peter phillips - hope and glory

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Review: Hope & Glory Author(s): Peter Phillips Review by: Peter Phillips Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 149, No. 1905 (Winter, 2008), pp. 107, 109-111Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25434577Accessed: 13-04-2015 09:56 UTC

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Book reviews

PETER PHILLIPS

Hope & glory Thomas Tallis and his music in Victorian England Suzanne Cole

The Boydell Press (Woodbridge, 2008); xxvi, 232PP; ?50, $95. isbn 978 1 84383 380 2.

This excellent book has dealt me two firsts, which are not connected: it is the first time a

book of any kind has started and ended with a

quotation from me; and, unique in my experience

of academic studies, I couldn't put it down.

Serious writing about Tallis is in very short

supply. The only proper all-round account is still

the deliberately thin 1968 Tallis by Paul Doe in the

Oxford Studies of Composers series. There have

been many articles, by such writers as John Mil

som and others, but no full-length biography, not

even for the 2005 anniversary. Byrd and Taverner

have fared much better. This really does seem un

balanced, since as every year goes by it becomes

clearer that Tallis was, at least, a more adventurous

composer than Byrd, and arguably a greater one. It

is also time the fundamental question of whether he was really the Catholic we all take him for was ad

dressed.

Cole's book is not the answer to the general cri

sis, but it is far more than a repository of much

wanted references to source material, many and

fascinating as

they are. She concentrates on a small

topic, which almost inevitably seems to lead to un

expected corners and discoveries. Behind much of it is the history of how European art music became

established in the public mind as a series of 'works'

worthy of taking out of their original contexts and

putting in what Lydia Goehr has called the 'imagi nary museum' of the concert hall. We hear repeat

edly about this 'museum', and from both Goehr and

Michael Talbot, who stand behind much of what Cole writes: 'The role of the imaginary museum is

two-fold: it acts as a marker of an object's status "as

a work of fine art", and serves to "frame" the ob

ject, to "strip it of its local, historical, and worldly

origins" so that "only its aesthetic properties would

metaphorically remain".'

It was during the 19th century that the establish

ing of the musical 'museum' and filling it with 'art

works' really got going. Cole chooses the Victorian

period for that reason, and chooses Tallis because

he represents a kind of fault line, where Byrd and

Gibbons would not do so well. On one side of the

line was the 40-part motet Spem in alium, which was

known about, inspected, waltzed round and prod ded with very mixed feelings, as something which

would not go away but represented something inef

fable from the past; and on the other were the Preces

and responses, which were not just loved but put on

a pedestal so high that the story about St Gregory and the dove could scarcely rival the status which

they achieved while representing exactly what was

wanted from the past. It helps Cole's thesis that the Victorians scarcely knew another piece by Tal

lis, and that neither Byrd nor Gibbons could offer

such an extreme divide between the complexity of

40-part polyphony (whose lustre in the last year or

so has taken a further polishing now that another, inferior 40-part colossus by Striggio has been un

earthed) and a few boring chords (which can only very vaguely be attributed to Tallis). By comparing the reception of such diverse compositions, Cole

has been able to capture several moments at once:

the gradual move from utility piece to museum

'work'; the very slow birth of interest in what Tal

lis might actually have written (though no apparent interest in what he might have heard); the progress of Tallis's reputation from a quasi-divine Anglican (according to one commentator he had been 'raised

THE Musical times Winter 20o8 107



up' by God to perfect the service of the English Church) to flesh and blood Catholic; and the influ ence of who the Britons really

are - nation myths

inherited from the past ? which Tallis and his Preces

got mixed up in because of a much-favoured theory about how the Celts used to sing in one way and

the Northern peoples of Britain in another, with the two traditions meeting in these chords.

The surprises are in the detail, and what fascinat

ing details they are. The full-life representation of

Tallis on the Albert Memorial, next to Beethoven, was news to me and figures grandly on the front

cover of the book. For some years in the 1840s Westminster Abbey used to have an annual Tallis

Day, which drew big crowds. The main attraction was his Service in D, which was loved for its 'vast

ness, gloomy grandeur, and ponderous solemnity'. Later in the century, when interest was at last turn

ing to Tallis's Latin-texted music, his great Angli can anthems, If ye love me and Hear the voice and

prayer, were sung to Latin words, possibly to dig

nify them. A whole chapter is devoted to the history of the 19th-century performances of Spem, which

precisely dovetail with what most of us know about the 20th-century

ones. These pass into living re

cord, beginning with the Boris Ord version in 1936, which I heard people still describing 20 years ago.

