Notes on the Program - Cantata Singers

diViNiNg the iNCaNdesCeNt Program <strong>Notes</strong>
The Requiem owes its being to the nationalist English revival of music of the Tudor Renaissance.
Howells vividly recalled the 1910 premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas
Tallis as one of two “revelatory” experiences of his youth. He felt an especially strong affinity for
the use of plainchant and modes; indeed, the Phrygian mode of the Tallis psalm tune inspired the
Phrygian colors of his 1917 Elegy, dedicated to two fellow Royal College of Music students killed
in World War I. The Requiem opens with a Phrygian Salvator mundi, an anguished petition for God’s
comfort, which arrives in its D major resolution. This pattern repeats in subsequent Latin Mass and
Psalm settings, moving from sumptuous tensions of modal and minor harmonies, coming to rest in
I Heard a Voice from Heaven with the bright certainty of D major. The two settings of the text “et lux
perpetua” are the heart of this work; in the impressionistic word painting of “light” Howells achieves
the most astonishing and dramatic harmonies of the Requiem.
It is commonplace to compare this cathedral music to the structure of cathedrals themselves. Surely,
the works in this program entreat those bowed in sorrow to raise their heads to stained glass and
vaulted ceilings. Yet one might see these works best as music of Coventry Cathedral. Next to the
shell of the Gothic cathedral destroyed by German bombs in 1940 was raised the new cathedral, a
masterpiece of modern architecture completed in 1962. The movement of this music is a gesture
of reconciliation and regeneration, as one stands within Coventry Cathedral’s ruins and raises one’s
eyes to the open sky.
— Mary MacDonald
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