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DDD Recorded: Exeter College, Oxford – 13-15 March 2002 - Total Time = 64:47 Few surnames in English history carry such resonance as that of Wesley. From the 1730s to the 1870s three generations of the family were at the forefront of religious or musical life, and the present disc contains contributions by four: John (1703-91), the driving force behind the establishment of the Methodist Church; his brother Charles (1707-88), the author of a vast and distinguished collection of hymns; the latter’s son Samuel (1766-37) and Samuel’s son Samuel Sebastian (1810-76), two of the leading organists and composers of their time. What they all shared was a strong personality, an often difficult character and a natural rebelliousness. John and Charles spent their earliest years in their father’s rectory in the Lincolnshire village of Epworth. After school and study at the University of Oxford (where John was subsequently elected a fellow of Lincoln College) both followed their father into the Anglican ministry, but it was not until the late 1730s that they underwent profound conversion experiences and began the itinerant evangelism for which they would henceforth be known. From the start singing played an important part in their ministry and the first of their many collections of hymns was published in 1738. Although John made a number of translations into English, including ‘Lo! God is here’, from the German of Gerhard Tersteegen (sung here to the chorale ‘Mach's Mit Mir, Gott’ harmonised by their near contemporary J.S.Bach), it is Charles who is remembered for his hymns, some six and a half thousand in all. Among these are many of the best-known and best-loved in the English language, and the following form a representative sample; the titles of the collections in which they appeared provide a good idea of their flavour: ‘Ye servants of God’ Hymns for Times of Trouble and Persecution (1744) ‘Rejoice, the Lord is King’ Hymns for Our Lord’s Resurrection (1746) ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’ Hymns for those that seek and those that have Redemption in the blood of Jesus Christ (1749) ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’ Hymns of Intercession for all Mankind (1758) ‘O thou who camest from abrove’ Short Hymns on Select Passages of Holy Scripture (1762) Only one, ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’, is still sung to the tune with which it was originally associated; ‘Helmsley’ first appeared in John Wesley’s Select Hymns with Tunes Annext (1765) and is probably the work of Thomas Olivers, one of his helpers. ‘Rejoice, the Lord is King’ also has a contemporary tune, ‘Gopsal’, written specifically for it by Handel, but this languished forgotten until a happy coincidence led to its rediscovery in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by Samuel Wesley in 1826. ‘All goes on well here’ he wrote in some excitement, ‘I have already copied six [recte three] famous fine Hymn Tunes from Handel’s own Manuscript, and what is uncommonly fortunate, they are all set to my Father’s own Words’. Within a year he had arranged for their publication, and the four-part arrangement familiar today is his handiwork. During the mid 19th century Charles’ grandson Samuel Sebastian set many of his hymns, but the happy association of his tune ‘Hereford’ with ‘O thou who camest from above’ only dates from the 1904 ‘new’ edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern. To turn from the hymns of John and Charles to the anthems of Samuel Sebastian Wesley is to move from the down-to-earth vigour of the great 18th-century religious revival to the more rarefied atmosphere of the 19th-century Anglican cathedral. Yet it is not merely the family surname which links them, but a shared understanding of the emotional power latent in the combination of sacred words and music – a sphere in which Samuel Sebastian was pre-eminent. The five anthems on this disc chart his development of the form across a period of 20 years, from his early masterpieces ‘The wilderness’ (1832) and ‘Blessed be the God and Father’ (1833 or 34) to those contrasting works of his maturity, ‘Cast me not away’ (1848) and ‘Ascribe unto the Lord’ (c.1851). Born in London, Samuel Sebastian began his musical career as a Child (chorister) of the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, in 1817. William Hawes, the Master of the Children, declared him to have been ‘the best boy he had ever had’ and when he left the choir in 1826 provided him with an entrée into the musical life of the capital by engaging him as pianist and ‘conductor of the chorus’ at the English Opera House. Teaching, organ playing and composition – mainly instrumental and secular vocal pieces – filled the remainder of his time and he seemed well-set on establishing himself as a successful all-round musician. In July 1832, however, shortly before The Dilosk Gatherer, a melodrama for which he had provided most of the music, received its first performance, he was appointed organist of Hereford Cathedral. Within a matter of weeks he had left London, no doubt expecting to return at some point and little realising just how destitute musical life in the provinces was. But if his departure spelt the end of his hopes for success in the wider sphere of concert hall or theatre, it proved to be the making of him as a composer of cathedral music. Within a few months he had completed his first substantial work for church use, an anthem (‘The wilderness’) to mark the re-opening of the cathedral organ. First heard on 8 November 1832, it opened a new chapter in the history of cathedral music as he brought his experience of concert hall and theatre to bear on the inherently old fashioned verse anthem form. Refusing to be bound by the constraints of tradition, he employed the contemporary harmonic idiom he had grown familiar with in London and developed the role of the organ into that of a fully-fledged partner in the musical argument (including an elaborate obbligato pedal part), infusing new life and a sense of drama into the genre. Such moments as the stalking pedal part in the bass solo ‘Say to them of a fearful heart’, the colourful accompaniment to the words ‘For in the wilderness