Wedding Hymns

We British are not proud enough of our hymns. How many of us have sat cramped in our pews on a Sunday morning, praying less to God than that the vicar might announce permission to omit the starred verses of any hymn with more than three? And how many of us sigh when condemned (as it seems) to sit through a service of matins that resembles more a morning hymn-sandwich than a morning prayer? Oh, we of little faith! Only those of us who have at some point been cast into darkest Continental Europe, far from that green and pleasant land, can truly appreciate the glories of the English hymn and the homegrown singing of it. In southern Europe, the warbling of the Catholic congregations oft resembles more a wailing and gnashing of teeth, while in the North, the weight of Protestant guilt would seem to preclude anything louder than a mumble. In Switzerland, one might even attend a service unaware that music was restored to their churches in 1598, so little do the locals exercise their God-given lungs. Even the starred verses of the lengthiest hymns would be balm to those poor souls.

No; while some of our finest tunes may indeed have their origins in some corner of a foreign field, I am certain that, today, only the English, the Americans and the Celts know what it is to hymn a hymn as a hymn truly should be hymned. They are also almost alone in the fact that their best composers have not deemed the crafting of hymns beneath their dignity. Among the leading composers represented on this CD of wedding hymns are: Charles Hubert Parry, one of our most prolific of the last century, whose oeuvre includes instrumental and choral music in equal measure; Herbert Howells, whose piano and chamber music is currently enjoying a much-deserved renaissance (see Guild GMCD 7119); John Stainer, whose oratorio The Crucifixion is still often heard today; and Gustav Holst, the melody of whose I vow to Thee, my country (a favourite of Britain's first woman prime minister) is taken from the middle section of Jupiter from his Planets Suite. Holst's friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the greatest of British composers, was even responsible for editing the epoch-making English Hymnal at the turn of our century. He is himself represented here by his wonderfully felicitous setting of Come down, O love divine.