Sing when your heart is breaking

THREE weddings, two funerals—as the years advance, you understand, the ratio shifts. We old choristers do tend to find ourselves at the centre of such family events. It’s a privilege.

In my Canterbury Choristers magazine this month, the current Dean, Robert Willis, writes of the power of the music on these high occasions: ‘When someone is deeply loved, everyone becomes aware that this is exactly the right thing to be singing together. These moments take you by surprise.’

We buried my motherin-law. With respect to Les Dawson, I adored her. She was kind, brave and wellorganised, right up to her departure. She was ready to go and did so without fuss. The service was joyous. However, when our daughter, Gus, her grand-daughter, with James at the piano, stood and sang Bridge Over Troubled Water, emotion ambushed us all.

I had not steeled myself against the piercing accuracy of Art Garfunkel’s lyric: ‘Sail on, silver girl, sail on by… I’m sailing right behind.’

‘Whatever you do, darling,’ I had warned her, ‘don’t look at the coffin.’ It’s an old chorister’s trick.

Stuck up at the Edinburgh Festival, I was saddened to miss my god-daughter Maud’s wedding to her handsome fellow-teacher. I’ll miss, too, my philosopher friend Matheson getting hitched to his pharmaceutical hubby in dear old Chalfont and Latimer. That’s the trouble with weddings at this time of year—everyone is somewhere else.

It was to Edinburgh that the killer text came. My cousin Naomi is a soprano soloist for the Welsh

National Opera. Her husband, Stephen Crook, also a singer, she had met when they were performing as Tamino and Pamina. Stevie, after a long, cruel struggle with prostate cancer, was in a hospice in Somerset, with only hours to go. He had written five last poems. Throughout his illness, he and their teenage daughter had gained immeasurable solace listening to audiobooks read by his hero, our Greatest Living Englishman (GLE). (I shan’t name him because he’ll despise me for telling you all this, but you’ll know exactly who he is.)

Naomi, aware that I knew him—another privilege—had sent a desperate appeal. Might I secure a brief message from the GLE (who has eluded a brush with the disease himself), reassuring a dying stranger that he might, one distant day, record the poems for the cancer charities?

Ordinarily, I am protective of a man who endures remorselessly such calls on his time, but he happened to be in Edinburgh too: the high-water mark of the Festival and about to perform his mighty one-man show of gods-and-heroes.

He was in dress rehearsal, and with two 2½-hour shows to get through on that very day, heart in mouth, I pinged him. He pinged back: ‘Leave it with me.’

Within hours, a miracle was wrought. The GLE (and this is why he is so) had taken time out to record, not merely a message, but all five of the poems. The hour-long audio-file flew through cyber-space to Stevie’s deathbed.

There, holding the hands of his wife and daughter, with glad tears pouring down his cheeks, speechless, yet listening to his personal god-and-hero reading the Proficiscere that he himself had written, his passing became transfigured. Earth, be my body. Wind be my breath Waters of the world, my blood. Night, my little death Fire, be the life, from the sun and the stars Omnipresent Universe, this and all be ours Welcome now my soul’s embrace Beyond the shores of time and space Courage, guide our faltering Grace, tread be our be bed the path. Joy, Hope, be our homing beacon, blazing in the dark Love, be our truest arrow. Love, be the mark.

There are times,’ continues Dean Willis, ‘when the anthems of John Rutter seem the perfect thing to be singing.’

When our son Rollo marries Rosie next week, we’ll have my old Cambridge choirmaster’s For the Beauty of the Earth, sung by her stepmother Lucy. We’ll have Rollo’s godfather James’s Kyrie, sung by Rosie’s cousin (and my fellow choristerin-arms) Michael Chance. We’ll even have my own Amen, sung by the Cecilia Consort, the contralto line of which will be held, I have no doubt redoubtably, by my trusty editor.

Perhaps most movingly, the bride will enter St Mary’s, Kingsclere to Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, that same sublime music to which Rollo’s mother entered Canterbury Cathedral at our own wedding. The soaring solo will be sung by Naomi.

Love, be the mark.

When our daughter, Gus, stood and sang Bridge Over Troubled Water, emotion ambushed us

Kit Hesketh-harvey, a lyricist, opera translator and broadcaster, is one half of cabaret duo Kit and Mcconnel. He lives in Norfolk

Next week: Jonathan Self