St Cecilia Singers Concert at Highnam Church conducted by Ashley Grote

The lecture to accompany Parry's Songs of Farewell by Anthony Boden

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to the Church of the Holy Innocents, Highnam, for this Three Choirs Festival performance of the Songs of Farewell by Sir Hubert Parry in which the St Cecilia Singers will be directed by Ashley Grote.

My name is Anthony Boden, and my part in the proceedings this morning is to give you a very brief introduction to the church and its importance to the Parry family; to outline Sir Hubert’s life and work, and to set the scene for the composition of his Songs of Farewell.

But first, I would like to pay a brief but heartfelt tribute to Tom Fenton, the Squire of Highnam and great-grandson of the founder of this church, Thomas Gambier Parry. Very sadly, Tom’s life was cut short by a heart attack on 7th July. Tom had loved this church with a passion. When he came to Highnam at the age of 18, he found the fabric of the church in a very poor state of repair: damaged by damp, and the interior decoration blackened by a century of smoke from oil lamps. But he was determined to restore his great-grandfather’s masterwork, and whilst setting about raising the considerable sum needed to do it, he sought out the best professional advice and workmanship to enable him to accomplish the wonderful result that you see here today: one of the finest Victorian church interiors in England returned to pristine freshness.

Amongst Tom’s many and varied interests, he included active involvement in the life of Gloucester Cathedral and staunch support of the Three Choirs Festival — indeed, he and his wife Debbie sponsored this concert. He was a valued member of the Festival Chorus and the Gloucester Choral Society, and he had also been a member of the St Cecilia Singers. Tom was a true gentleman, possessing that rare gift of making anyone who met him feel special and valued. He was loved by many, and those of us lucky enough to have been counted among his close friends will never forget his infectious sense of fun, his delightful, open personality and his warm spirit. So it is fitting that the choir is dedicating this morning’s performance of the Songs of Farewell to Tom’s memory.

We are going to divide them into three groups and I will speak before each. The songs will follow my words without interruption so, if you do feel moved to applaud, we would be grateful if you will please delay your appreciation until the end of the concert. There will be two songs in the first group, ‘My soul, there is a country’ and ‘I know my soul hath power’; three songs in the second group, ‘Never weather-beaten sail’, ‘There is an old belief’’ and ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ and, after my third and final contribution, we will hear the last song, Parry’s sublime setting of Psalm 39, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’.

And what more fitting venue could there be in which to hear Parry’s magnificent late motets than this, the church built by his father, Thomas Gambier Parry? Highnam Court was the Parry family home, and it was here in this church that the then organist, Edward Brind, gave Hubert, when he was a boy in the 1850s, his first lessons on the piano. Thanks to Brind also, Hubert was introduced to the elements of counterpoint and harmony, was taught to play the organ, and played and took services here even before his feet could reach the pedals. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Highnam remained a place close to Hubert Parry’s heart until the end of his life.

Hubert’s father, Thomas Gambier Parry, was a polymath: an artist in both water-colour and fresco. His work includes the rich interior decoration that you see around and above you, but he was also responsible for decorating the St Andrew’s Chapel in Gloucester Cathedral, the nave ceiling in Tewkesbury Abbey and, most magnificent of all, the major part of the nave ceiling and lantern in Ely Cathedral. But he was also a connoisseur and collector of art. He filled his home, Highnam Court, with many Italian masterpieces; he was a composer, arbrologist, generous philanthropist, ecclesiologist and a staunch anglo-catholic. He was an influential figure at the Three Choirs Festival, a leading Tory and was actively involved in many other spheres of public life in Gloucestershire and beyond. In fact, he has been accurately described as ‘a character straight out of the pages of Trollope, the best brand of amateur, a country gentleman of means willing to spend his money in the public service’.

The building of a church upon this spot was, for Thomas Gambier Parry and his adored wife, Isabella, a long-held ambition. But their blissful marriage had been punctuated by sadness. Of five children born to them by 1846, three had died in infancy — hence the name of this church: the Holy Innocents. By the end of 1847, Isabella was again heavily pregnant but also in the final stages of tuberculosis. On medical advice, Thomas took her down to Bournemouth, hoping beyond hope that the sea air would halt the destruction of her lungs. Sadly, it did not. On Sunday 27 February, 1848, summoning her remaining strength, Isabella gave birth to a son, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. Twelve days later, she died aged thirty-one. Thomas returned to Highnam Court and resolved to set about realising the dream that he had shared with Isabella.

