TY - JOUR
AU - Donaldson, Hilary Seraph
AB - The first of many letters between Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and the Anglican clergyman J. Walter Atherton Hussey (1909–85) was written in the winter of 1943, ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of Hussey’s parish. Hussey closes his letter in this way: On reading through this letter I feel more than ever how impertinent it is to send it, but I hope you will forgive me and put it down to enthusiasm for a great “bee” of mine—closer association between the arts and the Church.1 Hussey was writing to commission Britten to compose a piece for the choir of St. Matthew’s, Northampton, in celebration of its jubilee. The result, Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 30 (1943), is a rhythmically complex anthem set to vivid, animist poetry. The piece is also emblematic of the Church of England’s engagement with modernist artworks on sacred themes in the mid-twentieth century. In this article I examine the creation of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb in connection with the other artworks Hussey commissioned during the war, with a particular focus on Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child. In this context, Rejoice in the Lamb can also be seen as an important site of Britten’s engagement with English musical modernism during this period, a term not usually associated with Britten’s works for church performance. This active engagement with the church in the pursuit of modernist expressions of art and faith is particularly interesting in the context of the strictures of wartime austerity. This collaboration between composer and clergyman offers a unique perspective on the interplay of contemporary parish life, gendered assumptions about art and faith, and the place of modernist art and music in wartime culture. Hussey’s enthusiasm and gift of persuasion, both with regard to his congregation and to the artists he drew into his circle, opened a door to Britten’s continuing engagement with the church and its music upon his return from exile in America, and to the role that sacred and liturgical imagery would play in his mature music. Rejoice in the Lamb is significant not only for its enduring appeal to singers and Britten’s closest companions, but for the ways in which Hussey employed it as a means to galvanize the support of his parishioners around other artistic commissions at St. Matthew’s. Christopher Chowrimootoo has discussed the ways in which Britten’s music often negotiates a space between high modernism and mass culture.2 It may be that Hussey saw in Rejoice in the Lamb an accessibly modernist piece that could inspire an enthusiasm for modernist sacred art in his community. Having once lamented that “the arts had become largely divorced from the Church,” Hussey found in Britten a means to rekindle a relationship that he felt had largely broken down in the modern era. My broader research investigates the intersection of modernism and the sacred in Britten’s music. Scholars are actively reconsidering the previously more narrow conception of modernism as it pertains to musical language and the presumption of dissonance, and recent discourses have positioned Britten as an emblematic English modernist composer. Britten’s lifelong interest in exploring themes and musical structures drawn from the Anglo-Catholic Church put his music at odds with the dominant narrative of high modernism that was construed not only in terms of an avant-garde aesthetic, but in a distinctly secular opposition to tradition. I argue that Britten’s engagements with the sacred are an integral aspect to his musical modernism, rather than instances in which he evades or retreats from the modernist. Rejoice in the Lamb was one of five artistic commissions arranged by Hussey for the 1943 anniversary celebration of his parish church. Hussey was well regarded as an enthusiastic patron of sacred art for the church in the twentieth century.3 Though he was not alone in his impulse to bring the church and the arts into closer connection, his passion for modernist art, and his dogged persistence in commissioning it during wartime, merit closer attention. English officials foresaw the task of rebuilding the cultural life of the nation even in the midst of the conflict, and after the armistice, as Heather Wiebe has argued convincingly, Britten played an important role in activities of English postwar reconstruction.4 However, Hussey’s insistence on spending significant energy and resources on the commissioning of works of art for the church in the midst of wartime is a facet of modernist cultural life not previously recognized. Hussey’s “wild and ambitious dream,” as he termed it in a 1985 memoir, included five projects: First, to get a piece of music written for the [the fiftieth anniversary]; second, to get a first-rate organist to give a recital in the church; third, to persuade a really fine soloist―singer or instrumentalist―to perform a like service in the church; fourth, to get a top symphony orchestra and conductor to give a concert; and fifth, to commission a work of art―painting or sculpture―for the church.5 His plan was realized in full within six months of the anniversary (see Table 1). Rejoice in the Lamb was delivered in late spring of that year, and premiered at the festival on 21 September. Hussey also worked diligently to bring about the commission of the Madonna and Child of Henry Moore, which was unveiled at St. Matthew’s a few months later, on 19 February 1944. The scope of Hussey’s vision for the anniversary of a parish church is impressive in and of itself; that the entire vision was accomplished during open war is more remarkable still. He was motivated, as he stated many times over a long career, by a passion for modern art and for the perspective artists brought to the life and story of the Anglican Church. His sense that artists were becoming distanced from the church during that period is borne out in Britten’s own life. At the time that Hussey approached Britten for the commission, he was transitioning through a series of “breaks” with elements that had shaped him as a young man: the death of his parents had precipitated more openness with his mature sexuality; his formative friendship with the poet W. H. Auden was breaking down; his sojourn in America had come to an end. In many ways he had also closed the door to the religious practice he had inherited from his family and had followed enthusiastically at school.6 Following the commission in 1943, an amiable relationship developed between Hussey and Britten. Hussey repeatedly approached Britten for recommendations of young composers for future commissions. Britten recommended colleagues such as Michael Tippett and Lennox Berkeley, as well as his own student, James Butt. Rejoice in the Lamb itself remained an important early product of their connection: Hussey often reprogrammed it in connection with his later commissions, pairing the familiar modernist work with the unfamiliar newcomer. Of greatest significance is how Hussey employed the work as a tool to help his congregation “understand” and accept the introduction of Moore’s sculpture in early 1944. Hussey accomplished this through a combination of personal persuasion and shrewd homiletics. Ultimately, these tools worked powerfully in tandem with Rejoice in the Lamb’s own accessible modernism: Britten’s idiosyncratic modernist approach allowed the cantata, despite its newness, to be felt as part of the fabric of life at St. Matthew’s Parish in its jubilee year. Table 1. Walter Hussey’s Patronage Activities, 1943–44 Planned Projects . Resulting Commissions and Performances . Musical commission Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 31, premiered September 1943 Organ recital Recital by Dr. George Thalben-Ball, organist of the Temple Church in London, September 1943 Solo recital Vocal recital by Peter Pears, October 1943 (Rejoice in the Lamb reprised); Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad later gave a recital that Hussey connects with the jubilee, July 1947 Orchestral concert In-house performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult Artistic commission (painting or sculpture) Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, unveiled February 1944 Planned Projects . Resulting Commissions and Performances . Musical commission Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 31, premiered September 1943 Organ recital Recital by Dr. George Thalben-Ball, organist of the Temple Church in London, September 1943 Solo recital Vocal recital by Peter Pears, October 1943 (Rejoice in the Lamb reprised); Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad later gave a recital that Hussey connects with the jubilee, July 1947 Orchestral concert In-house performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult Artistic commission (painting or sculpture) Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, unveiled February 1944 Open in new tab Table 1. Walter Hussey’s Patronage Activities, 1943–44 Planned Projects . Resulting Commissions and Performances . Musical commission Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 31, premiered September 1943 Organ recital Recital by Dr. George Thalben-Ball, organist of the Temple Church in London, September 1943 Solo recital Vocal recital by Peter Pears, October 1943 (Rejoice in the Lamb reprised); Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad later gave a recital that Hussey connects with the jubilee, July 1947 Orchestral concert In-house performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult Artistic commission (painting or sculpture) Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, unveiled February 1944 Planned Projects . Resulting Commissions and Performances . Musical commission Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, Op. 31, premiered September 1943 Organ recital Recital by Dr. George Thalben-Ball, organist of the Temple Church in London, September 1943 Solo recital Vocal recital by Peter Pears, October 1943 (Rejoice in the Lamb reprised); Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad later gave a recital that Hussey connects with the jubilee, July 1947 Orchestral concert In-house performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Adrian Boult Artistic commission (painting or sculpture) Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, unveiled February 1944 Open in new tab The English Church, Art, and Modernism 1939–45 Hussey’s endeavor to draw the contemporary English artist and the church into closer proximity during the war years paralleled attempts by the British government to sustain English cultural life in wartime, to boost public morale, and to chronicle British war measures to other nations. Two government bodies were created to this end: the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), both founded in 1939. Under the purview of the Ministry of Information, the WAAC provided some thirty British visual artists with full-time employment, and patronized many more by purchasing works for touring exhibits. Britten registered as a conscientious objector upon his return to England in March of 1942. He went to the appeal hearing for his registration armed with the proposition that he could best serve his country by contributing to the work of CEMA; his unconditional exemption was granted with the stipulation that he do just that. Not everyone shared in the enthusiasm for these initiatives, however. Early in 1940, following the announcement of a government grant to CEMA of £50,000, a headline in the Daily Express screamed, “What madness is this? There is no such thing as culture in wartime.”7 In the background of the more pressing anxieties of the war and the place of culture within it, there lingered an anxiety about the idea of a Christian nation as part of England’s social fabric. As Wiebe has shown, Britten’s musical activities during this period “grappled in especially subtle ways with the problem of building musical culture” as a part of music’s role in a broader “project of cultural renewal that accepted artists, critics, and planners in the wake of the Second World War.”8 These activities, as she characterizes it, constitute “a double