Church Times
21 May 1999
Devotion without belief
Roderic Dunnett explains the contradictions in Herbert Howells
HERBERT HOWELLS was one of the enigmas of English music. Small, vain, highly strung, a womaniser, something of a name-dropper, certainly a charmer, riddled with depression and self-doubts, he was, in short, as Paul Spicer suggests, "a mess, like so many people, underneath". His liaisons, covert or less so, spanned many years: surprisingly, even his daughter, the actress Ursula Howells, concedes, "he was ruled by sex." More poignantly, the loss of his young son Michael, whose death from polio engendered some of Howells’s best works (notably his great oratorio Hymnus Paradisi) became almost a kind of talisman. Michael’s memory, as Spicer movingly puts it, was "like a ground bass to his existence".
Howells’s father was a decorator and builder from Lydney in Gloucestershire, and played at the local Baptist church. His sudden bankruptcy devastated the family. Others helped, enabling Herbert to study with Dr Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral, and later at the Royal College of Music (RCM), where his gifts made him the best loved of Stanford’s composition pupils. The first performance of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia, given in Gloucester, bowled him over. Later VW sat next to the impressionable young man, and they shared a score as Elgar conducted his Gerontius.
The First World War brought tragedy - not just the loss of his talented close friend Francis Purcell Warren, but Howells’s own near death from Graves disease. He was one of the first guinea-pigs for radium cancer treatment in Britain. Despite his illness, musically for Howells it was a golden age. Early organ works - a sonata, Psalm preludes, and rhapsodies (the Third written during a Zeppelin raid on Bairstow’s house in York) - were emerging, as well as the Tudor- inspired Mass in the Dorian Mode and the exquisite Three Carols, still popular today. But Spicer underlines another aspect: "It is almost as if he was liberated by being able to take his music out of church." it is the secular songs, quartets, and works like the Three Dances for Violin and Orchestra that confirmed Howells’s remarkable gifts in a wider field. This side, which has tended to be over-shadowed, is well emphasised here. in the 1930s, when already an established teacher at the RCM, Howells succeeded HoIst as director of music at St Paul’s Girls’ School; and during the 1940s, deeply versed in the music of the .16th century, and for four years acting organist at St John’s College, Cambridge, he attempted almost singlehandedly to set new standards for English liturgical composition. He had a unique gift for conjuring mood, with a serene long line. The settings for King’s College, Cambridge; Gloucester; St Paul’s; and New College, Oxford, trod new and distinct paths. The emergence of the Collegium Regale Te Deum - the result of a bet with Dean Milner-White – is one of many entertaining anecdotes in this well charted book.
The author, a former Howells pupil and a distinguished choral conductor and composer himself, has produced the first attempt to encompass Howells’s life and music, in all its facets, in a chronological biography. It is an admirable achievement. The sources for his early life are scantier, but well sketched in. Later, as Howells’s diary reveals more of the man, Spicer is particularly adept at reading between the lines. His comments on many works are invaluable. There is one marked surprise: "The real problem", says Spicer, "was Howells’s lack of faith. He simply did not believe. He could not reconcile what had happened to Michael with a merciful God acting in his wisdom." "Holding on" to his son by having to be near him (spending hours in Twigworth Church, where Michael was buried) "says more about his emotional state and his unwillingness to let go of the physical trappings of his son than of any religious ’revelation’ or ’conversion’." In short, it "underlines the flimsiness of his religious convictions".
Belief or no, to those complex emotions we owe numerous fine works - not least the five anthems penned when Howells, hounded by pleurisy and blitzed in Barnes, with the loss of his precious MSS and scores, was trapped one winter in snowed - in Cheltenham. Hymnus Paradisi is one of the most powerfully charged of all 20th-century sacred choral works. If some larger works failed initially to take off (singers cruelly nicknamed the later Missa Sabrinensis the "Severn Bore"), Spicer pays fitting tribute to the full scope of his achievement as composer, supportive teacher, encouraging adjudicator, and, to a degree, family man.
Spicer’s examination of certain works is detailed and instructive. A few early sections are not well proofed or punctuated, and Spicer is sometimes over-modest in pressing his own views. He need not be. This is a much needed book which many will welcome.