(Is it just coincidence that a succession of Organists of King's College Cambridge have played such a

leading role in the establishing of Spem as a master

piece? Perhaps to go from performances by Ord to

Willcocks in a relatively short space of time is not so

surprising, but who knew that AH Mann published the first practical edition of the music in 1888, some

80 years before the seminal CUMS recording? At least here is further evidence of how long-lived the influence of the choral scene at King's has been.)

At the beginning of the 19th century the prevail ing view of Spem was that it was something more

to be marvelled at than performed, rather in the

way that medieval Romans viewed the colossal but

decaying monuments around them as the unintel

ligible and practically useless creations of gods. Thomas Tudway, for example, claimed early in the

18th century that Spem was not to be performed but to act as a silent monument to Tallis's genius.

Nonetheless, copies of copies continued to be made at

regular intervals from the mid-18th century on

wards, which enabled Charles Burney to write in

1771: 'a long and laboured Fugue, recte et retro in

40 parts, may be a good entertainment for the Eyes of a Critic, but can never delight the Ears of a Man

of Taste.' Although there clearly had been perfor mances of Spem in the early 17th century, it didn't occur to anyone in the intervening

200 years that

it might be as much a sonic experience as a visual one until 1836, when the Madrigal Society gave a

private performance. The reviews of this and the

five subsequent attempts during the 19th century make wonderful reading; and even if the perfor mances were not

exactly enjoyed, one notices that

they were at least seen as a

big occasion, worthy of

comment. The performance held in Exeter Hall in

1845, f?r example, sung by 500 people to sol-fa syl lables was described as 'too trashy for endurance'

and Tallis's music 'the mistake of a barbarous age'.

Equally memorable is the Daily Telegraph's de

scription of the next attempt, 34 years later in 1879, when the music was found to be 'about as interest

ing and valuable as a set of Chinese concentric balls or a table made of a million bits of wood'. That should have sunk it for good but, undaunted, AH

Mann performed it with 400 singers at the Congress of the Incorporated Society of Musicians in 1898, when The Musical Times observed that 'it is not a

work one yearns to hear twice, but it is a remarkable

example of the glorification of early contrapuntal ingenuity'. That remark was the first sign of inter est in the actual musical style Tallis had employed, and from there the challenges inherent in staging it

began to be seen as desirable. By the time I came to conduct it for the first time in 1973 performances

were still rare enough

- every five years or so - to

be flagged up months in advance in the press, en

couraging enthusiasts to travel long distances to

hear them. By 2006 the rage was such that I was able to take part in 18 performances in as many weeks.

Cole has been tireless in unearthing these reviews

the musical times Winter 2008 109



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reverses the meaning of the sentence. The Span

ish composer Tomas Luis de Victoria is given as

'Vittoria', an Italian useage long since abandoned;

the German city of Hannover should be spelt with two 'n's, George III not coming from New

Hampshire; and I would have expected better of an academic publisher than to print 'to act as silent

monuments to the "ye great skill and ability of ye

composer".' Publishers who print 'Vittoria' should

know what 'ye' means. But the greatest mystery

was how the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard's name

was spelt. He first appears on p.97 as Shepherd in

the text, but Sheppard in the footnote relating to

it. This confusion is later compounded by a refer

ence to the great Tudor composer, John Sheppard, who is usually spelt thus, but in a footnote on p. 8 5 is

given as Shepherd. (The index has both spellings). One could only wish that the footnote on p. 120

which refers to 'Sheppard: Tallis and his Song of

Forty Parts' were true ? that would have been an

eye-witness account to cap them all.