gesture to the future and the past, seeking renewal in cultural memory,” as evinced in Britten by the debt owed to medieval chant by A Ceremony of Carols, or the juxtaposition of Latin rite and First World War poetry in War Requiem.9 The onset of conflict that threatened the English way of life prompted a renewal of interest in cultural institutions that had shaped it, such as the Church of England. Stephen Spender has reflected on this wartime attention to the sacred, identifying in it a “feeling of incandescent faith” brought on by the assault on English cities.10 Spender and Wiebe both draw attention to the idea that emphasizing the national past, especially by juxtaposing it with the realities of the present, was a central way that modern English artists mediated their experiences in art. This approach contrasts with the idiom of continental modernism, whose expressionism and non-figural, non-mimetic aesthetics emphasized a rupture with the past that was, often overtly, a rejection of convention and of conventional institutions such as the church. By the early twentieth century, the Anglican Church was not engaged in the creation of religious art in the way it once had been, and aesthetically, modernism in visual art and music had by this time largely left the church behind. Graham Howes has observed that in many instances the “very existence” of modernist art “was perceived as a challenge to the primacy of religion in spiritual, moral and social matters.”11 The result, Howes argues, is the general sense among church authorities that these modernist styles of art, “created in contexts so apparently foreign to the interests and mind-set of the Church,” were at best inappropriate and out of place within its walls.12 The rejection of tradition and rupture with the past that characterizes some emblematic modernist gestures posed a threat to the stability and authority which were bedrocks of the church. On the other hand, bound up with the racist atrocities of the Third Reich was its rebuke of much modernist art as decadent, excessive, and queer, and its vilification of the people who created and appreciated it. In that sense, to embrace modernist art was an anti-fascist gesture. The sense that modernist art was inappropriate for the church was countered by some artists at the time. Hans Feibusch (1898–1998), a German-born painter and sculptor of Jewish heritage who made his career in England from 1933 until his death, and who is perhaps best known for his murals in Anglican churches, called on the church to embrace modernism in a 1946 monograph. He critiqued the “immaturity” of contemporary representational religious art, and warned against church authorities promulgating artistic “baby language,” which he protested would be more at home in a nursery than a church: To see the way some of our best church and cathedral builders decorate their work with nursery emblems, golden stars, chubby Christmas angels, lilies, lambs and shepherds, insipid sculptures and paintings of a silly, false naivety, one wonders in what world they live. The men who come home from the war, and all the rest of us, have seen too much horror and evil…. Only the most profound, tragic, moving, sublime vision can redeem us…. It is for the leaders of the Church to take the initiative, to commission the best artists, the real representatives of our time, to give them intelligent guidance in a sphere new to them, and to have sufficient confidence in their artistic and human quality to give them free play.13 Feibusch’s closing call to action reads like a mandate for Walter Hussey’s career: to be a guide for modernist artists to move in the religious sphere and to create art that is wholly their own, and which speaks to the faith life of the church. Feibusch, writing just after the end of the war, frames his argument in terms of the church’s imperative to comfort traumatized men returning from war, insisting that the voice of the church should be “heard loud over the thunderstorm” of their pain, and that “the artist should be her mouthpiece, as of old.”14 With the fascist condemnation of decadent modernist art in mind, the gendered construction of Feibusch’s argument is striking: the undesirable, “weak,” and “silly” expressions of sentimental church art are elements generally coded as feminine, such as angels, lillies, and lambs. These belong in the domestic nursery, not in the steadfast, strong, masculine church. Modernist art, in Feibusch’s view, is coded as masculine, and has the capacity to speak to men of faith in their hour of spiritual need. The “seething bestiality” of humanity’s failings can only be remedied by a robust artistic mediation of the divine, he insists. Feibusch was not entirely alone in his wish for contemporary religious art that spoke to Christian theology, as Hussey’s career and legacy affirm. Hussey evidently did not consider aesthetic modernism at odds with the traditionalism of the parish setting. Rather, he lamented that the widespread increase in secular humanism had been paralleled in the steady decline of artists working for and on behalf of the Church of England, a “divorce” of artist and church for which he sensed both were the poorer. At the same time, the cultural narrative of England in the war took a trajectory very different from the Continental avant-garde, which equated modernism in art with a definitive break with the patronage and ideology of the church. A common thread of the art produced during this time was a sense of place, of rootedness within United Kingdom’s landscape, villages, and parishes, and of continuity with the past. As Anthony Barone has argued, English modernism more broadly tended to lack “any presumption of the ideological and aesthetic coherence of the European modernist mainstream in the years between the First and Second World Wars.”15 Byron Adams situates some of the earliest inspirations for an English expression of modernism in the mediation of Arthur Rimbaud by poets such as T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell. Adams notes that a defining feature of this poetry is its deliberate estrangement from—and even derision for—“nineteenth-century pieties, especially religion.”16 As Adams points out, in Sitwell’s responses to Rimbaud (as in her poetry for William Walton’s Façade) there is no “savage mockery” of religion but rather “a modernist synthesis of pastoral tropes with Victorian reminiscences for the purpose of sly satire.”17 This approach resonates with what Alexandra Harris has characterized as “Romantic Modernism,” borrowing her understanding of “Romantic” in relation to “Modernism” from the sense broadly used by John Piper, who along with his wife, Myfanwy Evans, was a longtime collaborator of Britten’s.18 Piper articulated in his 1938 book British Romantic Artists that English painters looked to their nation’s geography as inspiration for their art, that they were concerned with “the changeable climate of our sea-washed country.”19 Piper’s modernism was also informed by his long-standing interest in the art and architecture of medieval English churches. As Piper insisted, “Romantic art deals with the particular.”20 In other words, as Alexandra Harris suggests, even abstract art was a means of forming a connection to an explicitly English geography and cultural heritage, a “newly anglicized modern art.”21 The paradox of this aesthetic approach—which allows for the particularity of English textures and localities even while embracing abstraction—comes through in the title of the first exhibition of abstract art in United Kingdom, Abstract and Concrete, curated by Nicolete Gray and featuring the work of Mondrian.22 Similarly, Britten, who was committed to the idea of occasional music in much of his endeavors, engaged with English musical modernism in a way rooted in United Kingdom’s cultural history, and his engagement with church music offer good examples of his approach.23 I suggest that the paradoxical relationship between English modernity and the past (as highlighted by Harris) and between nostalgia and cultural renewal, metaphysical and material rebuilding (as framed by Wiebe), pervades Britten’s engagements with modernism. As Britten’s approach to Rejoice in the Lamb indicates, his modernism manifests in part through connection, and the creation of an “occasional” art, as he himself termed it.24 It speaks to the musical and cultural landscape for which it was written—in this case, an East Midlands parish—and also employs aspects of that language to reshape the terms of cultural exchange in subtle ways. The church and the trappings of the sacred are, for Britten, the English landscape from which he draws inspiration, using music to redraw its boundaries where he found they excluded him. His friendship with Walter Hussey formed part of the foundation for this career-spanning facet of his practice. Walter Hussey, Patron of the Arts The Reverend John Walter Atherton Hussey served as an English parish priest at St. Matthew’s, Northampton, from 1937 to 1955, and later as Dean of Chichester Cathedral, from 1955 until his retirement in 1977. As his biographers have noted, the defining characteristic of his life and ministry was an enduring appreciation for music, literature, and the visual arts, and a desire that the church should be a supporter and instigator of them. Kenneth Clark described him as the “last great patron of art in the Church of England,”25 and an “aesthete, impresario, and indomitable persuader.”26 Among the many artistic legacies of his ministry at St. Matthew’s was the landmark Madonna and Child of Henry Moore and the Crucifixion of Graham Sutherland, and at Chichester Cathedral Hussey left a tapestry by John Piper and stained glass by Marc Chagall. Hussey felt that artists working in a modernist idiom had much to teach his community about the divine. He contended that in the vocation of the artist there was an inherent theology, or at the very least a revelatory dimension. As he put it in a 1983 memoir: Artists think and meditate a lot and are in the broadest sense of the word religious. They create fine expressions of the human spirit which can symbolize and express worship, as well as conveying the truths of God to mankind in a vivid and memorable way.27 Hussey excelled at forging and fostering relationships with artists, many of whom had previously had little to no formal connection to the church. He developed St. Matthew’s and Chichester Cathedral into well-known and highly regarded centers for the arts. This engendered criticism by some that his passion for art and artists outweighed much else in Hussey’s professional life, including other duties of his parish work.28 In Trevor Beeson’s assessment, Hussey’s fervor for the arts came to largely replace his religious fervor; he suggests that the “Anglo-Catholicism in which [Hussey] had been nurtured” came to be “replaced by a form of liberal Christian Platonism” expressed through his love for and fostering of the arts, with the result that Hussey was “largely indifferent to the character and needs of a Christian community.”29 Beeson goes on to critique Hussey’s preaching: “His sermons had little identifiable Christian content, being confined mainly to the role of beauty in religion.”30 Whether this aspect of Hussey’s approach to ministry is cast as a flaw or a strength, Hussey clearly understood fostering the arts to be central to his role as a leader of the church and to his own legacy. Previous accounts of Hussey’s patronage activities, however, overlook or underdraw some of its most interesting aspects, namely, the intensity of his pursuit of new modernist artworks in the midst of the strictures of the Second World War. When the Jubilee year of his parish began, Hussey had been vicar for fewer than five years, three of them in wartime. The aerial bombing raids of the German Blitzkrieg had ravaged London and other English cities from August 1940 to May 1941, leaving over 40,000 English civilians dead by the end of the attacks. The focus on civilian casualties during this period was intended to destroy morale and weaken resolve in England ahead of an invasion; this assault came to a head symbolically in November 1940 with the destruction of much of the city of Coventry, including the fourteenth-century