The construction of the church began in 1849, and for the next three years, work on this project, together with ongoing work on the pinetum and gardens at Highnam Court, absorbed much of Thomas’s abundant energy, diverting his mind from grief. Tuesday 29 April 1851 was the date set for the consecration of the church. Nineteen guests had been invited to stay at Highnam Court on the previous night. When they had all gone to bed, ‘and the new church stood gaunt and silent under the moon’, Thomas Gambier Parry made his way here alone. He carried in his arms a bust of Isabella, made in Rome in 1844 by the sculptor W. Tweed. Thomas had instructed his architect, Henry Woodyer, to prepare a niche in the wall of the chapel on the south side of the chancel, and into this he now placed the bust of Isabella, which remains there undisturbed to this day. The church was, at last, complete. Thomas Gambier Parry recorded in his journal: ‘The greatest day in my life is over…Little Hubert was taken to church for the first time in his life (since his baptism at Bournemouth)… May he have a great share in the blessings of this consecration!’

Little Hubert certainly was blessed: destined to become, along with Stanford, one of the two leading figures in the English musical renaissance of the 1880s. Later, as Director of the Royal College of Music and as composer, scholar and teacher, he was to influence and inspire not only his own many students: men such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells, John Ireland and Ivor Gurney but, as Frank Howes put it, ‘the whole artistic life of his time’.

So, let us now hear the first two of Hubert Parry’s six Songs of Farewell, both settings in four parts of words by 17th-century poets. Firstly, ‘My soul, there is a country’, a setting of the poem ‘Peace’ by Henry Vaughan, and secondly, ‘I know my soul hath power’, two stanzas from the poem ‘Man’ by John Davies.

Choir: My soul, there is a country I know my soul hath power

Given his background, one might imagine that Sir Hubert Parry would have slipped easily into step with his father’s religious and political views. However, perhaps as a reaction to the rigid orthodoxy of those views, Hubert came to reject dogmatic theology, institutional religion and sectarianism, which became to him more and more irreconcilable with charity, wise toleration, and respect for private judgement. He chose instead to follow both a radical path in politics and a heterodox approach to religion. Herbert Howells recorded how he had first seen Parry in the Shire Hall at Gloucester, taking the chair at a political meeting. There was a Liberal candidate up for a by-election, and this was a Liberal meeting chaired by Parry, who was known as a Liberal. At the start of the meeting many were against the candidate, even against Parry, yet at the end it was Parry, not the candidate, who got a standing ovation. He had sufficient far-sightedness and grasp of the political situation to sense that this particular candidate was the right man to send to Westminster at that Asquithian time.

This was typical of Parry; his mind was so concentrated on things right outside music, and, at the College, he never tired of making us students remember that if we allowed our outlooks to become hedged in by purely musical matters and refused to allow the wider, broader issues of life — not merely of art — into our minds, we could never become complete human beings. Hubert Parry was an idealist with a great belief in humanity. ‘Art’, he wrote, ‘is a form of devotion. Everything that endeavours to beautify and make loveable the surroundings and the ideas of man is part of devotional religion. It is devotion to the beautiful aspect of things — the things which minister to spiritual well being, to truth.’

He had been appointed to the Board of the newly-founded Royal College of Music from soon after its inception in 1882, and in 1894 succeeded Sir George Grove as Director of the College, a post that he held until his death in 1918. His impact at the College during those years was both immense and long lasting. Given the huge workload and the stresses of his responsibilities at that pioneering time in the life of the College, it is amazing that Parry was also able to find time to compose so prolifically and that so many of his works are undoubted masterpieces. One thinks immediately, of course, of Blest pair of sirens, described by Elgar as ‘amongst the noblest works of man’; of the 4th and 5th Symphonies; and the superb Ode on the Nativity, composed for the 1912 Three Choirs Festival at Hereford and to be heard again next Saturday evening. Everyone is familiar with Jerusalem, of course, but there remain many fine choral, orchestral and chamber works, as well as more than a hundred songs, which remain long overdue for revival.

The Songs of Farewell stand high amongst those masterpieces. They were completed during the First World War, an agonising time for Parry as he saw countless young men, including many of his students, setting out for the trenches of Flanders and the Somme to fight against German aggression. An agony made all the worse for Parry whose devotion to the great legacy of German music formed the wellspring of his inspiration. ‘I have been a quarter of a century and more a pro-Teuton’, he confessed in his 1914 College Address. As Jeremy Dibble points out in his masterly biography of Parry, allied with Parry’s disgust at Germany’s infamous behaviour ‘was an incredulity combined with a profound sense of betrayal that a nation of artistic heroes, who had taught him everything and to whose mast he had nailed his true colours, could be capable of such carnage’.

