Building a Library

Parry’s own death gives these six late choral masterpieces an added poignancy, says Clare Stevens as she explores the best recordings

Clare Stevens on Parry’s poignant Songs of Farewell

The work

Hubert Parry’s six choral Songs of Farewell were first performed as a complete set on 23 February 1919, in the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford. The occasion was a memorial service for the composer, an alumnus of the college, who had died less than six months previously.

In the current context, it is poignant to reflect that the actual cause of his death was a combination of blood poisoning and influenza, caught during the pandemic that ravaged Europe towards the end of the First World War; but Parry had been suffering from ill health for some years, experiencing minor heart attacks several times a week. While the timing of their publication makes it impossible to avoid associating their elegiac theme with the agony and loss of war, the Songs of Farewell can also be seen as a personal leave-taking.

The genesis of the collection was a setting of ‘There is an old belief’ by John Gibson Lockhart, commissioned in 1907 for a memorial service at the Royal Mausoleum, Frogmore, in the Home Park of Windsor Castle. Four years later Parry returned to this motet, experimenting with different versions of the central stanza, and began to write its companion pieces. His amanuensis

Emily Daymond recalled hearing three additional songs performed with the Lockhart setting at the composer’s family home – Highnam Court, close to the city of Gloucester – in September 1913; they were ‘My soul, there is a country’

(the four-part setting of words by Henry Vaughan that begins the published sequence), ‘I know my soul hath power’ (John Davies) and ‘Never weather-beaten sail’ (Thomas Campion).

After some revisions, these four songs received an informal performance by a small choir at the Royal College of Music in March 1915. Parry evidently discussed his project and the choice of texts for two larger-scale motets with his colleagues and students – Herbert Howells encouraged him to add a setting of Walter Raleigh’s ‘Even such is time’, but the idea was rejected in favour of a suggestion from Thomas Dunhill: John Donne’s ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’. This and the concluding piece for double choir, ‘Lord, let me know mine end’, a setting of ten verses from Psalm 39, were finished by December 1915.

In writing a set of part-songs, Parry was returning to his musical roots; as a boy at Eton College, with its strong choral tradition, he was steeped in glees, madrigals and part-songs

Parry’s literary tastes and understanding of how to handle rhythm and metre set him apart

and composed several of his own before leaving school. He had a life-long passion for English poetry, especially that of the 16th and 17th centuries, setting many texts as solo songs as well as for choirs. His literary taste and his understanding of how to handle rhythm, metre and versification when setting English poetry to music were among the gifts that set him apart from previous generations and contributed to his being hailed as the instigator of a renaissance in English musical life.

Parry was also inspired by the Germanic musical tradition, and the influence of Bach, Mendelssohn and Brahms and their comparable collections of carefully crafted motets can be seen in the Songs of Farewell. There is a painful poignancy in this association, however – Parry and many of his colleagues in British cultural life were deeply shocked that Germany, a country with which they had felt such affinity and where many of them including Parry had studied, had taken a road that plunged it into conflict with its European neighbours.

As head of the Royal College of Music, Parry had to see many of his gifted students joining the armed forces. Some like George Butterworth and Ernest

Farrar would not return, others would be physically or mentally damaged for life. Parry felt they should not have been allowed to enlist, both because the role of musicians was important in itself and because he believed their gifts were too precious to squander. The resonance of his sorrow is inescapable in these songs.

A haunted valediction: (above) Parry’s pupil George Butterworth was killed at the Somme; (left) the Royal College of Music; (opposite) 19th-century Scottish writer John Gibson Lockhart

Surprisingly for a man whose artist father painted the nave roof of Ely Cathedral and built a church in the grounds of his country estate to honour the memory of his late wife, Parry was himself an agnostic, a social and political liberal who subscribed to the rationalist principles of Charles Darwin and John Ruskin and disdained conventional church-going, which he considered to be hypocritical.

However, he cherished the religious ideal of self-effacement and valued the rich language of religious texts – his fellow composer Walford Davies described him as ‘A man after God’s own heart’. Listening to the final bars of his last motet, ‘Lord, let me know mine end,’ it is difficult not to interpret it as a benediction.

Turn the page to discover the recommended recordings of Parry’s Songs of Farewell