cathedral. Northampton, some seventy miles northwest of London and thirty to the southeast of Coventry, did not see the devastation of the larger city centers but was not immune to the bombing raids. The broader context of modernist art’s conflicted place in wartime cultural discourse is connected to Britten and Hussey’s mutual admiration, and to contemporary society’s perception of the connection between male relationships, the church, and modernism. Their collaboration soon after Britten’s return to England was important in inciting an ongoing connection to church communities throughout Britten’s career. Though there are many reasons for Britten to distance himself from the religious observance he had maintained throughout his younger adulthood, his acceptance of his homosexuality and the start of his relationship with Peter Pears likely contributed to a sense of disconnect from the church, whose doctrines shored up society’s proscription of their love. Whereas those in artistic circles at the time were accustomed to the “open secret” nature of relationships like that of Britten and Pears—acknowledged and understood in private, but never in print—Hussey’s sense of ease and closeness with artists in light of his profession is exceptional. He garnered criticism for his proximity to artists and the arts, which was adjacent to criticism for proximity to queerness.31 The way he is spoken about and remembered, particularly by his detractors, gives the impression that some may have wished to suggest that he was queer. Doubtless, Hussey and Britten could have maintained an amiable friendship without Hussey himself being gay, but the ways in which Hussey is written about and remembered by both friends and detractors speaks to the ways that attitudes about modernism’s queerness bled into attitudes about proponents of modernism. I will illustrate some of the aspects of Hussey’s personality and tastes if they suggest the queer in order to highlight how his contemporaries leveraged the former to intimate the latter. It is telling that in accounts of his personality and of the impression he gave, his parishioners and colleagues tend to report him as being taciturn and closed off, while his friends in the arts report that he was generous, warm, and hospitable. Peter Pears reflected this impression in unequivocal terms: “If only all Vicars had been so understanding as you are I don’t believe the church would have lost so many of her artist sons.”32 Here, it seems reasonable to infer that Pears is suggesting that these “artist sons” have been distanced from the church for more than aesthetic differences, but because it has not been a place of welcome or “understanding” for many queer artists, on the part of clergy and community alike. Britten and Pears, and other artists with whom Hussey worked closely (for example Michael Tippett, W. H. Auden, and Lennox Berkeley) found in him a welcome that the doctrine of the church would have denied them. Understanding this context, the “divorce” between artists and the church that Hussey lamented becomes more nuanced; he not only laments the loss to the church of a generation of artists but losing people the church has held distant through stigma. In addition to his investment in friendships with many artists who were gay (alongside many with those who were not), other factors contributed to the undertone that Hussey’s passions were coded as queer. Characterizations of Hussey that convey this undertone speak to enduring English anxieties and tensions about the arts, sexuality, and Englishness. One example of this is an emphasis on the idea that Hussey was most comfortable in the company of men. This idea comes through strongly in reminiscences by Methuen Clark during a 1989 BBC radio broadcast about Hussey’s patronage activities at St. Matthew’s. Clark recalls Hussey’s visible delight in hosting the Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad for a solo recital in celebration of the jubilee: He was almost flirtatious with her. Because he wasn’t a great ladies’ man, you know, Walter wasn’t, oh no, he was happiest in male company—as a good many of us are—but no, he wasn’t a ladies’ man, but he really was very fascinated by her.33 In making this comment, Clark emphasized the word flirtatious in a manner that suggests it was incredulous to think of Hussey being flirtatious with a woman. The claim that Hussey “wasn’t a ladies’ man” also comes across as a veiled commentary on Hussey’s perceived sexual inclinations. The speculative nature of these comments was given more weight at the time by the fact that Hussey never married. This fact prompted Beeson, writing in 2004, to label Hussey “a lonely figure, not given to hospitality,” who “lacked … the warmth and sensitivity to human need required of the leader of any community.” Beeson contends that this insensitivity meant in turn that Chichester Cathedral “acquired the reputation of being an unwelcoming place for its increasing number of visitors.”34 The charge that Hussey lacked warmth and sensitivity, as exemplified by the fact he never married, seems to be a gendered criticism implying that he was unable to provide the kind of welcome a man with a wife at home would. Many biographical notes on Hussey reference his Anglo-Catholicism; Ellis Hanson, for instance, has illustrated an “association of Anglo-Catholicism with homosexuality” that was so readily recognized by this time it was tantamount to “a historical fact,”35 and Byron Adams has highlighted the “interlacing of masculine desire and Anglo-Catholic ceremony” in homosocial subcultures during Britten and Hussey’s lifetime.36 When Beeson references the “Anglo-Catholicism in which [Hussey] had been nurtured,” he is calling on a tradition (stemming from the nineteenth-century Tractarian or Oxford Movement) that Hanson and Adams indicate was broadly understood to have provided a kind of “refuge for homosexual Christian men.”37 This constellation of anecdotal examples points to an overarching attitude of the time that to take an interest in the arts as Hussey did was to bend toward the feminized and queer. The tone of these critiques, at once gendered and latently homophobic, are tied to his lifelong appreciation of controversial modernist art and his close friendships with artists. Paradoxically, these critiques of Hussey’s perceived effeminacy are in tension with the equally gendered way in which Hans Feibusch had called for a robust masculinity in modernism, having adjured artists to resist “talking baby language” in imagery of effeminate lilies and lambs, for the sake of idealized masculine men who sought healthy, masculine modern art to nurture their faith in the church. Against this complex background of the church’s relationship to modernism, debates about the place of culture in time of war, and the adversity and austerity brought about by the conflict, Walter Hussey’s efforts to make the 1943 Jubilee celebration forward-looking, joyful, and optimistic stand out for their audacity and imagination. Hussey first approached Britten via a letter to Boosey & Hawkes in March of that year, after a performance of Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20 (1940), which had made a strong impression on him when he heard it on the radio.38 In the letter, Hussey described his parish’s choir and organ and made deceptively modest claims for the goals of the festival: “We are most anxious to mark the occasion with a Festival which will be worthy.”39 The celebration ultimately encompassed Hussey’s five projects, and unfolded on a far grander scale than he or the community had attempted before. Premiered during the Jubilee celebrations on 21 September, Rejoice in the Lamb was the first project to be realized; Moore’s Madonna and Child was the last. The works themselves, as well as Hussey’s process of introducing them to his community, demonstrate Hussey’s commitment to making space for modernist expression in the church, especially against the background of a war that threatened the ideology he believed such art stood for. In what follows, I will outline the commission process for these two works. Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb Commission Britten’s spirited anthem Rejoice in the Lamb was composed during a harried summer of commission deadlines and performances, just before he began work in earnest on Peter Grimes.40 Paul Kildea has characterized the fifteen-minute cantata as “a captivating piece—a stroll through an over-curated nineteenth-century natural history museum as much as through a church.”41 The cantata mediates between layers of England’s cultural past—via quasi-Anglican chant, Purcell, and “madhouse” poet Christopher Smart—while making a contemporary statement which is by turns exultant and ironic. The piece’s juxtaposition of familiar indexes of the English Church music tradition (especially the music of Purcell) with unexpected, even subversive elements (such as the selection of Smart) exemplify Britten’s use of the traditional soundscape of church music to carve a unique space within English musical modernism. Britten excerpted the text from Jubilate Agno, a much longer, quasi-religious poem written in the early 1760s by Christopher Smart, first published just a few years prior. The poem had been brought to Britten’s attention by W. H. Auden, who was no doubt drawn by its wit, densely referential erudition, and spirited animism, comparable to that which had motivated Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8 (1936), and Paul Bunyan, Op. 17 (1941). Rejoice in the Lamb is significant, however, not only for its enduring appeal to singers and Britten’s closest companions, but for the ways in which Hussey employed it as a means to galvanize the support of his parishioners around other artistic commissions at St. Matthew’s. I have written before about the textual and musical details of this piece, and here a few of my comments will help situate Rejoice in the Lamb in the context of Hussey’s other activities as a patron.42 The editor of the first edition of Smart’s poem, William Force Stead, invited his readers into its pages in terms that are part turn-of-the-century travel memoirist, part carnival barker: Imagine that the foundations had sunken under one of those fantastic gothic palaces built by the mad King of Bavaria, and that in consequence the doors, windows and turrets were all twisted askew. The design … changed from the fantastic to the disconcerting. If you entered such a building you might be tempted to hurry through … before its bizarre disproportions unsettled your reason. But if you were brave and patient enough … you would begin to notice some of the details … retained the marks of a master-craftsman. So it is in this strange composition, written by that Cambridge prodigal, Christopher Smart, while confined in a madhouse.43 Christopher Smart is known as a brilliant but troubled poet with an uneven legacy. Among his religious poetry, he is remembered chiefly for A Song to David, which gives praise to the Psalmist as an Orpheus-like archetype of the “Divine Poet.” He also produced a complete paraphrase of the Hebrew Psalter. The work on these was completed during and shortly after his institutional confinement from 1757 to 1763. Though he is referred to in many sources as a “madhouse” poet, the reality of his institutionalization is more complex, in that he was officially detained for unpaid debts, rather than his reportedly erratic behavior.44 Furthermore, some scholars speculate Smart’s puzzling behavior may indicate symptoms either of advanced syphilis or mercury poisoning, ingesting mercury having been the primary treatment for syphilis at the time.45 As constructed by the mid-twentieth-century critics looking back on him, he is a paradoxical and ironic figure; an Enlightenment-era poet who wrote his most famous work amid disintegrating mental faculties; a poet in the Age of Reason whose distress expressed itself in effusive, lettered, but only quasi-coherent religiosity. Whatever the reasons for the six-year confinement during which he wrote these works, Smart’s religious poetry of this period has been compared to the work of similarly visionary poets such as John Clare and William Blake. Jubilate Agno, in turn, bears witness to Smart’s enduring interest in the Psalms. Unmetered and without a rhyme scheme, it is equal parts poetry and devotional journal. The manuscript survives as a series of unnumbered fragments, described by Smart scholars Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson as being “covered on both sides with a series of closely written, unnumbered verses, each beginning with the word ‘Let’ or ‘For.’ ‘Let’ and ‘For’ verses are never combined on the same sheet, but it seems that the sheets were numbered in pairs.”46 The anaphoric quality of these phrases beginning with the subjunctive command “Let” gives the poetry a Psalm-like quality, as does the continuous exhortation to inanimate objects (and anthropomorphized animals) to praise God. In an article exploring the similarities between Jubilate Agno and the Psalms, Jeanne Murray Walker makes the many thematic resonances between them clear, particularly, she notes, when “in the ‘For’ section” Smart expresses “many attitudes similar to those of the Psalmist.” A small selection of her extensive examples in Table 2 illustrate the similarities. 47 Table 2. Comparison of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno to Psalmody Smart Folio . Psalm Reference . For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor to my family. They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of drunkards. (Ps. 69:12) For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorne (Ps. 92:10) For his horn is the horn of Salvation. The Lord is … the horn of my salvation. (Ps. 18:2) Smart Folio . Psalm Reference . For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor to my family. They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of drunkards. (Ps. 69:12) For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorne (Ps. 92:10) For his horn is the horn of Salvation. The Lord is … the horn of my salvation. (Ps. 18:2) Open in new tab Table 2. Comparison of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno to Psalmody Smart Folio . Psalm Reference . For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor to my family. They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of drunkards. (Ps. 69:12) For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorne (Ps. 92:10) For his horn is the horn of Salvation. The Lord is … the horn of my salvation. (Ps. 18:2) Smart Folio . Psalm Reference . For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor to my family. They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song of drunkards. (Ps. 69:12) For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again. But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorne (Ps. 92:10) For his horn is the horn of Salvation. The Lord is … the horn of my salvation. (Ps. 18:2) Open in new tab There is another pervasive quality of both Jubilate Agno and Smart’s Psalm paraphrases, one that would have made the former especially attractive to Britten. Throughout his Psalm paraphrases, Smart fashions the figure of Christ as an expression of divine creativity.48 Donald Davie highlights this emphasis, noting the doctrinal consistency of the liberties Smart takes: “Smart … exploits to the utmost any chance of connecting Christ with the natural creation.” Smart wishes to direct his praise to a “creating” God, “not in the first place to God the Redeemer, nor to God the Judge, nor to God the Protector of His faithful … but to God the Creator.”49 William Force Stead equally highlights the resonance between Jubilate Agno and A Song to David: “Broadly speaking, the theme of the two compositions is the same, the bringing together of the whole of creation in praise of the Creator.”50 In excerpting Smart’s text, Britten chose to foreground passages that highlight the animistic and musical emphases of Smart’s original: all are called to praise God in their own unique way, from a cavalcade of Old Testament characters, to consonants and vowels, to the author’s cat Jeoffrey, subject of an extended meditation. The arioso passage for soprano solo based on Smart’s musings about Jeoffrey are some of the most recognizable verses of the cantata: “For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey,” Smart writes; who “worships in his way” by “wreathing his body … with elegant quickness.” Britten must have sensed that these verses might seem out of place in the context of a patronal festival, because he preempted any protest in a letter to Hussey: “I am afraid I have gone ahead, and used abit about the cat Jeffrey, but I don’t see how it could hurt anyone—he is such a nice cat.”51 Along with the spirituality of all things, Britten emphasizes the passages that closely align divine creativity with music. He achieves this, in part, with the bookending effect of his “Hallelujah” section, the contrapuntal chorus whose bow-like construction reaches its climax at the name of the Artist Inimitable: Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from the hand of the artist inimitable, and from the echo of the heavenly harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty. In selecting this portion of Smart’s much longer text, Britten may have been taken by the way that it seems to interrupt the flow of the persistent “Let” format in a sudden outpouring of praise inflected with language of artistry, craft, and song. It is unclear from Smart’s verse to whom he refers with the phrase “artist inimitable.” In Jubilate Agno as in Rejoice in the Lamb, this “Hallelujah” stanza follows directly from the line “Let David bless with the Bear—The beginning of victory to the Lord—to the Lord the perfection of excellence.” Given the thematically linked format of the previous “Let” verses, the “artist inimitable” may in this case be David, the author of the Psalms. This idea is supported by Smart’s great interest in David as a poetic archetype, a lyricist as seminal to poetry as Orpheus is to song.52 This verse might also be read as a Trinitarian symbol, with the “Hallelujah” issuing from the heart of God the Father, followed by the artist inimitable (the Son, Christ) and the animating heavenly harp, the Holy Spirit, echoing back the final Hallelujah. However, the construction of the chorus as Britten writes it suggests that Britten is “elevating” the idea of the “artist inimitable” to a synonym for God. The entire chorus, with its Purcellian overdotted rhythms, ascends in stepwise motion (see ex. 1). Britten plays with the expectations of imitative part-writing in this section, with successive voices making imitative entries and a false expansion of the melodic motive beginning in the organ at measure 60 but abandoned after two measures. Each voice part climbs to its highest point at the phrase “artist inimitable,” followed by a mirror-like descent. Britten emphasizes the importance of this expression of joy by repeating the section in full to close the cantata. Because of this structure, the entire chorus is structurally and registrally a bow, with the phrase “artist inimitable” at its height; if the movement is an archway, the “artist inimitable” is its keystone (see ex. 2). Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Benjamin Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, melody line, rehearsal no. 9, mm. 60–64. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Benjamin Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, melody line, rehearsal no. 9, mm. 60–64. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, rehearsal no. 9, mm. 63–66. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, rehearsal no. 9, mm. 63–66. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. The chorus beginning “For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour” serves as the dark mirror-image of the “Hallelujah.” This intense, harrowing section sets one of the many passages in Jubilate Agno in which Smart seems to reference his troubled inner life and the anguish of his asylum confinement. Coming after three sections for solo voice, this passage ushers in a change in texture with the return of the full choir. The choral writing again becomes chant-like, on homorhythmic open fifths that crescendo to a fortepiano marking at the word “Saviour,” at which point the choir arrives on an unexpected C-minor triad (the flatted VI of the original open E sonority), supported in the lower manual by a C-minor triad in second inversion. This phrase is answered by an insidious chromatic motive in the organ’s right hand that returns to punctuate, in sequence, each homorhythmic statement in the choir. This motive is finally taken up by the choir at an immense dynamic high point with the unison declamation “For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me” (see ex. 3). Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, pickup to rehearsal no. 20, mm. 174–76. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, pickup to rehearsal no. 20, mm. 174–76. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. The measures that follow, beginning at the rough halfway point of the cantata, mirror in texture and construction the imitative C-major “Hallelujah” passage. Here Britten sets Smart’s plaintive lament “For I am in twelve hardships / but he that was born of a virgin shall deliver me out of all.” In a similar fashion to the treatment of the “Hallelujah,” the voice parts in this section enter in rising imitative lines in mostly stepwise motion, building from measure 180 to a climax—again in terms of ambitus, dynamic level, and texture—at the downbeat of measure 186. Whereas “artist inimitable” was the subject of the most intense expressive point in the “Hallelujah,” here it is the fraught word “deliver.” The highest soprano pitch is again G5, but whereas in the “Hallelujah” this pitch was the fifth scale degree of C major, here it is the third scale degree of a synthetic mode composed of the pitches of two minor triads a semitone apart (E minor followed by D-sharp minor; see ex. 4). The formal and stylistic resonances between the bookending “Hallelujah” sections and the central statement “For I am in twelve hardships” sets up a dichotomy between the inner life of the misunderstood visionary poet and his outward expressions of praise; it is perhaps the moment of deepest pathos in the cantata. Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, rehearsal no. 21, mm. 180–88. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Britten, Rejoice in the Lamb, rehearsal no. 21, mm. 180–88. © Boosey & Hawkes; reprinted with permission. Britten’s writing in these two choruses evinces his esteem for music-makers of all abilities and his acumen, exercised throughout his career, of writing challenging yet idiomatic choral music. In Rejoice in the Lamb, the most exciting passages are not just the province of the soloists—though the playful counter-tenor solo “For the mouse is a creature of great personal valour,” with its Broadway revue posture, and the sinuous and mysterious tenor solo “For the flowers are great blessings” are indeed rewarding solo miniatures. In this cantata, the chorus is offered material that is not only challenging and substantive, but that advance the dramatic quality of the whole in a way that evokes Bach’s turba choruses and the jeering Borough of Peter Grimes in equal measure. Britten, by his own declaration, placed great value on music as “occasional,” as speaking to a specific time, place, and community. Rejoice in the Lamb, commissioned for the anniversary of a parish church, is a highly personal statement—on the part of poet and composer alike—on what it means to pray and render praise. Britten’s engagement with modernism in Rejoice in the Lamb is best understood with regard to its artful intercalation of elements of a received “English” musical heritage with a mixture of an idiosyncratically modernist choice of text, harmonic approaches that foil straightforward tonal expectations, and musical choices that subvert generic expectations for an event of ritual significance. This unfolds, per Britten’s preferred way of working, within the context of a piece that is challenging but within the grasp of the community ensemble for which the piece was commissioned. Britten’s “archaic” nods to Purcell in the “Hallelujah” section and elsewhere in the work,53 which were likely fresh in his mind