shall waters break’, or the dramatic recitative ‘And a highway shall be there’ in which the lower voices (in B flat minor) are answered by the ethereal sound of high voices in B major, have no direct forbears. But Wesley’s masterstroke is to be found at the close of the fugue ‘And the ransomed of the Lord’ where a striking series of modulations away from the tonic is as unexpected as it is effective. What the Hereford congregation made of the work can only be guessed at, but Wesley was well satisfied and entered it for the Gresham Prize Medal, for a newly-composed piece of church music. The three judges thought otherwise and one (William Horsley) damned it with the immortal words, ‘A clever thing, but not Cathedral music’. Undeterred, Wesley departed even further from the accepted style in his next anthem, ‘Blessed be the God and Father’. Written for use on Easter Sunday 1833 or 1834 when only trebles and a solitary bass were available – and originally scored for these voices – it too draws on his experience of the theatre, not least through the adoption of an arch-like form, reminiscent of the operatic scena. Even the simple unaccompanied opening chorus has operatic overtones, and one is also reminded that early in his career Wesley was strongly indebted to the music of Louis Spohr, whether in the decorative chromatic harmony, or the absence of strong cadences between the five sections. But as an early commentator was quick to note, there are also echoes of his close contemporary, Mendelssohn – an example of ‘kindred inspirations of like minds, journeying towards the same object and lighted by the same guide-star’. Although the organ plays a less prominent role than in ‘The wilderness’, the registration is carefully marked, nowhere more effectively than in the recitative for men’s voices, ‘Being born again’, where the dark tone of a swell reed is used to accompany the words ‘For all flesh is as grass’. But the boldest gesture is reserved for the final chorus – an introductory dominant seventh for full organ with the power to (and which should) make the congregation jump! Within a few years of completing ‘Blessed be the God and Father’ Wesley’s ideas about the appropriateness of its style had begun to change, and in 1840 he dismissed it as a being ‘fitter for the drawing room than the church’. Instead he looked increasingly to the past and in particular to two contrapuntal styles – those of the English cathedral school and Bach. The result was an idiosyncratic blend of ancient and modern, forward-looking in its imaginative use of harmony, but conservative in its contrapuntal textures, which reached its peak in the anthems written during his time as organist of Exeter Cathedral (1835-42). Perhaps the best known of these is ‘Wash me throughly’, a concise but wonderfully effective setting of verses from Psalm 51, written c.1840 at a time of great personal difficulty for Wesley. He had lost an infant daughter in February 1840 and his increasingly uneasy relationship with the Dean and Chapter almost reached breaking point the following September when, in a fit of temper, he attacked two choristers! In such circumstances it is hard not to read an element of autobiography into its impassioned pleas for mercy, though the calm assurance of the final statement ‘And forgive me all my sin’ suggests that peace was ultimately achieved. On a more technical level it is remarkable for its adventurous chromatic harmony and for the incorporation of the ‘BACH’ motive (transposed) in the bass line. Given his unhappy experiences at Exeter, it was not surprising that when Wesley was offered the post of organist at the newly-rebuilt Parish Church in Leeds in October 1841 he should have immediately accepted it. Moving to Yorkshire in February 1842 he found a very different establishment and, for the first time, encountered moderate High Churchmanship influenced by the Oxford Movement. An immediate result was a further change in style and emphasis in his anthems. Hitherto most had included substantial solo movements and elaborate independent organ accompaniments, but both were now significant by their absence and in one work, ‘Cast me not away’, he deliberately adopted an archaic, mock 16th-century, idiom, albeit with a contemporary slant. The result is a masterpiece of restrained vocal writing and genuine pathos, unique in his output . It is also a deeply personal work, written while he was convalescing after breaking his right leg in December 1847. Again the text is from Psalm 51, but it includes the telling words ‘that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice’, accompanied by harshly grating discords. But the high hopes with which Wesley had gone to Leeds were quickly dissipated and he was soon itching to be elsewhere, and grateful for the opportunity to move to Winchester Cathedral in 1849. Here he found an old-fashioned environment and, as though to acknowledge this, returned to the type of extended anthem he had earlier cultivated at Hereford and Exeter. ‘Ascribe unto the Lord’ was written c.1851 for a service in aid of church missions and its text includes appropriate references to the ‘gods of the heathen’ and their ‘idols of silver and gold’. Musically it marks a return from the experimental idiom of ‘Cast me not away’ to a more obviously contemporary style, and provides a fine example of the way in which he could build up a large-scale work from a sequence of individual sections: in an ideal performance the first six movements coalesce into a single whole, culminating in the mighty chorale ‘As for our God’, with the relaxed final movement ‘The Lord hath been mindful of us’ forming a satisfying conclusion. Although still only in his early forties, Wesley had already passed the peak of his career. Discouraged by the lack of recognition, disillusioned by the poor status of church musicians and with the burden of bringing up five sons weighing heavily on his shoulders, he no longer had the appetite for sustained composition and for several years in the late 1850s wrote practically nothing. His final move was to Gloucester in 1865, but by the early 1870s his health was beginning to fail and he played for the last time on Christmas Day, 1875, dying four months later. Page revised 26.06.03 |
