The American Organist
HERBERT HOWELLS, Paul Spicer. Bridgend, Wales: Seren Press, 1999.203 pp., illus. $19.95. ISBN 1-8541-233-3 (distributed by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, PA 19425-0007).
Herbert Howells's music, quirky, fluid, singular though it was, never truly mirrored modern life. Such was the conclusion of a review of Paul Spicer's recording of Howells's choral works in the September 1998 issue of this journal. Now, Spicer validates that opinion in this, his essential and elegant biography of Herbert Howells. Spicer, conductor of the Finzi Singers, studied with Howells at the Royal College of Music, where Spicer himself now teaches.
Though the fellowship of church and choral musicians has nearly universally accorded Herbert Howells a place of top honor in British choral composition of the past century (along with Benjamin Britten), Paul Spicer does as much to debunk Howells's sainthood as to sing praises of his flawless if conservative style. Spicer's opening sentence puts it best: "Herbert Howells was a great musician, a complex man, a devoted and devastated father, a loyal but weak and unfaithful husband, a sensualist though not a hedonist, a teacher, adjudicator, examiner, writer, and speaker, and almost last of all, a composer."
Thus opens an irresistible narrative that, like all biographies of the accomplished and creative, balances and reconciles the mundane issues of everyday living with those transcendent moments that astonish and inspire the rest of us and give us cause to envy. Herbert Howells's life willingly lends itself to such narrative. Again and again, perhaps even to excess, Spicer alludes to the com- poser's beginnings in "humble circumstances" as if simple origins would make the suavity of later life and music all the more astonishing. But Howells was just as much the end product of bloodline, a co-mingling of Welsh and Celtic heritage. "The romance of the Celtic disposition," reasons Spicer, explains much of Howells's charm just as it elucidates the richness of detail in his com- posing. Like a Celtic maze or cosmic puzzle, Herbert Howells was given to putting little musical riddles and unnoticeable devices in invisible positions.
The complexity, the rhythmic jabs and stabs, so typical of Howells's church music, was a later accretion, for Howells was not the one-dimensional, stylistically static composer that some think. For instance, he wrote little church music until he was in his 50s (during World War II). Correctly, Spicer asserts that Herbert Howells's music grew both in style and technique, something that those who know the composer only as a lion of Anglican choral music might routinely overlook. Such a legacy, says Spicer, was "a major disadvantage."
Biographies come in many sizes and styles, qualities often measured by the distance allowed between the author and subject. Paul Spicer delves headlong into a close and passionate relationship with his subject. As he relates the musical formation of Herbert Howells, the reader discerns the twitter of young musical discovery. If Howells's mature style reflects little other than its own remarkable image, it is not because Howells remained clear of the influence and inspiration of others. Rather, he seems to have absorbed so much that his music selectively picks and chooses from a wide palette of possible color, texture, and form. Paul Spicer portrays Howells as a youngster under the influence of the very men who were responsible for the English musical renaissance, mesmerizing figures including Parry, Stanford, Mackenzie, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams. That renaissance was destined to flourish in and around the Royal College of Music; which in turn was “the anchor point of Howells’s whole musical career”
The ragged picture of the country boy, Howells, arriving at the big-city conservatory with a sheath of early compositions in hand, is fleeting and soon mitigated by the musical brilliance and social wit that the composer developed; and that Spicer relates with partiality. Those social graces grew and the accounting of Howells at the height of his career includes much extramusicality. Spicer traces the most important phase of Howells's years, the wartime stint as replacement organist at St. John's College, Cambridge (for Robin Orr who had gone to serve in the RAF). Howells staffed the chapel for four years while keeping up his duties at the RCM. Spicer quotes John Margetson, a choral scholar at St. John's during the war, and his recollections of musical and social affairs. Howells was never far away from the prettiest women at Cambridge (despite his marriage of, then, over 20 years to Dorothy Dawes Howells). Margetson would go to visit Howells "partly to see him, and partly in the knowledge that the prettiest girls in the College would be either there (in Howells's room) or thereabouts. He was well known to love pretty girls and we were quite happy to use him as a sort of high-class pimp!"
Elsewhere, Ursula Howells, the composer's daughter whose commentary and reminiscences amount to Spicer's information mainstay, is said to have been uneasy as a student at St. Paul's Girls' School in London. In 1937, her father had succeeded Gustav HoIst as director of music and his "presence at St. Paul's Girls' School was causing adolescent hearts to flutter." Ursula was put in the unwelcome and embarrassing position of being asked to carry notes home to her father. Howells "was unable to stop these extra-marital liaisons, although he was often racked by guilt. The need, however, was stronger than the resolution to stop it, and his sex drive was the inner motor which kept his creative life humming." Spicer also maintains that "throughout his life and well into old age Howells had a succession of girlfriends," and Ursula is quoted as saying that "Herbert was ruled by sex. He was unbelievably attractive to the female sex and was just as attracted to them."
The extent to which Howells's behavior and creativity were shaped by sex may not be as clear as the degree to which his life was deeply struck by the loss of his son, Michael. In 1935, while on holiday, Michael, only ten, was stricken with a virulent polio. Within several days, after returning to London in search of better care, he died. Howells's extended grieving mirrored itself in music and resulted in his arguably greatest masterpiece, Hymnus Paradisi. Spicer reserves particular reverence for this work. He lovingly details the literature amassed between its covers and, importantly, connects the piece to another musical mirror of death and loss. As the Hymnus followed Michael's death, so the a cappella Requiem had preceded it. Howells subsumed that Re- quiem into the Hymnus.
About the same time, in the wake of Michael's death, Howells had developed ambivalent feelings about religion. The radiance and peace, therefore, of the Hymnus surprise Spicer, who notes that "the principal theme of 'light' - 'Et lux perpetua luceat eis' - pervading Hymnus Paradisi is all the more remarkable."
But in the end, for all the frantic energy ensnared in Herbert Howells's daily life and in Paul Spicer's story, for all the names and relationships that chronicle British music for the past century, for all the dalliances and tragedies, for all the great music written and unwritten (for Spicer laments what might have been as much as he celebrates what was), Howells himself died alone and, if not bitterly, then sadly. He was weak, failing, literally falling, and losing memory and, with it, functionality. Spicer evokes sympathy for Ursula, who had to care for her father and her second husband, a stroke victim. So this idiosyncratic and fluent composer, stylistically unlike any other, this dandy, the confidant and friend of musicians, politicians, and scientists alike, was reduced to mere moments of cognition. Spicer quotes Ursula:
"In the last months I saw that 'Hymnus' was on the radio and I told him it was on. He asked what it was. I told him that he had written it for Michael. He said, 'I don't want to hear it,' but I just left it on. And I went through at the end of it, and there he was just lying there with tears streaming down his face saying, 'Did I write that?' "
He did write that, and much else that was to become central to the identity of a particular 20th-century ethos. If Herbert Howells's music reflected anything in its complexity, detail, and passion, it was the fascinating and enigmatic personality who wrote it and who is so candidly and zestfully portrayed in Paul Spicer's narrative.
Haig Mardirosian
The American Organist