from his realizations of Purcell around this time, are of a piece with Britten’s own engagement with what Heather Wiebe has called a “turn toward deep England and local culture.”54 Further, Britten’s choice of the visionary and self-revelatory passages from Smart might be read as an early working out of the themes and preoccupations of Peter Grimes: the individual against the crowd, the misunderstood dreamer, the intolerable creative cast into the darkness by a censorious and self-interested society. On the other hand, not unlike the Missa Brevis, Op. 63, still to come, Rejoice in the Lamb presents an engagement with the musical language of modernism that is retooled to remain legible to a wider public and accessible to performance by skilled amateurs. When initially discussing the composition, Hussey had indicated that theirs was a volunteer choir composed of men and boys (that is, they did not employ professional lay clerks as a cathedral would). Britten visited the parish to hear them sing, and understood their capabilities. With the chorus that slips briefly into a synthetic mode and the accompaniment that evades and distorts conventional cadential motion, Britten pushes at the confines of tonality within the scope of what is feasible for amateurs. The irregular and constantly shifting meter of the “Let Nimrod the mighty hunter” chorus also introduces a metric element that contributes to the modern edge of the cantata’s sound (though irregular meters are not unexpected within the twentieth-century Cathedral choral repertoire). While these compositional approaches do not disestablish the tonic in the manner of either atonal or twelve-tone music, for example, Rejoice in the Lamb brings some of the innovations of musical modernism within reach of the parish choir. Further, Britten’s acumen for situating a composition within the voice and spirit of the community for which it was intended was integral to its success, surpassing a mere awareness of their technical capabilities. Timothy Miller argues that Rejoice in the Lamb evinces ability to adjust his register to the different church traditions, in this case the parish tradition. This tradition is characterized by a higher level of engagement with the congregation’s tastes and priorities, as compared with the more hermetic cathedral tradition, which is “untrammelled” by the caprices of popular style.55 There is a clear distinction between the musical style expected in a cathedral and that for an Anglican parish. Miller further notes that the Chapel Royal, as a royal peculiar outside the diocesan structure of the church, was also typically more aligned with contemporary musical tastes—those of the monarch.56 Britten’s recalling of Purcell’s musical style is used more deliberately here than as a flourish held over from his recent activity crafting Purcell realizations. He bookends the anthem with a Purcellian chorus to recall the composer’s musical connection with the Chapel Royal, in a gracious gesture for St. Matthew’s celebratory occasion. At the same time, the cantata is structured so that Smart’s fraught cri de coeur “For I am in twelve hardships” is a structural and expressive high point. Positioned midway between the two “Hallelujah” choruses, “For I am in twelve hardships” is their ironic mirror, a glimpse of the embarrassing religiosity of a poet who was reported to “pour forth his prayers in the street.” The text of the passage stands out within the structure of the cantata, as it does in Smart’s longer original. The majority of the aphorisms that make up the “For” passages are third-person observations: “For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary. / For there is a language of flowers.” This gives these passages a sense of detached passivity. In “For I am in twelve hardships” the poet shifts to first-person singular, to arresting affect: For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour— For they said, he is besides himself. For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchman smites me with his staff. For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me nor to my family. For I am in twelve hardships, but he that was born of a virgin shall deliver me out of all. The beleaguered sense of persecution in this passage is intensified by the directness of the language in contrast to many of the other passages of the cantata, as well as by Britten’s choice to set it for full choir, swelling in a dissonant canon. In this chorus, the glorious rationality of the Purcellian Chapel Royal is curtailed by a glimpse behind the curtain of Smart’s mental state, the insidious “Silly fellow” motive signaling his encroaching madness. It is a double gesture of esteem and subversion by Britten, for an occasion characterized by pomp and fanfare. Not only does he put confusion and infirmity on display alongside beauteous churchliness, he places it at the apex of the musical structure. Though far from a statement of faith, Britten’s setting of Smart for this occasion, as outlined above, foregrounds illuminating aspects of his understanding of how community, occasion, and faith interact. This emerges in his choices in the excerpting of Smart, his positioning of the “For I am in twelve hardships” chorus as an ironic mirror to the Purcellian “Hallelujah,” and his positioning and use of the abilities of the choir. Smart’s original is a kind of highly personalized psalm, deeply grounded in scripture and owing much to Smart’s parallel work, A Psalm to David. Britten excerpts passages that reflect the sense of spirited praise and delight in creation of the original, while ultimately leaving open the interpretive possibility that it may be music itself that is most worthy of praise. He not only selects a passage of frank personal confession that expresses a tortured sense of persecution and mental anguish, but positions it musically at the center of the work; if “For the instruments are by their rhimes” is the finale of the work, “For I am in twelve hardships” is the expressive heart. Finally, his understanding of the capabilities of the choir in writing in an accessibly modernist idiom speaks to his commitment to grounding his music in the local community. His stylistic nod to Purcell in the “Hallelujah” section gestures to the chapel royal tradition of church music, a flattering reference point for this celebratory commission. In many ways, Rejoice in the Lamb is a peculiar offering for the jubilee of a parish church. However, it evinces the kind of recognizably English modernism framed by Wiebe and Harris, by situating archaic elements in conversation with the new, and by celebrating the local and particular rather than breaking with it. Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child Commission The reception history of Rejoice in the Lamb is intertwined with that of Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child, also commissioned as part of the St. Matthew’s Jubilee celebrations. Julian Andrews notes that at the beginning of the war, Moore had been “consolidating his reputation as an important and innovative sculptor, within the somewhat limited world of British modern art,” and was becoming known internationally, particularly in France and Germany.57 The Arts and Crafts Museum in Hamburg was the first international museum to purchase his work, “though the piece subsequently disappeared during a Nazi cull of ‘degenerate art’ in 1937.” He worked prolifically during this period, and made experimental gestures toward the abstract and Surrealist. When Hussey encountered Moore’s work, it was not through his sculpture but through an exhibition of his sketches of Londoners sheltering in the Underground tunnels during the Blitz. Following the bombing of his Hampstead studio, Moore had turned to drawing as a means of self-expression and working through the violence of the war. This led to a commission by Kenneth Clark on behalf of the WAAC to develop an exhibit of shelter sketches, which turned Moore’s initially private and personal endeavor into a very public, even propagandized, art project. Hussey was excited by the drawings—“That is the sort of man who ought to be working for the Church,” he told a colleague—and brought about a meeting with Moore.58 As Hussey recounts it: I asked him whether he would be interested in the project; he replied that he would…. I asked whether he would believe in the subject and he replied: “Yes, I would. Though whether or not I should agree with your theology, I just do not know. I think it is only through our art that we artists can come to understand your theology.”59 Hussey’s probing of Moore’s belief is significant in light of his overall project of persuading his community to embrace new works of modernist art. Hussey reportedly asked Moore if he would “believe” in the subject of the Madonna and Child, seeming to imply that it was important to Hussey that the process of creating the work itself would be a kind of devotional act on Moore’s part. Moore, who might understandably have been keen to ingratiate himself to a potential patron,60 replies in the affirmative, with the notable reservation that he might not agree with or fully understand its theology. Ever the persuader, Hussey’s subsequent correspondence with Moore reveals his eager enthusiasm for the project, his awareness of the need to carefully present it to his Parochial Church Council in order for it to go forward, balanced with his hope that Moore would not feel artistically compromised by the religious parameters of the project. Both men seemed to appreciate the dimension of collaboration between artist and church that the plan entailed: “It’s the sort of thing that would happen in an ideal world,” Moore remarked to Hussey.61 Britten’s involvement in the planning for the jubilee festival also seemed a draw for Moore; Moore described an abortive scheme for the two men to collaborate on a ballet, with Moore supplying the set design. “But I would rather do the Madonna and Child—it is so much more important,” Moore remarked.62 By July of 1943, plans for the sculpture were well underway. The funds for the commission were donated by Rowden Hussey, father of Walter, as a gift to the church he had served for over fifty years. It amounted to roughly £350 for materials and honorarium. Moore selected Hornton limestone for the sculpture, which was cut in early September from a quarry in Oxfordshire. Moore favored this material in his sculpture, and the Madonna and Child has become an especially well-known example (fig. 1). The sculpture is at once arresting and welcoming, it gives the impression of an economy of means while conveying solidity and earthiness. It is proportioned slightly larger than life-size, and mounted so that the child is level with the viewer, as the mother looks on from above. Its gentle, gracious curves suggest a fullness and softness in both subjects, a suggestion amplified by the ochre-brown warmth of the stone. Moore obliged Hussey by returning to an earlier expression of his style, in contrast to the airier, more kinetic and non-mimetic forms he had explored prewar (such as Two Forms, Pyinkado wood, 1934, and Two Forms, ironstone, 1934). The style of the Madonna and Child is also evocative of Moore’s shelter sketches made during the Blitz; in particular, the sweep of the fabric across the Madonna’s knees evokes the thin blankets draped over and across the desperate Londoners huddled in the wan light. One of the shelter sketches, titled Seated Mother and Child (ca. 1941, see fig. 2), could be mistaken for an early study in preparation for the Northampton sculpture; its subject matter, form, and proportions all anticipate the Hussey commission. The Madonna’s feet are planted flat on the ground; the figure appears grounded, substantial, heavy, in comparison to the many other Western Madonnas that preceded it. The statue foregrounds a strong sense of the corporeal, rather than the exalted, otherworldly, or eternal of some treatments. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child, 1943–44, St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child, 1943–44, St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Henry Moore, shelter sketch, Seated Mother and Child, ca.1942, private collection. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Henry Moore, shelter sketch, Seated Mother and Child, ca.1942, private collection. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. In commissioning a sculpture from Moore, Hussey was wading into already turbulent waters: Earlier in the century, in 1913, the young and unproven Eric Gill had been charged with sculpting the Stations of the Cross for the newly consecrated Westminster Cathedral. Gill was by training a stone carver rather than a sculptor, and his designs owed little to “art-school anatomy and traditional academic style,” as he himself put it.63 His Stations were vociferously criticized as “grotesque and undevotional,” “cold as the mind that produced them” and “hideous, primitive and pagan.”64 Shortly after Hussey’s initial meeting with Moore, Harold Williamson, Principal of Chelsea College of Art who had arranged the introduction of the two men, expressed to Hussey his apprehension at the thought of a Henry Moore sculpture in St. Matthew’s Church. He described the scene as he imagined it in a letter: Your scheme … fills me with forebodings, however! Flayed alive by the authorities who grant faculties, and finally torn asunder by the stalwart members of your Church Council, I foresee that it will be incumbent on me to attend your funeral.65 Williamson’s rueful comments align with Moore’s impression of the undertaking at the time. He was cognizant of the potential volatility of a modernist treatment of the Madonna topic. As he reflected in a BBC interview: Here was something challenging: other people’s religious beliefs. At that time in England, so-called modern music and modern art and poetry and everything was a battle, a fight, with the general public who disliked it all.66 Hussey was well aware of these dynamics. At every stage of the commissioning process, he used as tools of persuasion a combination of theological and aesthetic apology, positioning the statue at once as both an important piece of art and a theological statement in its own right. He first set to work on his Parochial Church Council, positioning the statue as a gift from Hussey Sr. to honor the parish jubilee, remembering that Rowden Hussey remained beloved by the members of the parish. In words that bring to mind Hans Feibusch’s critique of “insipid” church art, Hussey argued: Many of the statues of the Madonna and Child which had been put in churches in recent years were feeble and of no importance in themselves—useful perhaps as symbols in to which some of the faithful could read their own thoughts, but negligible as works of art which had something fresh to say and which would last.67 As Hussey notes to his Council, he views recent additions to the Madonna and Child genre as mere “symbols,” devotional icons with little artistic, and therefore little spiritual depth. Hussey wanted his Council and parishioners to share his view that art, in the manner of Moore’s proposed statue, should challenge accepted viewpoints, should have “something fresh to say,” and therefore be worthy of enduring. To give further weight to his argument, he enjoined three figures of authority to comment on Moore’s models and the proposed plan, whose letters he next shared with the council. These commentators were Kenneth Clark, in his capacity as director of the National Gallery; Eric Newton, a respected writer, critic, and radio broadcaster; and Dr. George Bell, the beloved Bishop of Chichester, himself a proponent of contemporary art. All three expressed their enthusiasm for the project, and for the broader idea of modernist art being commissioned by the Church. Hussey also primed the members of the Council for the criticism and controversy that he anticipated would greet the statue once unveiled. The groundwork thus laid with the church leadership, he set about carefully preparing the congregation ahead of the dedication ceremony on 19 February 1944. The Sunday prior to the unveiling, Hussey preached a sermon entirely on the topic of the statue. He prefaced his remarks with a brief excerpt from the Pauline epistle to the Philippians 4:8a (King James Version): Whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things. It is worth emphasizing that the sermon that followed was in no way an exegesis of this passage from Philippians. The quotation comes from the latter portion of a Pauline letter exhorting a fledgling Christian community to live in a “manner worthy of the gospel of Christ,” to love one another in radical humility, and to reject false prophets and their teachings. A characteristic passage reads: “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!” Hussey quotes the letter in such a way as to avoid any of this context. Rather, he makes the argument that a thing of beauty calls for extended reflection. Contemplation of a beautiful object—in this context, the soon-to-be-unveiled Madonna and Child—is godly, Hussey preaches. He describes his conversations with Moore, underscoring the spiritual reflection undertaken by the sculptor during the process of the commission: The statue is no mere artist’s design. Before beginning, and during the whole of the time when he was working on it, it meant, he said, prolonged thought and meditation on the “theology of the subject.”68 Hussey’s rhetoric is striking: in their initial conversations, Moore had been reticent to assure Hussey that he would believe, in an uncomplicated way, in the subject at hand. However, in this passage Hussey foregrounds Moore’s “meditation” on the divinity of the Mother of God and her miraculous child—the “theology of the subject”—as integral to the commission. Hussey makes the claim that theological reflection has been a part of Moore’s artistic process. He goes on to interpret aspects of the sculpture for his parishioners, and to direct their attention to some of the site-specific qualities of its conception: The Blessed Virgin is conceived as any small child would in essence think of his mother, not as small and frail, but as the one large, secure, solid background to life…. Her hands do not grip or restrain Him, for she presents Him, offers Him to the world, as He will offer Himself…. The Blessed Virgin looks away into the distance, towards those who first approach the statue from afar; the Christ Child looks intently at those who stand straight in front of the statue only a few feet away.69 Hussey goes on to describe the letters from Newton and Bell he had shared with the Council, and alludes to a similarly enthusiastic letter from T. S. Eliot. Then, Hussey turns his attention to the question of reception of Moore’s sculpture, opening this paragraph with comments about the premiere of Rejoice in the Lamb which had occurred some five months before: When Benjamin Britten wrote for St. Matthew’s his fine Festival Cantata we did not know what to expect, and the result was probably quite different from what most of us expected. But as we get to know it we begin to realize how fine a work it is, and those who have spent hours on it, learning to sing it and to play it, know best.70 Here, Hussey positions Britten’s cantata, which had just been reprised for those gathered, as a worthwhile but possibly confounding example of new art, one that had been well received and that the community had come to enjoy and be proud of. He acknowledges that there may have been some difficulty in accepting it on first hearing, but that through repetition, they had come to appreciate it. Hussey also emphasizes the intimate knowledge of the work that comes from preparing it for performance: “Those who have spent hours on it, learning to sing it and play it, know best … how fine a work it is.” These comments about Rejoice in the Lamb do the most work to connect the scripture passage quoted at the opening of Hussey’s sermon with his overall message, that a work such as the Madonna and Child requires sustained reflection and familiarization in order to be appreciated for what it is, as had already happened with Rejoice in the Lamb. Hussey goes on to parallel the “hours spent” by the community’s musicians to understand Rejoice in the Lamb with the time and care spent by Moore on his commission: Here is the result of six months’ thought and work in the prime of the sculptor’s life…. The work may not be, probably will not be, what we expect. If it were, then, as Mr. Moore says, it would be unworthy of its place in the church, because it would only be what you and I could already imagine, and in that case we had better do without the statue and simply use our own imagination. In comparing the spheres of music and sculpture we must remember that many who through the radio and in the flesh have heard a certain amount of good music, and know something of the great masters, have perhaps never even heard of the corresponding masters and great works in the realm of sculpture…. Nearly all church and religious statuary that we see today is not sculpture at all, but sentimental plaster-work, corresponding in the realm of music to the religious ballads of the end of the last century, such as “The Lost Chord,” or Liddle’s setting of “Abide with Me.”71 These comments prior to the unveiling of the statue equate the idea of perceiving beauty in the statue as a marker of true contemplation and understanding. Hussey’s jab at the sentimentality of religious ballads such as Arthur Sullivan’s immensely popular “The Lost Chord” emphasizes Hussey’s aesthetic sensibility: there may be a place for art and music such as this, but art for the church should be more substantial; that is, forward-looking and modernist. At the same time, Hussey exhorts his congregation to put aside preconceived notions, and suggests that, if allowed to, this modernist artwork will afford the viewer a kind of pure, natural connection to the divine. Hussey seems to want the viewer’s experience of the statue to mimic Moore’s sentiment, expressed to Hussey upon the invitation to a commission: “I think it is only through our art that we artists come to understand your theology.”72 The tension between these two notions emerges in the above comments that amateur music-lovers may consider themselves qualified to make an assessment of music on the radio, but likely do not have the knowledge required to “accurately” judge the new sculpture, the implication being that the sculpture will “speak for itself” if not judged negatively at first sight. Hussey concluded his sermon by urging the gathered congregation to undertake a similar process of contemplation of the statue: The purpose of saying all this is certainly not that we may congratulate ourselves, but that we may approach humbly, putting aside preconceived ideas and expectations, and often studying the statue—as it was certainly given and carved—to the Glory of God; and this will be achieved if we make it for ourselves, as it was for its author, the focus and stimulus for six months’ hard thinking on the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary.73 Hussey closed by inviting those gathered to similarly engage in “six months’ contemplation,” on the miracle of the incarnation, equating Moore’s process of sculpting the Madonna with a meditative act. Hussey’s positioning of Britten’s festival cantata as a tool to better understand the modernism of Moore’s sculpture is interesting, because he offers the cantata as an example of “successful” modernism already at work in the community at St. Matthew’s. Britten’s composition was unusual, even strange, but still accessible enough for the community to engage with; Hussey suggests that the same will be possible with the Madonna and Child. In this sermon, Hussey positions the act of making the Madonna and Child as an act of faith. He grounds its creation in a faith practice to shore up against the idea that modernist art does not belong in the church, or that it is somehow degenerate or ungodly. Furthermore, Hussey equates the process of creating the sculpture with communing with the divine, and suggests that the contemplation on the Madonna and Child through sculpture in which Moore was engaged means that the finished project will point to a religious truth, regardless of any initial impression of its aesthetic value. Reception of the Northampton Commissions The reception of Hussey’s commissions at Northampton is recorded in editorials