Page 6 - Church Music Quarterly September 2018

THE DOWNFALL OF
A GREAT NATION
SIR HUBERT PARRY AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
JEREMY DIBBLE
In the years immediately before the First World War, Parry had enjoyed a creative Indian summer. With
his Fourth Symphony revised in 1909–10, his Fifth Symphony (1912) and his last major orchestral work, the symphonic poem From Death to Life (1914), he had re-established his credentials as a significant composer of symphonic music. For the coronation of George V
in 1911, Parry revised the opening fanfare of his anthem I was glad, added two more trumpets to his large orchestra, and used the same regal scoring for his Coronation Te Deum, an impressive choral fantasy based on two traditional English hymns, St Anne
(‘O God, our help in ages past’) and The Old Hundredth (‘All people that on earth do dwell’). For the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford in 1912, he produced what was arguably his choral masterpiece, the Ode on the Nativity, a setting of William Dunbar’s poem, with
an impressive blend of strophic, variation and sonata forms in which Parry’s intellectual abilities as a composer can be observed at their highest level. Less well known, but also of the highest quality, was his double-choir anthem God is our hope, commissioned by Sir George Martin for the Festival of the Clergy
at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1913. (This anthem was sung for the first time for over 100 years at this year’s Charles Wood Summer School in Armagh and broadcast by the BBC for Choral Evensong.)
This great creative surge took place under the shadow of growing European tensions. Yet Parry genuinely believed that there would be no war. He lampooned the ‘blue funkers’ responsible for raising the temperature of international relations, particularly with Germany and Austria, in his incidental music for Aristophanes’ satirical play The Acharnians produced
by the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1913,
in the certainty that, when the politicians of Europe considered the consequences of a great military conflagration coolly and calmly, war would be averted. Nonetheless, when hostilities did break out on 4 August 1914, Parry’s response was one of incredulity and defiance, as he made clear to his students at the
Royal College of Music in his September address:
I have my own confession to make. For I have been
a quarter of a century and more a pro-Teuton. I owed too much to their music and their philosophers and authors of former times to believe it possible that the nation at large could be imbued with the teaching
of a few advocates of mere brutal violence and material aggression.1
Reconciling militarism with the German love of culture required Parry to face a new realism.
Apart from the mere daily excitement of war news, there is one great thought which overshadows all others. There is forced upon us the overwhelming and soul-shaking experience of seeing the downfall
6 CMQ