Page 7 - Church Music Quarterly September 2018

of a great nation from honour and noble estate.
We cannot help recalling the splendid hexameter in our English version of Isaiah, ‘How art tho fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’ This is the German nation which in former times was glorified by producing some of the noblest minds that shone in the world of art.2
Parry’s admiration for Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner had nourished his creativity since the mid 1870s, which, together with the tradition of the English cathedral style of S.S. Wesley and Stainer, had coalesced to shape the individual musical voice of Blest Pair of Sirens, Judith, Job and the Invocation to Music, written in honour of Purcell’s bicentenary in 1895. What is more, he had sought to pass on these aesthetic values together with the moral imperatives of democracy, social responsibility and self-improvement to a great many students – Hamish MacCunn, Charles Wood, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, William Hurlstone, John Ireland, Frank Bridge, Thomas Tertius Noble, Edgar Bainton, George Butterworth, George Dyson, Herbert Howells, Arthur Bliss and Ivor Gurney – who had passed through his hands as a teacher, Director of the
RCM and Heather Professor of Music at Oxford.
The war left Parry in a quandary. For several decades he had espoused a sense of mission for music in Britain.
The subject and its practitioners, he insisted, were an integral part of society in the same way as other professions. With this new role, however, came responsibility. Many of the RCM’s students, present and past, had volunteered for the armed services:
For one thing which concerns us deeply is that quite a lot of our happy family party have been honourably inspired to go and chance the risks of military life; and among them are some very distinguished musicians.
We feel a thrill of regard for them. It gives a comfortable feeling of admiration for our fellow- countrymen when we see them moved by fine and honourable motives to face the awful conditions of modern warfare.3
Yet Parry also believed that his RCM students were gifted ‘in a rare and special way’. ‘Some of them’, he contended, ‘[were] so gifted that their loss could hardly be made good.’4 Therein lay the dilemma of endorsing the obligation of military service in the face of death and destruction to precious sensibilities. Many joined
up, among them Vaughan Williams, Dyson, Bliss, Gurney, Butterworth, Benjamin, Bainton, Fox and Farrar. In answer to Benjamin’s anxious mother who had written to urge Parry to counsel her son against enlisting, he wrote back expressing his anxiety:
I am sorry to say your letter arrived just too late, as your son had taken the decisive step and was enrolled as a member of His Majesty’s Forces.
I had always been averse to his joining up, as he is too exceptionally gifted to be counted on the same footing as the millions who have no exceptional promise of a special kind. As I have pointed out
to him, people who have special gifts may benefit the country and humanity at large in a higher way than those who offer themselves as mere unspecialized individuals in the fighting hosts.5
In consequence, it was that much harder for Parry
to countenance the deaths of Butterworth, Purcell Warren, Adolphe Goossens and Farrar, the imprisonment of Benjamin and Bainton in Ruhleben, and the news of Dyson, Bliss, Moeran, Gurney and Fox among the casualties.
Parry’s own musical commentary on the war is perhaps best observed in his tone poem From Death
to Life (performed on 12 November 1914), which juxtaposes two movements, a lament (‘Via mortis’)
and a reveille (‘Via vitae’). As Parry wrote in the programme: ‘Death, arm-in-arm with fate, walks
ever in our midst, while Life unceasingly protests, grieves, deplores, defies, despairs and finally triumphs spiritually.’ It was a fair summary of Parry’s optimism even in such dark times. In 1915 he published his tune Laudate Dominum, until then only known as the finale to his anthem Hear my words, ye people, and in December of that year he finished the last two of his motets, At the round earth’s imagined corner and Lord, let me know mine end (for the Songs of Farewell), which were published
in 1917 and 1918 respectively. It is tempting to hear these deeply moving expressions of valediction as an expression of the war. In truth, however, they were more a reflection of the composer on his own mortality as he approached the milestone of 70, seen through the prism of his own religious heterodoxy. Parry was no traditional Christian believer, even though he looked so often to the Bible to help define the parameters of his moral and spiritual outlook. For him the Deity was a distant concept. This is perhaps best enunciated in the last section of his motets, a setting of Psalm 39, in
THE DOWNFALL OF A GREAT NATION 7