Amongst those many of his former students who marched away were several who had demonstrated exceptional promise and whose loss to music would have been unthinkable; men such as Arthur Benjamin, Arthur Bliss, George Butterworth, George Dyson, Ernest Farrar, Douglas Fox, Ivor Gurney, E.J. Moeran, Ralph Vaughan Williams and a reputedly brilliant viola player and composer who was a very close friend of Herbert Howells, Francis Purcell Warren. Of this outstanding group, Butterworth, Farrar and Warren were all mown down. Gurney was gassed near Passchendaele in 1917 and, in mental collapse, for a while seriously contemplated suicide on his evacuation back to this country. He wrote to Parry, saying ‘I know that you would rather know me dead than mad’. And when Douglas Fox, an outstanding organist, returned home in January 1918 he had lost his right arm. He visited Parry, who was so overcome with compassion that he could barely speak.

Now to three more of the Songs of Farewell. For the gentle 'Never weather beaten sail’ by Thomas Campion the parts increase to five, and then to six for ‘There is an old belief’ by John Gibson Lockhart, which was sung at Hubert’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ is a seven-part setting of one of John Donne’s Divine Meditations in which the poet stands in awe of the Last Judgement; and surely at the words ‘Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes shall behold God and never taste death’s woe’, Hubert’s vision was that of his father’s great Doom, here, above our heads.

Choir: Never weather-beaten sail, There is an old belief, At the round earth’s imagined corners

Sir Hubert Parry spent three days at Highnam in December 1917. The situation he found here was, he wrote, ‘heart-rending’. Government instructions had been given to ‘cut down a large number of the finest elms in the place! I had to go round this week to look at them all. Glorious, old, noble trees that have taken centuries to grow—and doomed irrevocably. They are going to clear the whole of the chestnut wood in the next fortnight —shave it off clean. The larch wood by the brickfields is to be cleared—and they threaten to take all the ash in the woods, as they say they are too good and straight. The place looks bald already. What it will be when they have accomplished all their fell designs is too tragic to think of’. The felling of so many trees, trees that he had known all of his life, brought to his mind, inevitably perhaps, a ghastly parallel with the felling of the flower of Britain’s youth in war.

In his youth, Hubert Parry was an all-round sportsman who flung himself fearlessly into every game with almost foolhardy abandon. In adulthood, he was a passionate yachtsman—always happiest on the roughest seas—and an enthusiastic if appalling motorist. He had an open nature, a great sense of humour, and inspired both admiration and adoration in equal measure. Children, especially, loved him. He was the archetypal favourite uncle who could arrive at a lacklustre birthday party and within moments have bored children bursting with laughter and delight as he joined in their rumbustious games. ‘My father’, wrote his daughter Gwendolen, ‘stood pre-eminent and alone as both the loved centre and the training ground of our lives. His was the spirit to whom we owed our first recognition of loveliness; the first intimations of beauty spoke through him’.

Writing of Parry in 1916, the musicologist H.C. Colles recalled that ‘Among the many fine pictures by Italian masters, which Sir Hubert’s father collected and which decorate the walls of Highnam Court is one of the coming of the Magi to the infant Christ. When Sir Hubert showed me this he pointed out how one of the three wise men was nestling his head up to the child in a sheer ecstasy of loving-kindness. Whenever I hear the Ode on the Nativity Sir Hubert’s music brings that picture before my mind. Quite apart from music Sir Hubert himself recalls the picture of the loving wise man, and it is because that quality touches every aspect of his many-sided character that those who know him think lovingly of Sir Hubert Parry as the first English Musician of modern times.’

Sir Hubert Parry died on 7 October 1918. After 1914, although demoralised by the First World War, wearied by tensions at the Royal College of Music, and increasingly troubled by deteriorating health, in these years he gave expression in his Songs of Farewell to a faith which was both unorthodox and unshakeable. For the final motet, set for double choir, he turned to the Bible, to Psalm 39, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’: a confession of the uselessness of riches and vanity, an acceptance of the brevity of life, and a plea for forgiveness, ending in a final supplication: ‘O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen’.

Choir: Lord, let me know mine end

© Anthony Boden 10 August 2010 www.anthonyboden.co.uk