and letters to local and national periodicals, in correspondence between Hussey and his collaborators, and by Hussey himself in his memoir. It appears that the majority of negative opinion emerged from the wider community rather than from within the St. Matthew’s congregation, though public response was more likely to be preserved in written form via letters to newspapers. Britten’s cantata was met with enthusiasm tinged with bewilderment. The day after the premiere performance of Rejoice in the Lamb in Northampton, the Times published a favorable review of this “modern work of religious art” which deemed it a “work not to be placed in any of the usual categories, but certainly beautiful.”74 The reviewer was most taken by the choice of “recondite” poet Smart for the commission, but credited Britten with capturing the “curious and vivid” character of Smart’s poetry. Though more than one commenter agreed that the piece was more of an anthem than a festival cantata, the Times critic felt it had “little in common with the church anthem.” When it was performed in Birmingham some months later, a newspaper critic noted that with this anthem Britten “cuts through conventions uncompromisingly and often calls both on the voices and the organ to display considerable virtuosity.”75 This same critic found the music “tremendously daring: one does not expect grinding discords and a movement in 7-8, con brio, in a church cantata,” and was further taken by the “Blakian fervour and conviction” of the piece.76 These mentions of the piece’s daring, virtuosity, and flouting of conventions illustrate how the piece was received as a modernist entry to the church music repertoire, and testify to Britten’s ability to introduce recognizably unconventional, modernist elements to a choir, taking seriously their ability as performers while pitching the cantata’s “virtuosic” elements within the range of ability of amateur performers. Moore’s Madonna and Child, however, was received negatively by many. Hussey’s exact words for the reaction in the local press were “hostile with varying degrees of hysteria.”77 Some questioned the “ecclesiastical functionalism” of the statue, given that its modernism precluded its being “readily comprehensible.”78 Another letter printed with the heading “A Monstrosity” bemoaned the “revolting” statue, saying that “it was with disgust that I viewed the new statue of the Madonna,” and demanded its immediate removal from the church. A prevalent theme of the criticism was that the modernist style transgressed ideals of femininity associated with the Madonna: This sculpture may be great art without beauty, or it may be beautiful to the eyes of an initiated few, but it warps a mental picture of an ideal which has remained unchanged for 2,000 years.79 Indeed, more than one responder seemed personally offended on behalf of the Virgin Mary: The Madonna and Child at St Matthew’s Church is an insult to every woman. But it is a grave insult to the one it is supposed to represent. The most beautiful works of art are now being destroyed and it is up to every good artist to try to replace them. But sacred subjects should be left alone, unless they can be portrayed in a real and proper manner. This one will disgust thousands of right-minded people. [Signed] Disgusted80 This letter conveys the anxiety associated with the destruction of works of art across Europe in the wake of the Second World War. “Disgusted” opines that modernism has no place in the church, and that “sacred subjects” should only be treated in a traditional style. As Christopher Frayling and others have recounted, similar reactions in this vein protested that “the Madonna seemed to have elephantiasis, she was wearing jackboots, and she would have worked better as a doorstop than as a sculpture.”81 Hussey recounts having met an army colonel from outside the parish who objected, “Whoever saw a woman with a neck that thick.” These criticisms again highlight how contemporary intolerance to modernist art in the church was bound up with gendered notions of the relationship of femininity to both beauty and the sacred. Given the prolific tradition of the Madonna archetype, typically rendered as an idealized combination of conventional beauty, fertility, and holiness, the Moore Madonna was a shock. Whereas mural painter Hans Feibusch’s contention that feminized expressions of art had no place in a modern aesthetics of sacred art, the public response demonstrated which markers of femininity should not be transgressed. However, the work Hussey had done to lay the groundwork for the sculpture with his community, using Rejoice in the Lamb as a modernist exemplar, meant that the greatest shock and outrage came from outside the walls of his church and not from within the congregation. In response to the person who decried the Madonna’s thick neck, as Hussey recounts, he reiterated his Philippians-inspired hermeneutic: “I replied [that] … I was sure if he returned to look at Moore’s work a number of times, he would understand his purpose and admire it.”82 Hussey and his community held firm on behalf of Moore, and the controversy eventually waned. In this way, the idiosyncratic modernism of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb had been introduced to the community with some surprise but little to no controversy. Hussey then insisted to his community that the making of both works of art was a sustained meditative act on the subject matter by the artists, making the case that their creation was itself an act of faith. By homiletic argument, as well as by force of personality, he rooted both works in belief. In doing so, he shored them up against the widespread notion that modernist art had no place in the church; he argued for the holiness of what many considered aesthetically unholy. Even more shrewd, by programming and extolling the virtues of Rejoice in the Lamb at moments when he wished to introduce a more controversial example of modernist art, Hussey made a legitimating creative link between Britten’s acceptable example of artistic modernism and Moore’s initially less acceptable one. Conclusion The commissioning of Rejoice in the Lamb, and the friendship it incited between Britten and Hussey, inaugurated Hussey’s career-long project of remedying the “divorce” between artists and the church. Factors that had caused that long-standing breach are, in the watchwords of modernism, rupture, rift, and subversion of traditional forms, tenets that were supposedly incompatible with sacred spaces and liturgical structures, and, as noted above, “created in contexts so apparently foreign to the interests and mindset of the Church.”83 Britten gestures toward familiar tools of modernism in Rejoice in the Lamb, while still producing an anthem within the reach of performance by skilled amateurs. Hussey’s insistent pursuit of the creation of modernist art and the church, and his persistent program of drawing modernist artists into the life of the church—even amid the extra-challenging circumstance of wartime—is a rare occurrence in the history of twentieth-century English cultural life. Britten’s popular cantata with as its accessible, non-threatening modernism allowed an entry point to modernist art in the church setting. Hussey challenged his communities to acknowledge the importance and vitality of art that one might not find appealing at first glance or upon first hearing, but which, he felt, had the capacity to transform one’s experience both of art and of the divine. Britten’s offering is one that uplifts music itself as a source of life, deflecting in many ways any orthodox expression of worship. The verses Britten selected in setting Rejoice in the Lamb emphasize Smart’s appreciation for the Spirit of God in everyone, and indeed in every creature and object. The exuberant praise of Rejoice in the Lamb ultimately valorizes praise that might not be expressed as orthodox piety. Rather than selecting an exultant hymn of the ancient church, a creed, a psalm, or a similar text that might be expected within the canon of English church music, Britten offers Christopher Smart’s disarmingly strange pseudo-psalm of praise. Britten’s choice to position Smart’s intensely confessional “For I am in twelve hardships” in a manner that darkly mirrors the Purcellian refinement of the “Hallelujah” refrain is the kind of ironic subversion that characterizes his modernist turns. One is reminded of Britten’s equivocation in the written statement at his first Conscientious Objectors’ tribunal, trying to give a moral justification for his pacifist convictions: I cannot destroy a man’s life because in every man there is the Spirit of God. I was brought up in the Church of England. I have not attended for the last five years. I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, but I think his teaching is sound and his example should be followed.84 Britten’s festival anthem seems to displace the praise of the divine in favor of a joyful meditation on the animating spirit in all things, a spirit that Britten closely aligns with music itself. The vibrant animism and seemingly naive verses of praise that Smart penned during his asylum confinement include subversive elements as well, which Britten exploits to great effect in the passage “For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour.” Britten places Smart’s heartfelt critique of the terms of his confinement at the center of his celebratory cantata. In this way, Britten participates in the celebration and self-definition of an English parish church, while also subtly reworking the terms of its musical discourse. In a moment of community pomp and celebration, Britten simultaneously holds up glorious religiosity and imperiled delusion. This use of the structures and soundscapes of the sacred to explore subtle ironic subversion pervades Britten’s interactions with the church. This approach is familiar in many English modernist gestures beyond the work of Britten. The work of a number of scholars of English modernism indicates it is characterized by drawing on England’s engrained culture and local history while gesturing to the present and future, rather than the aesthetic rupture that characterizes continental modernism. This comes through in John Piper’s signaling of his sense of the “limits of abstraction,” and an esthetic he shared with others who drew on England’s geography, architecture, and landscapes as inspiration. Piper’s formulation of this idea recalls Eric Saylor’s view, via Ralph Vaughan Williams, that to be a musical modernist in this place and time was to “articulate a sonic response to the brave new world of the twentieth century and, if necessary, to forge a musical language suitable for conveying its meaning.”85 Britten’s career-long engagement with the symbolism, tropes, and aesthetics of the Church of England engages with this English modernist tendency to draw from the familiar past as a means of reframing the present. Britten’s approach in music is similar to Moore’s in stone. Moore chose for his St. Matthew’s commission a material that was available during wartime, but one he favored throughout his career. Whereas his modernist contemporaries made statements in concrete, a material stripped of geographical specificity in a testament to the brutality of the modern, Moore worked in local Hornton limestone drawn from a quarry a few miles from the statue’s eventual home. Moore worked within the tradition of the Madonna and Child subject, but mediated it in a contemporary way, in a way that brings to mind his sketches of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz. Britten does this as well; in a way, the choral voices of St. Matthew’s served as Britten’s Hornton stone. Britten seamlessly draws together the everyday material of choir and community with the acknowledged church anthem tradition and his own sense of music’s creative beauty. Through his sensitivity to the singers’ abilities, he grounds the piece in the community while also making it interesting for himself artistically: “I don’t see how it could hurt anyone—he is such a nice cat.” As noted above, Beeson criticized Hussey’s “liberal Christian Platonism,” his sustained interest in the place of art in worship supposedly over and above the orthodoxy of Anglican worship. However, this very trait seems to have contributed to the warmth of their collaboration and the durability of Britten’s and Hussey’s friendship, engendering for Britten an ongoing proximity to—rather than a divorce from—the English Church. Hilary Seraph Donaldson holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests are focused on the intersection of English musical modernism and the sacred in the music of Benjamin Britten. Her other areas of interest include music since 1900, the BBC, intersections in music and theology, and hymnology and congregational singing. Footnotes 1 Quoted in note to letter 421, in Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, vol. 