William Lloyd Webber: Rhapsody on Helmsley for organ (1956)

Today is Advent Sunday. For many Christians this is a time of preparation for Christmas. Traditionally, this demands meditation on three topics: 1. The Coming of Christ to judge the world, 2. The end of the world is approaching and 3. The need for confession of our sins, leading to forgiveness. The well-known Collect of the day calls for the believer to “cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light.” The ceremonial calls for the altars to be “adorned in a simple manner and at all Services of the Season the colour will be violet.”

In the January 1956 edition of the Musical Times, a new series of organ music publications was announced. Novello were to issue six volumes of Festal Voluntaries. The advertising blurb notes that these “…are intended for the Church Seasons, each contain five pieces based on appropriate hymn-tunes. Despite the use of the word ' Festal ', provision has been made for the seasons of Lent and Passiontide. All were written specially for this series and the composers have assumed a wide interpretation of the chorale-prelude form, the various styles including Prelude, Postlude, Sortie, Meditation, Rhapsody and Pastorale.”

Musicians who were commissioned included most of the big names in the nineteen-fifties organ world. This included Francis Jackson, William H. Harris, Flor Peeters, Healey Willan, and Ivan Langstroth. The six volumes were Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Lent, Passiontide and Palm Sunday, Easter, Ascensiontide, Whitsuntide and Ascension and finally Harvest.

In the Advent album, William Lloyd Webber contributed his Rhapsody on Helmsley for organ completed around 1955. Helmsley is a hymn tune associated with the words:

 Lo he comes in clouds descending,

Once for helpless sinner slain!

Thousand, thousand saints attending.

Swell the triumph of his train:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

All the Angels cry amen.

This is a perfect Advent hymn which derives its theological content from the Book of Revelation, relating imagery of the Day of Judgment. The words were by Charles Wesley, and the melody is attributed to Thomas Olivers, a Welsh Methodist preacher and hymnist.

In his seminal study of British Organ Music of the Twentieth Century, (Scarecrow Press, 2002), Peter Hardwick gives a succinct analysis of the Rhapsody on Helmsley. He considers that it is a “notable piece.” The work opens Allegro spiritoso, “loosely based on the opening motif of the hymn tune, with fleeting references to the fifth and sixth lines of the melody.” The rhapsodical nature of the work is clear in the various sections, which alternate contrapuntal and chordal textures. There are frequent changes of tempo throughout. It ends with massive chords. Hardwick sums up: “In Rhapsody, raw emotion, and [Lloyd Webber] allows himself unfettered freedom, to be totally and utterly immersed in the creation of this rhythmically driven, dramatic, Romantic music.”

The Rhapsody was dedicated to John Churchill, who at that time was the organist at St Martin-in-the-Fields church.

To my knowledge, there is no commercial recording of Lloyd Webber’s Rhapsody on Helmsley. However, at least three versions have been uploaded to YouTube. For me the best account (here) is given by Matt Brittain on the organ of Front Street United Methodist Church in Burlington, North Carolina.