Herbert Howells (1892-1983): Salve Regina (1915)

There is a good anecdote about Charles Villiers Stanford sending his pupil Herbert Howells to Westminster Cathedral. Patrick Russill, in an article about Howells, has suggested that the young composer had the legendary phrase “Polyphony for a penny, m’ bhoy” ringing in his ears. The ‘penny’ being the price of a bus ticket from the Royal College of Music to the Roman Catholic Cathedral – circa 1912. The purpose of the trip was to hear performances of Renaissance Latin polyphony under the musical direction of the great Dr. Richard Terry: Stanford felt that it would do his pupils good to hear the pure music of Palestrina. Howells was to benefit from this advice more than most.

However, it was not only historical music that Terry explored: he encouraged several established and up and coming composers to write new settings of the Mass and other liturgical texts.  These included works by Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Charles Wood and Stanford himself.

For Howells, his attendances at Westminster Cathedral were highly motivating: the list of pieces produced for Richard Terry includes five separate works including the great Mass in the Dorian Mode which has only relatively recently been rediscovered and recorded. 

The Salve Regina was one of Four Anthems of the Blessed Virgin Mary, op.9 which was composed in 1915. The other three were an Alma Redemptoris Mater which was written in the Aeolian mode, an Ave Regina caelorum that was seemingly ‘decidedly modern’ and a Regina Caeli (which has survived) for double choir.  Unfortunately, the first two of these pieces have been lost. Dr. Terry considered these Four Anthems to be “quite the finest by any modern Englishman”.

Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,

Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Hevae.

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes

in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia ergo, Advocata nostra,

illos tuos misericordes oculos

ad nos converte;

Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,

nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens, O pia,

O dulcis Virgo Maria.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,

Our life, our sweetness and our hope.

To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;

To thee do we send up our sighs,

mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

Turn then, most gracious advocate,

thine eyes of mercy toward us;

and after this our exile,

show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Until relatively recently many present-day listeners probably assumed that Herbert Howells wrote solely ecclesiastical music –for the Anglican Church. In fact, for many people, he typifies the so-called 'cathedral sound’. However, at the time of the Four Anthems he was better regarded for his ‘secular’ works. These included the fine Three Dances for Violin and Orchestra, the Three B’s Suite, the Lady Audrey’s Suite for String Quartet and the Quartet in A minor. It is only relatively recently that the works of this period have reappeared in the public domain.

Contemporary reviewers regarded the Salve Regina as the finest of the Four Anthems, though it is not now possible to compare it with the two lost pieces. Unfortunately, there is no autograph score of this work. It was through the diligence of Patrick Russill that this work was ‘realised’ from the choral parts and a conductor’s score.

The music has its roots in the sixteenth-century English polyphony of William Byrd and Peter Phillips. However, Howells brings his own musical aesthetic of ‘harmonic ambiguity’ to bear on the setting. One major feature is the closing soprano solo, which has been compared to Stanford’s The Blue Bird and even Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.  In later years Howells was to write his great Missa Sabrinensis. This work was more a hymn of praise to the River Severn and the surrounding countryside rather than a viable liturgical setting of the Mass. Perhaps here, in 1915 Howells was already creating a synthesis of the sacred and the secular in his Salve Regina? 

Listen to Andrew Nethsingha conducting the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge on YouTube.