Dyson was a working class lad. Not for him the
comfortable affluence of Vaughan Williams and Arnold Bax. This
is not of course to imply that poverty necessarily breeds excellence
though certainly it may suppress the opportunity to develop it.
Dyson's upward path was taken with the blessing of his parents
who encouraged him to play the organ at the local church. He won
a scholarship to the RCM in 1900 and took the Mendelssohn Scholarship
in 1904 as a result of which he could travel to Italy and tour
Berlin and Vienna. Dyson returned home but it was not long before
he was in the trenches. His handbook on grenade-fighting techniques
became the standard Army text for many years. He was invalided
out after his experiences on the Western Front. A haunted shadow
of the young man his tutors had known, he returned to life at
the RCM and the world of a professional musician in academe. His
experience of wading thigh deep through muddied trenches and of
the sight of horrific things left their mark. It is not, I think,
too fanciful to read those experiences into parts of this work.
Was Quo Vadis partially cathartic in the same way that
Morning Heroes helped lay to rest Bliss’s wartime ghosts?
Quo Vadis (nothing to do with Henry Sienkiewicz's
novel) is literally the Latin for ‘where are you going?’ This
is a challenge to the soul: mortality and immortality. As a scheme
the work belongs to the genre of anthology-cantata where the words
of more than one author are used to explore a subject. In the
same tradition are works by Britten and Bliss.
This is not a travelogue tapestry like The
Canterbury Pilgrims (Chandos CHAN 9531(2)) that for years
basked in greater success than any other major work of Dyson’s.
The Pilgrims has humour, even some ribaldry (of the sort
found in Vaughan Williams' Five Tudor Portraits), ruffianly
excitement and picaresque incident. It is a serious work with
no levity and rustic jackanapes. Bantock's much longer Omar
Khayyam packs a potent emotional smack combined with a seer’s
insight and vivid scene painting. Quo Vadis, is a work
that, in its aim, design and achievement, reaches for the visionary
heights. It is not a specifically Christian piece although some
of the texts derive from Biblical sources. Dyson, the agnostic,
like the similarly minded Vaughan Williams, channels into his
music both reflections about the nature of life and thoughts about
what follows death.
Our Birth is but a sleep is music purged
of drama. This is a sincere and smoothly contoured setting of
episodes from Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality.
The same poem was set much more fully by Gerald Finzi in 1949
and some years previously, though seemingly less effectively,
by Arthur Somervell. Unlike Finzi it was not Dyson's way to hand-colour
every word's emotional nuance. Compare the priority Dyson accords
to choral continuity with Finzi's microcosmic etched approach
in the words 'neither listlessness nor mad endeavour'. This first
part of a nine part work is a musical foreword though the words
could easily have admitted of exaltation. These are the emotional
foothills; Dyson’s preparation or scene-setting.
In Part III O whither shall my troubled muse
incline we seem to hear the marching tread of starry soldiery
(3.48). Dyson is ready with a volcanic blaze of glorious choral
tone. This is delivered not in the multiform complexity of Howells;
rather it is dourly exuberant. Hickox is excellent here. Listen
to his way with the stabbing determination of this most glorious
of music.
Night hath no wings communes with the
solo viola, here played by Steven Burnard. Burnard it was who,
in December 1996, gave one of the most memorable broadcasts of
Bax's Phantasy for viola and orchestra. In the Dyson his viola
sings an incantation hoarse with amber emotion. If you recall
Carl Davis's music for The Mayor of Casterbridge (circa
1979) you will know what to expect. The tenor Philip Langridge
is in good voice allowing for a tremulous vibrato [tr.4. 1.39,
04.01]. Otherwise his colouration and intelligence are fully in
place. He sings in touching interplay with the solo viola at the
words in the hour of my distress and when the house
doth sigh and weep. Surely this is Dyson speaking to assuage
his own demons, bereavements and distresses. ‘Comfort me’ is the
repeated heart-breaking call; an invocation to balm and healing.
Roderick Williams’ steady and sturdy bass is
a joy to hear. The great Baxian yearning cry of the strings (tr.
5) is searching and heavy with poignancy (3.57). This represents
one of the great moments rather like the benison of a tune in
the slow movement of Bax 2. Dyson terraces the full chorus and
semi-chorus at 5.19 in echo after antiphonal echo, streaming to
eternity. There is some great choral singing here, burnished and
brazen [6.09] with the brass shatteringly well placed. At 7.33
the choir sing superbly creating, not for the last time, a sense
of space and distance. Note the chaste medieval atmosphere at
7.34-8.14. At 11.50, at the end of each of the following lines:
‘Only O Lord in thy dear love / Fit us for perfect rest above’
comes the astral feminine cry suggesting Dyson’s familiarity with
the Rosenkavalier ‘Presentation of the Rose’ scene. The
movement ends with a beautifully weighted Amen, well balanced
and yet not tamed into orthodoxy.
