DOCTOR HERBERT HOWELLS, CH.
Forty years ago ….. when close and together parted were those
who were singing that day, they marched out of the old school hall
to a jaunty little tune.
It was a march written while he was still at school by a boy named Herbert
Howells. The story goes that one night his mother discovered him sitting at
the piano in his night clothes. He should have been in bed.
Today the hero of that musical escapade is Dr. Herbert Howells Companion of
Honour, Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music and one of the
most contemporary composers.
When I look back and forgetfully wonder little thought as I marched to his
music that one day our paths would cross and that I would come to know something
of his gentleness as a man and his greatness as a musician.
I do not use that word greatness lightly. Because he has concentrated his gifts
mostly to small forms like songs and chamber music and to the church, his fame
is not universal. But it is established and will endure.
Indeed his church music is in the tradition of Bach and his largest work and
masterpiece, Hymnus Paradisi, ranks with the masses and passions that religion
has inspired in musicians through the centuries.
To bring it back to school, Herbert Howells is to my mind one Old Grammarian
whose name will live, so long as men make music.
Herbert Howells was born in High Street, Lydney,"near to the Baptist
Chapel" as he puts it, on October 17, 1892. At the age of 13 he became
a pupil of Herbert Brewer, organist at Gloucester Cathedral, to whom he was
articled for two years, 1909-11. He then began to show that gift for composition
which had first flickered when he crept downstairs to compose his little march.
In 1912 he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music. Within his
first year there, under the tutelage of Charles Villiers Stanford, one of his
compositions, Mass in the Dorian Mode, was given its first London performance,
conducted by Richard Terry at Westminster Cathedral.
A year later his first concerto for piano and orchestra was performed at Queen's
Hall.
The Carnegie Trust chose a piano quartet of his to be their first publication
and another quartet was awarded the coveted Cobbett Prize.
But just as, still in his early twenties, he was on the fringe of being a successful
composer, which he would modestly claim he never intended to be, fate stepped
in.
He was always physically frail and while at Salisbury, where he had accepted
a post as sub-organist, his health broke down. He spent much of his late twenties
in St. Thomas's Hospital London, and in his native Gloucestershire.
In perspective this unhappy time was possibly an almost fortunate break in
his career. For he was achieving fame. Fame at 25 can be heady and lead to
excesses which might have encouraged him to write what might be called more
popular music - not of course in the present use of that phrase, pop - and
seek public acclaim.
Instead he was able to follow that path where fame was not the spur but dedicated
devotion to the great gifts that God had given him.
And so he wrote music which showed a passion for perfection and precision of
workmanship. If he could not perfect it, at least to his own satisfaction,
he destroyed it. (Perhaps old Pa Dixon had told him as he once told me "Write
a lot and burn a lot!")
He has been described as"a modern without self consciousness or affection,
like himself, lively but aloof".
Fame there came, however. Two works, Merry Eye and Puck's Minuet, one
of his most charming, and indeed, popular, works were played by Sir Henry Wood
at the then Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts.
A second piano concerto written for Harold Samuel and performed by him at a
Royal Philharmonic Society in 1924 indeed caused a stir and accusations of "modernism".
In 1920, at the age of 28, he was appointed to teach composition at the Royal
College of Music where, at the time of writing he still continues a respected
and well loved teacher of the art to which he has devoted his life.
During the distinguished fifty years that were marked on his 80th birthday
by a party at the Royal College, to which I had the pleasure of being invited,
Dr. Howells served music as composer, conductor, critic, organist, and adjudicator
both in his country and abroad.
He continued to write his kind of music. Some of it was inspired by his native
Gloucestershire. Like his friend, the poet, G. W. Harvey, he turned his eyes
towards the skies and saw"the blue high blade of Cotswold" and"jagged
Malvern."
"No-one" he once said"born and bred within the sight of those
hills can be unaffected by their gentle outlines and see those hill from a distance
without some quietness and haziness falling upon his harmonic schemes."
It was Gloucestershire and a very personal tragedy that was to produce his
masterpiece, Hymnus Paradisi.
In his private room at the Royal College he told me about it in a conversation
I shall not forget.
Quietly, in that aloof, precise but gentle manner he spoke almost as though
he was talking about somebody else. It was in 1935. Asked what he would like
for his ninth birthday his son Michael Kendrick said he would like to have
a holiday in the lovely land where his father was born. So they came down and
stayed at Gunter's Farm in Bream. There, one afternoon they played with
bat and ball in the fields. In the evening the boy complained of being tired.
It seemed natural. But later that night he wandered from his room and collapsed.
His father rode on his bicycle through the night to the doctor at Coleford.
The doctor knew what Herbert Howells did not know: there had been an outbreak
of polio in the area.
The boy was rushed to London but died.
Hymnus Paradisi was dedicated to his memory. Yet it was not performed until
15 years later. I asked why.
"It was not written for performance. I wrote it to try to recover from
Michael's death" he said simply.
It was years later that the composer Vaughan Williams saw a copy and persuaded
Howells to have it performed at the Three Choirs Festival, Gloucester.
There, in September, 1950, it "burst forth like the blaze of a thousand
suns" as one who heard it said.
When the story had been told, Dr. Howells nodded to a grand piano in the room.
"That" he said "was Michael's".
It had been promised to him by a friend for his 21st Birthday and on the day
he would have been 21 it was delivered.
The next day, at the party, I introduced my son. He turned to me and asked "The
only son?" I said "Yes".
"Now" he said "you know how I felt."
There were no tears, at least not in his eyes. But I knew that I had not only
been lit into the secret of how a masterpiece was born. I had seen a man go through
hell to reach heaven.
Ivon Adams
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