellence that lures and then beguiles its fanatical following to such an extent that they stoically accept the woeful loos and the hard, cramped seats; they fan themselves with their programmes to alleviate the sultry heat of a crowded cathedral, just to be there for that music, for that heritage, for the first night, for the last night and for any in-between.
Are they pilgrims? Well, yes, I think that they are because in any pilgrimage there is an element of self-indulgence - it has to be good for the soul and I, for one and I am sure that I am not untypical, feel closer to God at the end than I do at the beginning and, if I were an atheist, in spite of myself, I may still feel the same.
When I wrote my Hereford Newsletters, I conceived the image of our festival as the object of a pilgrimage and as Chaucer encouraged his companions to tell their stories on the way to Canterbury, so I elicited some stories from my colleagues to share with you in the run-up to the summer. I made one up myself and embroidered them with my own prologues in a tongue-in-cheek Chaucerian style and sent them winging their digital way all over the world, half fearing an indignant response. Only two recipients removed their names from my list over the year; perhaps the rest were just too polite. From the responses that I got back I found a chiming with their own views.
Philip Dickinson
Hereford Administrator 2006
