In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      3 Besides the twelve Lay Clerks, another three deputies or supernumeraries should be appointed on a retainer of £52 p.a. to take the place of those who might be absent because of illness or for other good reasons. In large towns competent amateur singers should be recruited to augment the contribution of the professionals on special occasions or when the music demands larger forces.

      4 The cathedral organist should be ‘a professor of the highest ability’, competent not only as an organist, but also as a choir-trainer and a composer. He should be chosen by the organists of seven other cathedrals and rewarded with a salary of £500–£800 p.a. (more at St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey) for ‘such men are the bishops of their calling – men consecrated by their genius, and set apart for duties which only the best talent of the kind can adequately fulfil.’ They would, however, be required to take no outside engagements.

      5 A College of Music should be founded for training of all organists, choirmasters, composers and lay clerks – this to serve and be funded by several cathedral or other choral foundations.

      6 A national ‘Musical Commission’ should be founded to advise, and where necessary exercise authority over, the church’s music. It should also administer a common fund to assist with the training of choristers, the purchase of printed music and the repair or rebuilding of organs wherever local resources were limited.

      A few years later (1854) Wesley sent these proposals, accompanied by a number of characteristically pungent comments, in a published Reply to the Inquiries of the Cathedral Commissioners relative to the Improvement in the Music of Divine Worship in Cathedrals.

      Admirable though Wesley’s ideas might, in principle, seem to those responsible for cathedral music in the twenty-first century, it was unrealistic to believe that they would be enthusiastically welcomed in his own time. He probably recognized this and offered them as a challenge that might provoke some positive response. But, although he lived and worked for almost another 30 years, he was destined to be disappointed. It was not until well into the twentieth century that most deans and chapters began to increase significantly the financial resources necessary for the production of high-quality music, and although cathedral music has now reached a standard never previously attained, except possibly in the High Middle Ages, this is due at least as much to the selfless dedication of the musicians as it is to the priorities of those who employ them.

      Samuel Sebastian Wesley was born in London’s West End in 1810. His father Samuel was a son of Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer and brother of John, the founder of the Methodist movement. Samuel was one of the finest organists of his time, a notable composer and an early student and performer in Britain of the works of J. S. Bach, hence the choice of Sebastian for the second Christian name of his son. Samuel Sebastian was, in fact, the first of seven illegitimate children born after the failure of his father’s first marriage and when he had established a new relationship with his housekeeper. This irregularity undoubtedly stood in the way of a cathedral appointment for the gifted father; he also had a depressive personality that quite soon limited both the quality and quantity of his compositions.

      Young Samuel Sebastian displayed unusual musical talent from his earliest years and in 1818 was sent to the Chapel Royal where the choir was under the direction of a notable musician, William Hawes, who combined this with responsibility for the music at the English Opera House and the training of the choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral. The musical education provided by Hawes could not have been bettered and he later described his prodigy as the best pupil he ever had. But the level of general education offered to the boys was poor and the boarding conditions harsh. Nevertheless, Samuel Sebastian flourished and in 1823 went to Brighton to sing before King George IV. In December of the same year he performed a piano duet with Rossini which so pleased the King that he presented him with a gold watch.

      Aged 15 he was appointed organist of St John’s proprietary chapel in Hampstead and was capable enough to join his father in organ duets performed for audiences in London and Bristol. Four years later he moved to become organist of St Giles Parish Church, Camberwell, in South London, and quickly added to this responsibility for the music at what was then the new church of St John, Waterloo Road. He also found time and energy to play for the evening services at Hampton in West London, and, to keep himself occupied on weekdays, he conducted the band at performances of comic opera at the Opera House in the Strand. He once regretted that he had never managed to compose a comic opera.

      In 1831, aged 21, he composed his first anthem, ‘O God, whose nature and property is always to have mercy’, and in the following year was appointed organist of Hereford Cathedral. The dean, John Merewether, was one of the earliest cathedral reformers and there was much to claim his attention, not least in the music department. The eight adult members of the choir were all clergymen, whose ages ranged from 49 to 78. Five of these were in poor health, two were deemed to be sub-standard, and the eighth, the 78-year-old, exempt from attending. In order to meet this situation, the previous organist, himself in an advanced state of infirmity, had composed three Communion service settings for boys and a single bass voice.

      Wesley’s appointment was designed to deal with this situation, but, since the organ was due to be enlarged, his arrival in Hereford was delayed by just over a year. This left him with time for a lengthy holiday in the Black Mountains of Wales, the experience of which inspired his landmark verse-anthem ‘The wilderness and the solitary place’. This was performed for the first time (with what choral resources is unknown) at the re-opening of the organ in November 1832, and was widely acclaimed, though when he submitted it for the national Gresham Medal the adjudicators did not like it. One of them complained: ‘It is a clever thing, but it is not cathedral music.’ This did not prevent it from being performed subsequently in many cathedrals, some at the present time. Its length – a full 12 minutes – is now a major problem, and even Wesley admirers concede that it has some weaknesses, but it is a very remarkable work and would be welcomed by many cathedral congregations as an occasional substitute for the Sunday Evensong sermon. More accessible and still deservedly popular was the anthem ‘Blessed be the God and Father’, which he composed, at the request of the dean, for Easter Day the following year. This became his best-known anthem, and, after an inauspicious start – its first performance was by a row of trebles and a single bass (the dean’s butler) – it was sung in Westminster Abbey at the wedding of the present Queen and is part of the standard repertory of every cathedral choir and of many parish church choirs.

      Wesley was at Hereford for a mere three years, which was just long enough for him to be the conductor of the Three Choirs Festival, which included an eclectic mixture of fine music – sacred and secular – and also in 1835 to marry the dean’s sister, Mary Anne. Evidently the dean did not approve of the union and the wedding took place quietly in Ewyas Harold Church, some miles from Hereford.

      A few weeks later he moved to Exeter and in 1836, believing that he might one day secure an academic appointment, he applied for BMus and DMus degrees at Oxford. These required him to submit and perform one of his own compositions, and the anthem he chose for this purpose required a choir. The examination was therefore held in Magdalen College Chapel and the quality of the college choir at that time was candidly expressed in a local newspaper account of the event. Having congratulated Wesley on a fine composition and his introduction on the organ, it added, ‘but of the vocal line we could not fairly judge, the singers, in many parts, being both out of time and out of tune’.

      Wesley’s early years at Exeter were without serious incident, though he was always short of money, and in a revealing letter to Vincent Novello, the music publisher, he explained his late delivery of a promised composition:

      I hope to be able to comply with your desire respecting the Voluntary. I now have several engagements to fulfil with Publishers in London, but the dreadful nature of an organist’s, I mean a county cathedral organist’s, occupation, that of giving lessons all over the county from morning to night makes composing a pleasure hardly to be indulged СКАЧАТЬ