Jean Rigby sounds somewhat like Dame Janet Baker
in Holst’s Choral Fantasia (a piece also indebted for its
poetry to Bridges). ‘The royal banners forward go’ is set to music
similar to that found in the music for Keats’ words ‘underneath
large bluebells tented … where the lilies are rose-scented’ from
Holst's Choral Symphony.
The Second Part opens with a section which bears
the strongest resemblance to Patrick Hadley's writing yet the
prefatory bars have the visceral ‘grunt’ of Elgar's Introduction
and Allegro. Then the pastoral writing enters with flute calls,
chuckling woodwind, cries of pain and all. This is Hadley at one
moment but the paschal innocence of Bliss (John Blow Meditations)
surfaces at others. The solo violin twines with the singing as
it does earlier in the work (The God of Love, Dear Stream
Bank and finally in Part 9: Rejoice with gladness evermore).
They are at rest is redolent of Elgar's
Where corals lie but such familiarity is abandoned in the
eldritch shudder of the strings. This surely sings the losses
of two world wars to audiences acquainted with bereavement. It
stands, in this aspect, as sincere as Bliss's Morning Heroes
and shoulder to shoulder with the trudging cortège
of Bridge's Oration. Comfort is administered like a blessing
by this movement. Balm and benediction come with the alleluias
of the solo quartet.
The finale (Part IX), To find the western
path, is the longest movement at 18.34. It mobilises tortured
strings and jagged blazes of sound humming with power. The word
setting is masterly as in 'Love from its awful throne of patient
power'. Shelley’s words 'To suffer woes etc' is familiar from
the superscriptions to Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica
(intriguingly premiered at about the same time as the Dyson
work). The choral singing has a glorious sturdiness and potent
muscle. The music rises to yet another climactic on 'This is alone
life, joy, empire and victory' - wildly joyous, yelping and baying
in spiritual triumph. The piece ends with the solo quartet of
voices, line by line, making the similitude of a 'round' out of
the confident, smiling, introspection of 'Holy is the true light'.
How unnerving it is to hear these words without the orgasmic ecstasy
of Howells' treatment of the self-same text in Hymnus Paradisi.
Here they are sung as if to the self. There is no volcanic Ragnarok
here just Dyson's preternaturally sustained radiant sunset - an
audacious downbeat.
Chandos have documented this set fully and texts
are provided with French and German translations either side of
the sung English. Lewis Foreman provides the background reminding
us that Part I was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on 12 April
1945. The first complete performance came as part of the 1946
Three Choirs at Hereford. The booklet runs to 64 pages. Believe
me there is a lot of text to be sung - and very little repetition.
The booklet would not have fitted into a standard jewel case so
the single-width double-disc case is inserted with the booklet
into a light card sleeve.
We need to pinch ourselves as a reminder of how
far the catalogue has evolved since the 1970s when interest in
this repertoire first kindled. After this, whither next? We know
from Lewis Foreman that Chandos will be issuing the remaining
unrecorded Bax choral works including St Patrick's Breastplate
and To the Name Above Every Name. But there are still
some superb works to be tackled. Look at Arthur Bliss's Beatitudes
(a reputation obliterated by Britten's War Requiem at
the Coventry Cathedral opening in the 1960s), Rootham's 1925 Ode
on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Julius Harrison's Requiem
of Archangels, Woucestershire Requiem and Mass (major
works each), Peter Racine Fricker's A Vision of Judgement (to
Anglo-Saxon texts and none the worse for the occasional hat doffing
towards Walton's Belshazzar), Patrick Hadley's Ephemera,
Mariana, Fen and Flood and Connemara and
Maurice Jacobson's The Hound of Heaven (setting the famous
poem - ask Rogers Covey-Crump who sang this work during the mid-1970s
for the RCM - a work similar in style to Quo Vadis). Even
more massive pieces waiting in line include Bantock's Omar
Khayyam and Song of Songs and Havergal Brian's Prometheus
Unbound.
The Dyson is an extremely impressive piece in
a performance close to the ideal. I hope that it inspires more
choral society performances.
Rob Barnett
DYSON's Quo Vadis - section layout:-
- Our birth is but a sleep - chorus - Wordsworth [11.32]
- Rise O my Soul - alto and semi-chorus - Sir Walter Raleigh;
Thomas Campion; Thomas Heywood [8.20]
- whither shall my troubled muse incline - bass and chorus -
Barnaby Barnes; Robert Herrick; Thomas Lynch; Thomas Sternhold
[10.54]
- Night hath no wings - tenor, solo viola and semi-chorus -
Robert Herrick; Isaac Williams [10.30]
- timely happy, timely wise - solo quartet, chorus, semi-chorus
- John Keble [13.20]
- Dear stream, dear bank - soprano - Henry Vaughan; George Herbert
[9.51]
- Come to me God - bass solo and chorus - Robert Herrick; Henry
Vaughan [10.12]
- They are at rest - alto and quartet - John Henry Newman [8.00]
- To find the Western path - tenor, quartet and chorus - William
Blake; Percy B Shelley; Salisbury Diurnal [18.34]
BBC National
Orchestra of Wales/Richard Hickox