Around this point in Holy Week, organists around the world will be searching for their copies of Herbert Howells’ Six Pieces for organ. The second of these — Saraband (For the morning of Easter) — is very popular and this year I’ve got my copy out again, at the request of a conductor friend, Hilary Davan Wetton. The resulting recording is below and I’ve posted some history and thoughts on performance too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Howells and the Saraband recently. There’s a book chapter by Graham Barber on the topic in The Music of Herbert Howells. It’s a genre he repeatedly came back to and it’s a central part of his Stabat Mater (1965), which he referred to as ‘a series of sarabands’. In that piece, there’s a strong influence of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the sense of ritual pervades all of Howells’ late masterpiece. He generally equated the saraband with mourning and there’s a long history of compositional precedents for Good Friday, take for example, the final chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, ‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’ (We sit down in tears). 

When Howells was writing the Six Pieces, he was particularly close to the dedicatee, Herbert ‘John’ Sumsion. Following the burial of Michael, Howells’ nine-year-old son, it was Sumsion who dragged Howells out of the church at Twigworth after several weeks of refusing to leave. The Howells family stayed with the Sumsions that Christmas and frequently thereafter. 

Howells’ Gloucester roots are well known, but of course, the area now came to represent a tremendous loss. He turned to composition as a way of dealing with his grief, and pieces like Hymnus Paradisi, the Cello Concerto, the Psalm Preludes (set two) and the Six Pieces, all date from this period. The Six Pieces weren’t intended as a set, and when they were first pulled together for possible publication they were marked ‘Five Pieces’ – the Saraband (In Modo Elegiaco) was added later. They were then published in 1953.

It’s possible to draw Gloucester links to most of the pieces. The first to be written was the Fugue, Chorale and Epilogue (dated 16 December 1939 – which contradicts the published score). It is a peculiar form, but there is a precedent in the ‘Chorale and Fugue’ which ends the first organ sonata, which he wrote at Gloucester in 1911. This was inspired by the final movement of the first sonata of Basil Harwood. Howells saw the fugue form as particularly personal (possibly due to the volume of counterpoint teaching he did) and ‘his’ movement in Lambert’s Clavichord is a fugue. 

Next came ‘Master Tallis’s testament’ which he considered to be ‘a footnote’ to Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, the premiere of which at Gloucester in 1910 had convinced him to become a composer (rather than a pianist). Next came the Paean with its incredibly fast metronome marking (see Paean blog). It seems to have been sketched concurrently with the ‘Sanctus’ of Hymnus Paradisi. The Preludio ‘Sine Nomine’ followed and might look back to the improvisational ‘Sine Nomine’ for orchestra, soloists and chorus that was premiered there at the Three Choirs Festival in 1922. 

The two sarabands were originally a pair: one for Good Friday (in modo elegiaco) and one for Easter morning. Of course, Easter was a highly problematic time for Howells after Michael’s death. Ursula said that he desperately wanted to believe in the Resurrection and the hope of being reunited with his lost son, but simply couldn’t. The manuscripts show that Howells revised the ending of his Easter Saraband for publication. HH likely had Vaughan Williams’ Job in his mind when writing the piece – particularly the ‘Saraband of the Sons of God’.

Several years ago I discussed the Six Pieces with Dr John Birch, former professor of organ at the Royal College of Music and close friend of Howells. He gave the first performance of the Partita (with its Sarabande for the 12th day of any October – RVW’s birthday). He was very clear about the need for performances to project ‘a strong sense of the dance’, by which he meant a strict tempo and the customary accent on the second beat. ‘So many Howells performances aren’t rhythmic enough’. I’ve demonstrated a ‘strict’ performance below.

Howells’ tempos are often a source of confusion. They were frequently conceived with a very specific acoustic and set of performing forces in mind and later in his career there was pressure from his publisher to include more of them (it was seen as unprofessional by that stage to not put them in). Several people (including Dr Birch) have told me that Howells never owned a metronome himself. We know that David Willcocks wrote very different tempo markings into the Stabat Mater (and Howells worked closely with Willcocks on the score), which were then used as the basis for David Hill’s recent recording with the Bach Choir. In general, these markings were too slow. However, there are examples of the opposite too and I was particularly moved by David Briggs’ recent recording of the Rhapsody no.1, which comes in at around two minutes longer than any other commercial recording. So experimenting with tempo is particularly important. 

You can hear a recording of my practice on the Saraband (For the morning of Easter) above and I’d mention two performance aspects that I think are important. 

1 – To maintain the strictness to establish ‘the dance’ that Dr Birch was after, I’ve had to cut many of Howells’ phrases short. In a big acoustic, you simply can’t hear the phrase structure if you follow all of Howells’ rhythmic values. Of course, choirs are very used to cutting quavers or crochets off here and there. 

2 – I’ve tried to stick to Howells’ tempo markings. Most performances of this piece are a bit slower in the outer sections and considerably slower in the middle section. In contrast, the final Largamente is often missing the necessary ‘expansiveness’. When I worked on the piano works, Hilary Macnamara stressed to me how ‘driven’ Herbert Howells’ playing was. Of course, the Saraband is at the centre of the piano sonatina he wrote for her, and recording this Easter saraband, I thought of her playing too. 

The recording was made in one take using the Metzler organ sample set of Düren Church.