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991–2008), 1139. 2 Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 3 See in particular David L. Howard, “The Way Forward: Building on Dean Hussey’s Vision,” The Musical Times 153, no. 1919 (Summer 2012): 73–86; Howard, “Patron of the Choral Art: Walter Hussey’s Commission of Choral Works in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2008); Trevor Beeson, “The Connoisseur: Walter Hussey, Chichester,” in The Deans (London: SCM Press, 2004), chap. 10, 187–95; Garth Turner, “‘Aesthete, Impressario [sic], and Indomitable Persuader’: Walter Hussey at St Matthew’s, Northampton, and Chichester Cathedral,” in The Church and the Arts: Papers Read at the 1990 Summer Meeting and the 1991 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell Publishers, 1992). 4 Heather Luella Wiebe, Britten's Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 5 Walter Hussey, Patron of Art: The Revival of a Great Tradition Among Modern Artists (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985). 6 Stephen Arthur Allen, “Britten and Christianity, from Childhood to Paul Bunyan (1941),” in “Benjamin Britten and Christianity” (PhD diss, University of Oxford, 2003), chap. 1, 1–53; Graham Elliott, Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); John Evans, Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928–1938 (London: Faber and Faber, 2009). 7 Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, Daily Express, quoted in Patrick Dee, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7. 8 Heather Luella Wiebe, “Curlew River and Cultural Encounter,” in Rethinking Britten, ed. Philip Rupprecht (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933–75), 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1978), 96. 11 Graham Howes, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 24. 12 Ibid. 13 Hans Feibusch, Mural Painting (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1946), 91–92. 14 Ibid., 92. 15 Anthony Barone, “Modernist Rifts in a Pastoral Landscape: Observations on the Manuscripts of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony,” The Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 1–2 (2008): 61. 16 Byron Adams, “Foreword,” The Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 1–2 (2008): 1. 17 Ibid., 2. 18 Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2010). 19 John Piper, British Romantic Artists (London: Collins, 1938), quoted in Harris, Romantic Moderns, 12. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 16–19. 23 Contemporary observations of modernism and the visual arts during this period include a Penguin Modern Painters series published during the war. See John Betjeman, John Piper (Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1944); Edward Sackville-West, Graham Sutherland (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1945). A thorough assessment of Britten and Pears’s tastes and engagement with contemporary visual arts can be found in Judith LeGrove, ed., A Musical Eye: The Visual World of Britten and Pears (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012). 24 Benjamin Britten, “On Receiving the First Aspen Award,” repr. in Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 256–57. 25 Piper paraphrased Clark’s assertion in his introduction to Walter Hussey, Patron of Art: The Revival of a Great Tradition Among Modern Artists (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), ix. David L. Howard quotes Clark directly in “Patron of the Choral Art: Walter Hussey’s Commission of Choral Works in the Twentieth Century” (DMA diss., Michigan State University, 2008), 69. 26 Kenneth Clark, “Dean Walter Hussey: A Tribute to his Patronage of the Arts,” in Chichester 900 (Chichester: Chichester Press, 1975), 72. 27 Hussey, Patron of Art, 3. 28 The obituarist of Lancelot Mason, who had served as archdeacon of Chichester during Hussey’s tenure as dean, noted Mason’s “great influence in Chichester,” where Walter Hussey was “more than content for him to run the Cathedral.” Daily Telegraph, 14 February 1990, quoted in Turner, “Aesthete, Impressario,” 534. In a series of biographical sketches of cathedral deans of the twentieth century, Trevor Beeson is even more critical in The Deans, characterizing Hussey’s ministry as “disappointing—some said disastrous” (187). 29 Beeson, The Deans, 187. 30 Beeson allows, however: “He nonetheless preached a notable sermon in Westminster Abbey at the memorial service for Benjamin Britten,” Ibid., 191. 31 See Nadine Hubbs, “Being Musical: Gender, Sexuality, and Musical Identity in Twentieth-Century America,” in The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), chap. 2, 64–102. 32 Peter Pears to Walter Hussey, n.d. (1940s?), Dean Hussey Papers 7365, West Sussex County Council Record Office, Chichester, UK. Quoted in Turner, “Aesthete, Impressario,” 533. 33 BBC Radio 4, “The Muse of St. Matthew’s,” 17 October 1989. Accessed through the British Library Sound & Moving Image Catalogue, Shelfmark B4893/2, digital recording, transcribed by the author. 34 Beeson, The Deans, 191. 35 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 368. 36 Byron Adams, “‘Save Me From Those Suffering Boys’: Britten, John Ireland, and the Venerable Tradition of Uranian Boy-Worship in England,” in Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on an Inexplicit Art, ed. Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2017), 184. 37 Ibid. 38 Hussey, Patron of Art, 5. 39 Quoted in Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, 2:1139. 40 Kildea, Benjamin Britten, 223–25. 41 Ibid., 224. 42 See Hilary Seraph Donaldson, “An Analysis of Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb,” Choral Journal 51, no. 10 (May 2011): 6–24. 43 William Force Stead, Introduction to Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno: A Song from Bedlam (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 13. 44 See Noel Chevalier, “Breaking the Circle of the Sciences: Newton, Newbery, and Christopher Smart’s New Learning,” in Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century: “By Succession of Delight,” ed. Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 125–42. Smart had a volatile relationship with his influential father-in-law, who may have brought about the institutionalization as a means to impede Smart’s career ambitions. 45 Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony, The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart (Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 66–67. 46 Mark Riddles, “The Instruments Are By Their Rhimes: An Examination of the Text in Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb,” American Organist 42, no. 8 (August 2008): 68. 47 Adapted from Jeanne Murray Walker, “Jubilate Agno as Psalm,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 20, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 452–53. 48 Although the Psalms are a portion of the Hebrew Bible and therefore do not feature the figure of Christ as understood by Christian theologians, Smart took a revisionist approach and gave the Psalms a Christological gloss. 49 Donald Davie, “Christopher Smart: Some Neglected Poems,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 242–64. 50 Stead, Introduction to Rejoice in the Lamb, 17. 51 Britten to Hussey, 28 May 1943, in Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, 2:1157. Britten misspells “a bit” and “Jeoffry” in his letter. 52 A growing critical interest in homosocial and homoerotic associations with the figure of David during this period suggests Britten’s reference would merit further attention. These erotic associations are furthered, and complicated, by the inclusion of the extended meditation on the author’s cat for soprano (boy) soloist: “For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey,” who “worships in his way” by “wreathing his body … with elegant quickness.” The domestic cat has associations in literature and painting to feelings of lust and desire. 53 The “Hallelujah” section (mm. 60–77) is marked “rhythmic,” which Britten qualifies in a footnote with the instruction “to be sung approximately as ,” familiar from Baroque performance practice as an overdotting technique. 54 Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 23. 55 Timothy Miller, “Benjamin Britten’s Liturgical Music and Its Place in the Anglican Church Music Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Surrey, 2012), 34. 56 Ibid. 57 Julian Andrews, “The 1930s and the Shadow of War,” in The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), 13. 58 Hussey, “Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child,” chap. 3 of Patron of Art, 23. 59 Quoted in ibid., 24. 60 The onset of the war had greatly altered circumstances for the artists Hussey patronized, a reality that surely contributed to the reasons for their acceptance of Hussey’s patronage. The ongoing war meant that many emergent artists were either disposed to take commissions they would not normally entertain, or were willing to work for lower than their usual fees. Britten’s sojourn in America and eventual return to face a conscientious objectors’ tribunal in 1942 are well documented elsewhere. Moore and Sutherland were more directly connected with the official project of wartime art. Sutherland was employed full-time as a salaried war artist by the WAAC, and though Moore initially had resisted joining, the commission of his Shelter Sketches led to him to do work for the Committee as well. See Paul Francis Kildea, “Exile: America, England, 1939–1945,” in Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 150–243; Brian McMahon, “Why Did Britten Return to Wartime England?” in Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on His Life and Work, ed. Lucy Walker (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2009), 174–186; Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, vol. 2, esp. 1046–49. 61 Recollection of Walter Hussey, quoted in Hussey, Patron of Art, 28. 62 Ibid. 63 Eric Gill, Eric Gill: Autobiography (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968), 208. 64 “Stations of the Cross,” Westminster Cathedral, https://westminstercathedral.org.uk/the-cathedral/art-marbles-and-mosaics/. Accessed 9 September 2021. 65 Harold Williamson to Walter Hussey, quoted in Hussey, Patron of Art, 24. 66 BBC Radio 4, “The Muse of St. Matthew’s.” 67 Hussey, Patron of Art, 29. 68 Ibid., 37. 69 Ibid., 37–38. 70 Ibid., 38. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 25. 73 Ibid., 39. 74 “A Festival Cantata: Mr. Britten’s New Work,” Times, 22 September 1943. 75 Anonymous, “World of Music: Britten’s Latest,” Birmingham Post, 7 February 1944. 76 Ibid. 77 Hussey, Patron of Art, 44. 78 Ibid., 45. 79 Ibid. 80 “Disgusted” letter, Northampton Chronicle & Echo, quoted in Patron of Art, 45. 81 Quoted in Sir Christopher Frayling, “Art and Religion in the Modern West: Some Perspectives,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 11–12 November 2009, 221. 82 Hussey, Patron of Art, 47–48. 83 Howes, The Art of the Sacred, 27. 84 Benjamin Britten, in Letters from a Life, 2:1046. 85 Eric Saylor, English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 6. © The Author(s) 2022. 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TI - “Whoever Saw a Woman with a Neck That Thick”: Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, Walter Hussey, and Patronage of Modernist Art in Wartime
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdac002
DA - 2022-04-07
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