Which brings me to my own words. The book

ends with a reprise of the opening, where I am quot ed as having said in a newspaper interview that The

Tallis Scholars unashamedly sing Tallis's music in

concert halls, treating it simply as very good music

and not trying to recreate the original circumstances

of its performance (or, I would now continue, the

original sound, but that is a different topic). Fair

enough. Cole's book ends: 'a full understanding of

the revival of this music can only be achieved when

the religious function is considered alongside the

aesthetic function, and when we leave aside our de

sire for the music of Tallis and his contemporaries to be "just very good music".' Isn't that the wrong

way round? I don't desire Tallis's music to be very

good. And if it weren't, no-one would be interested

in trying to understand the revival of it. I can't help

feeling that the need to find a good research topic has run away with Cole in these words. But it is a

good topic, and I recommend her contribution to

the available literature on Tallis wholeheartedly.



as well as telling the history of how the music itself

has been preserved. She shows how some of that

history came

together in the wrong order. The ear

liest surviving manuscript of Spem is Egerton 3512,

copied in the first years of the 17th century, pre

sumably from the lost autograph. Although every

subsequent edition more or less depends from this, the manuscript itself disappeared between 1815 and

1947, when it was presented to the British Library

'by a lady resident in King's Lynn'. None of the

19th-century editions therefore could have referred to it directly, nor could the Tudor Church Music edi

tion of 1928, on which many performers still relied in the 1970s. The famous story of the Duke of Nor

folk putting his gold chain about Tallis's neck after

the first performance of Spem only came to light in

1878 when the Rev. H. Fleetwood Sheppard wrote

a letter to The Musical Times (The Musical Times

and its reports are a major source for much of this

book) saying that 20 years earlier he had stumbled across the information in the Cambridge University

Library, but done nothing with it.

Cole's patience in examining all the sources

reaches its zenith in the chapter on the Preces and re

sponses. If anything this story is even more remark

able than the one about Spem, though the music, to

us, is so unremarkable that a critic of a recent re

cording of the complete Tallis could only congratu late the singers for managing not to sound bored. At

least it shouldn't be necessary for anyone to have to

go over all the twists and turns of the reception of

these pieces again, surviving as

they do in count

less sources, edited and published by musicians of

greatly varying proficiency, the music constantly being rewritten on a whim and little of it having anything to do with Tallis himself. Even the basic

question of whether they were written for four or

five voices gave rise to turf wars between the ex

perts, which lasted for decades. A typical contribu tion came from the collector Edward Rimbault, who

claimed that the old Barnard edition for five voices must be wrong because the chant had been moved from the tenor and, as if by logical extension, a part added. And so it went on: these chords were a hot

enough property for reputations to be made or lost on account of them.

The main subplot of the book is to join the dis

cussion about how composers and their music are

'concretized ' after their deaths, a word which means

'that in the perceptions of a particular collective an

individual work or the works of a given composer will assume a distinct shape that can be identified

and that will change with time and circumstance '. In

Tallis's case in Cole's account this applies primarily to the Victorian period, though a crucial perspec tive is how we have reacted to him since. The choice of repertoire to compare

? very big indeed and as

small as it gets while still sustaining fame - is per fect for the task, though there is a trace of whimsy about it. Why does the title of Lydia Goehr's book

refer to the 'imaginary museum of musical works'

when there is nothing 'imaginary' about it? A mu

seum is full of pictures which have been taken there

from other places; a concert hall plays host to pieces of music which were intended for somewhere else.

The concert hall is not an imaginary museum, it is a museum. And the very word 'concretization' is a

shocker, the shock augmented by the fact that the V spelling is not used consistently every time this

word appears (p. 14) and is not used at all in other and similar words ('crystallisation'

on p. 191 for ex

ample). There are other minor irritations of this kind.

Although Cole writes clearly, she lays out the dis cussion as in a student essay: first you explain what

you want to say, then you say it, then you sum up by

saying it again and previewing the next stage of the

argument. This is tedious, and by the largely super fluous Conclusion, redundant. Much as I would like to think that music students habitually study Tallis's

music I fear even that is hoping for too much, let alone his reception in the 19th century: this book is for trained minds. And the over-care which has

gone into this side of the writing is regularly vitiated

by the proof-reading and the partial referencing of

the index. In the former category there are several

single nouns followed by plural verbs; and one case

(p. 170) of a 'not' being omitted, which of course

the musical times Winter 2008 111



peter phillips - hope and glory

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