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Hope and glory

Peter Phillips welcomes a recent book on Thomas Tallis

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 Milsom and others, but no full-length biography, not even for the 2005 anniversary. Byrd and Taverner have fared much better. This really does seem unbalanced, 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 addressed.

Cole’s book is not the answer to the general crisis, 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 unexpected 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 ‘imaginary museum’ of the concert hall. We hear repeatedly 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 object, 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 establishing 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 prodded with very mixed feelings, as something which would not go away but represented something ineffable 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 Tallis, 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 unearthed) 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 Tallis 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 up’ by God to perfect the service of the English Church) to flesh and blood Catholic; and the influence 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 fascinating 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 ‘vastness, gloomy grandeur, and ponderous solemnity’. Later in the century, when interest was at last turning to Tallis’s Latin-texted music, his great Anglican anthems, If ye love me and Hear the voice and prayer, were sung to Latin words, possibly to dignify 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 record, 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 masterpiece? 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 prevailing 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 unintelligible 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 onwards, 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 performances 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 performances 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, for example, sung by 500 people to sol-fa syllables was described as ‘too trashy for endurance’ and Tallis’s music ‘the mistake of a barbarous age’. Equally memorable is the Daily Telegraph’s description of the next attempt, 34 years later in 1879, when the music was found to be ‘about as interesting 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 interest 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, encouraging 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 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 earliest surviving manuscript of Spem is Egerton 3512, copied in the first years of the 17th century, presumably 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 edition of 1928, on which many performers still relied in the 1970s. The famous story of the Duke of Norfolk 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 responses. If anything this story is even more remarkable than the one about Spem, though the music, to us, is so unremarkable that a critic of a recent recording of the complete Tallis could only congratulate 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 countless 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 experts, which lasted for decades. A typical contribution 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 discussion 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 perspective 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 perfect 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 museum 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 ‘z’ 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 example).

There are other minor irritations of this kind. Although Cole writes clearly, she lays out the discussion 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 superfluous 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 reverses the meaning of the sentence. The Spanish 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 reference to the great Tudor composer, John Sheppard, who is usually spelt thus, but in a footnote on p.85 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 quoted 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 desire 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.

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Peter Phillips is Director of Music at Merton College, Oxford, and of The Tallis Scholars.