Last year’s Public Singing Day explored Sir Edward Elgar’s delightful Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, while this year’s focussed on two other fine works by “Englishmen Abroad.” All three combine to make a varied, tuneful and uplifting concert of music by giants if the late Victorian an Edwardian ages.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) experienced both prejudice and popularity as a black composer, but his trilogy of Cantatas setting Longfellow’s poems telling the story of Hiawatha were particularly liked by both audiences and performers. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is the best known of the three. While there was a real Native American leader named Hiawatha, Longfellow simply appropriated the name for the eponymous hero of The Song of Hiawatha. This work, and especially the Wedding Feast, became staples of the English amateur choral tradition but fell somewhat out of favour. The recent focus on neglected composers of colour or female has reignited interest in all Coleridge-Taylor’s varied output. Here he captures perfectly the rhythms and colours of the narrative poem.
Elgar, often regarded as a quintessentially English composer, was mostly self-taught, learned most of what he knew from Wagner, and was a symphonist in the German tradition. Among his champions were the German conductor Max Richter and German-born publisher August Jaeger, immortalised as Nimrod. From humble origins, and as a Roman Catholic, Elgar always felt an outsider in England, who nonetheless captured the spirit and grandeur of the Edwardian Age, though he hated the words Land of Hope and Glory superimposed on perhaps his most famous tune.
He was deeply saddened by war with Germany and by fascism looming when he died. Despite the photo of him on a bicycle in the Malvern Hills, he was never happier than when holidaying in the Bavarian Alps with his wife Alice, a chance to relax – or exert himself on two wheels – in the countryside, soak up local culture (and beer), and hopefully to boost his low self-confidence. Alice who nurtured and supported him in dark times, penned the poems that form the texts of Six Songs from the Bavarian Highlands. Elgar in lighter vein, but he was a master of the genre as witnessed by popular favourites such as Salut d’Amour and Chanson du Matin. Elgar once said that English folk song was “tunes by me” and while these tunes may not be genuine German folk melodies, they certainly capture their character.
Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918) is best known for his tune for Blake’s Jerusalem, but he composed in many genres and is surely one of Britain’s neglected composers, with far too few performances even in his native land of works such as his symphonies and the oratorio Judith. From a wealthy background, a baronet, his musical interests were somewhat hampered by his family and Eton College. Rejecting insurance, which he hated, he became a successful composer and renowned as a teacher, favouring the rigour of German masters such as Brahms and demanding it of students, though Vaughan Williams recalled him being open minded. Succeeding generations of composers including Vaughan Williams and Holst learned much from him. Parry took the opening words of Milton’s poem At a Solemn Musick, Blest Pair of Sirens, as the title of a brief but magnificent choral setting. The Sirens are not those who lured sailors to their deaths as in The Odyssey, but two angels representing music and verse praising God with words and music. As powerful and uplifting a ten-minute choral piece – and finale to a concert – it would be hard to find.
Fun Fact! Parry was a sailor, owning a yacht, and a great enthusiast for the motor car, becoming one of the first composers to be prosecuted for speeding.
This showcase of fine English choral music is accompanied by Rosalind Hall.
As always, the concert will feature the Choir’s now legendary raffle with generous prizes.
The images show Bollington Festival Choir by Nola McGaul; “Hiawatha” photographed by Cavendish Morton (cropped); Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Edward Elgar and CHH Parry, all from the public domain via Picryl.
