Are pageants once again in fashion? Hugely popular in the lead up to the Second World War, they awaken our often dormant sense of history with purposeful effect, for they show how larger issues in national life overlap with the local and particular. Hence E.M. Forster’s pageant, “England’s Pleasant Land”, written in the late 1930s and dedicated to a preservation society, at a time when there was much concern about the destruction of the countryside by developers. Similarly, Virginia Woolf, in Between the Acts, structured her novel around the rehearsal and performance of a theatrical pageant, in this way layering the historical with the contemporary. Following in this tradition, Gill Perrin and Bill Risebero recently devised a musical pageant into which they blended a dramatization of the story of Hampstead with the musical heritage of the Anglican church. Of course the setting had to be Hampstead Parish Church and it played up magnificently. There were two performances on consecutive nights.
So, as we took our places in the church, there opened before us a span of time covering just over a thousand years. At the start, the church vanished into darkness and we were taken back to Saxon Hamestede. The choir, in black robes and hoods, moved down the aisle singing a Gregorian chant by candlelight. From then on brief dramatic interludes, performed by the Hampstead Players, set the historical scene against which music from each era was performed. And from the first of these we learnt that King Ethelred had granted the land of the Manor of Hampstede to the Abbot of Westminster. Hence the notion that the earliest sacred music in this area was performed by monks, sent across the fields and up the hill by the Abbott to sing a Mass for the souls of the faithful.
By the Tudor period Hampstead, still a rural hamlet but already boasting several alehouses, had gained a Lord of the Manor. But Sir Thomas and Lady Wroth apparently did not think much of the place. They felt far removed from Hampton Court and began the habit of absenteeism which other influential residents copied. Hampstead did now have a simple parish church, but its musical life probably could not handle the rich polyphony of the period. As Sir Thomas Wroth remarked, “pigs and publicans have no taste for counterpoint”. In conversation with his wife he also reminded us of Henry VIII’s determination, after his break with Rome, to make services understood by all his subjects. This put an end to Latin words and led to Archbishop Cranmer’s injunction: “For every syllable, a note sung distinctly and devoutly.” A fine demonstration followed as the choir, in the east gallery, sang two motets by Thomas Tallis.
The flow of movement, as both players and choir took up new positions in different parts of the church, aided the sense of time passing. In the Restoration period there was a marvellous cameo in which the Vicar played Samuel Pepys, reading aloud from his diary a vivid account of the beheading of Sir Henry Vane, another Hampstead nobleman who, in keeping with his name, swung with the prevailing wind. His indecision, over whether to support Commonwealth or Crown, caused him to be taken off to the Tower when the monarchy was restored. Reflecting on this period, an Anglican parson, played by John Willmer, reminded us how, during the Commonwealth, all church organs were silenced, cathedrals closed, clergy and choirs dismissed and music-books destroyed. Charles II resolved to restore this broken tradition and sent Mr Pelham Humfrey to France and Italy, to gain ideas with which to put an end to the musical famine. A piece by Humfrey was sung, followed by “Rejoice in Lord always” by his better known contemporary Henry Purcell.
Throughout the evening, we were led through the history of English music and the evolution of Hampstead with a light touch and nicely pointed details. There was humour too in the observation that by the Georgian period Hampstead, owing to the discovery of spring water, had become a fashionable spa, on a par with Scarborough, Bath and Tunbridge Wells. The increase in population, combined with the rotten state of the first parish church, led to the decision to pull it down and build a new one, with box pews and galleries on three sides, its presence in the village made still more imposing by the purchase of railings from the Duke of Chandos’s estate, Canons, through the gates of which Handel would have regularly passed. This licensed a performance of Handel’s “Zadok the Priest”. In the steady rhythmic build up to choral opening, the choir, in their red cassocks, processed through the chancel and down the steps, to take up a position in front of the audience, thereby adding to the exultant drama of the piece.
In the second half of the evening, attention focussed still more closely on the church. Debates about the use of Parochial taxes arose, at a time when the poor in Hampstead, very visible in the wake of the Napoleonic war, were unaided by any formalised or state support. Yet social reform was in the air, and there was mention of Chartism and the Peterloo Massacre. Hampstead, now home to Keats and “that artist fellow from Suffolk”, is beginning to foster a liberal spirit, worryingly so for the wealthy Mr Longman who is hurrying off to Divine Service. There he will occupy a Box pew, while servants and tradesmen go up to the galleries.
The music, however, of this period is pretty dull, and when the organ tuners make off with the small organ, because the penny-pinching trustees have failed to pay for tuning and repairs, it is resolved that Mr Henry Willis, who recently built the organ for the 1851 Great Exhibition, should be asked to create a new organ for Hampstead Parish Church and to become its organist. At the same time the church, which only seats 1,000 people, is proving too small and needs an extension. Minutes of the Vestry meetings here provided the dialogue, the rash of objections, then as now, all too comically part of church life. But a more serious protest came from a wider forum, when it was realised that the original proposal would require the tower to be knocked down. William Morris, Anthony Trollope and Francis Palgrave, poet and great anthologist, were just three of the protesters, among many leading names of the day.
The solution, as we know, was to turn the church round and to build a Victorian extension on the east end. The church reopens with a chancel, new pews and a fine new entrance, and once this is done Henry Willis’s first organ B “yes, you’ve guessed it” (remarks Alfred, the amiable narrator played by Bill Risebero) – is thought not big enough. So Willis builds bigger and better. And we were treated to a triumphant performance on the Willis organ of Widor’s Toccata from his Symphony no 5 in F minor.
After a moving interlude on the First World War, which was accompanied by the singing of an Elgar anthem and a Nunc Dimittis by Stanford, we ended in modern Hampstead, with a group of tourists being shown round the church. A young woman asks about the choral services. “Our musical tradition nearly got lost,” replies the guide, “it almost collapsed with the two World Wars. But a young organist Martindale Sidwell arrived in 1946.” Talk moves on to the ten cupboards in the Choir Vestry, housing music from the 16th century to the present day, and the young visitor accepts an offer to be shown them.
The tourists disperse leaving Alfred on his own in the spotlight, musing simply on the significance of music, its origin, its language, its shape, the way melodies become more complicated and travel further, but still seek return and endings. He spoke in bursts, and between and behind his words could be heard the choir singing short extracts from a Gregorian chant, a Byrd Mass and Lotti’s Crucifixion. He reflected also on what the listeners to this event had already been made to feel: that in coming to this church and hearing music which touches in so many different ways on human experience, we become part of a web of joys and sorrows, stretching back over time and on into the future. This web, shaped by the larger movements of history as well as personal life, contains within it the pattern of human beginnings and endings. These are echoed in the music, which offers reassurance and invites reflection on God who is “Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.”
Much more could be said about the vigorous acting, the production team, the Junior choir and the main choir, in superb form and made additionally poignant at times by the presence of the countertenor Joe Adams. It was especially good to hear again Grayston Ives’ “Jubilate”, written for our choir and its director Lee Ward in 2004. The evening as a whole offered an astonishing display of the talent fostered by Hampstead Parish Church. But at the nub of it all was a powerful sense of dedication, the outcome of all the knowledge, skills and understanding on which the creative partnership between Gill Perrin and Bill Risebero, aided by assistance from Lee Ward, evidently throve.
Frances Spalding
Musica Sacra
Frances Spalding