The Prince and the Composer: A Film about Hubert Parry by HRH The Prince of Wales

# Dear Lord and Father of mankind Forgive our foolish ways... #

I remember so well singing that at school.

# ..our rightful mind

# In purer lives thy service find... #

They're hummable things, a lot of his tunes, and people...

I mean, they're well-known, almost household tunes, but nobody has any idea where they've come from.

# Rejoice in His word... #

And I think Jerusalem, certainly, is such a favourite one.

We know the tune so well, but not the name of the man who wrote it.

Sir Hubert Parry is one of the great underrated, under-appreciated,

special British composers.

Somebody introduced me to his symphonies.

It was a revelation to me - he wrote symphonies?!

"Well, hang on a minute, how is it possible that somebody who can write

"this sort of music is just completely left out?"

It made me determined to discover more about him.

I found a complex man with a mind of his own,

who challenged his upbringing and, in love, let his heart rule his head.

It's given new meaning and significance to music that has been with me almost all my life.

# In England's green and pleasant land. #

BELLS PEAL

CHEERING

When it comes to the coronation of my mama,

what was I, I suppose I was four.

I sort of vaguely remember I was up in a gallery,

looking down, with my grandmother and my aunt.

I only wish I could remember having heard

I Was Glad by Sir Hubert Parry!

But at least I was there!

Maybe it was because I heard it at the coronation without realising, but it is so -

well, I don't know, it sounds silly, really, trite - uplifting.

That piece was written especially for the coronation of my great-great-grandfather,

King Edward VII.

"I was glad when they said unto me,

"'We will go into the house of the Lord.'"

It's used at every coronation and at some weddings too.

If you're coming into the abbey and you have to walk up the aisle,

and there are an awful lot of people peering at you,

some pieces of music literally do waft you up the aisle

and it's so marvellous that you're sort of carried along on this wave of music.

And that's what I think is so brilliant about this piece,

giving you all those tingles up the spine and tears in the eyes.

# I was glad

# Glad when they said unto me

# "We will go

# "We will go

# "We will go

# "Into the house of the Lord."

-# Our feet shall stand in thy gates

-Our feet shall stand...

# O Jerusalem

-# Our feet shall stand

-Our feet shall stand

-# Shall stand in thy gates

-Shall stand in thy gates

-# Our feet shall stand

-Our feet shall stand

# Shall stand in thy gates

# O Jerusalem

It has an extraordinary capacity to lift the spirits, this particular piece of music.

It's timeless, really, isn't it, in that sense?

# Jerusalem is builded

# As a city

-# That is at unity

-That is at unity

# In itself. #

I Was Glad is probably one of the greatest ceremonial pieces

that's ever been written.

There's that funny moment in the score where it says,

"The Queen's scholars of Westminster School

"shall perform the vivats and if you're not at a coronation, you're not allowed to perform this,"

and there's an asterisk and then you have to skip a page.

The vivats, the "Long live the King"

have to be praising the King by name,

and also his Queen, if he has one.

So, for 1902, "Long live King Edward, Long live Queen Alexandra."

The Queen came in first, "Vivat Regina Alexandra, vivat Regina Ed...

"vivat Rex Eduardus."

And Parry wrote vivats for both of those.

And now, of course, that forms a central pivot in the anthem.

Our own Queen, just, "Long live Queen Elizabeth,"

because Prince Philip is not King.

FANFARE

It's a magical moment, almost a football shout, in the middle of this very stirring service.

# Vivat Regina!

# Vivat Regina Elizabetha!

# Vivat, vivat, vivat! #

They're set to music with a very unstable chord,

which makes you feel very kind of shivery at that moment.

# Vivat, vivat, vivat!

# Vivat! #

Normally, they apparently just used to shout these out,

but actually incorporating it into a composed piece of music was a new idea.

It's a real coup de theatre, musically.

The soft passage in the middle, "Oh, pray for the peace of Jerusalem,"

is so exquisitely intimate,

given the occasion for which it was written is so public

and ceremonial and ancient.

There's a wonderful delicacy to it, and it's really personal.

# O pray for the peace of Jerusalem

# They shall prosper that love thee

# Pray for the peace of Jerusalem

# They shall prosper that love thee... #

And then, of course, for the trebles, it's the climb towards the B-flat at the end.

# Plenteousness within thy palaces... #

The sense of elation after you've sung that climax,

as the orchestra takes over and does the final flourish, as it were.

And you just want to jump up and down during that.

But, of course, you're not allowed to!

It's fantastic, I think.

And, of course, with a with a big choir it must be even more remarkable, I would have thought.

-ORGAN PLAYS BASS NOTES

-But... it's very interesting, you see?

HE LAUGHS

See, it's those ones that make the whole difference,

I think, those pipes!

Most extraordinary, I think, achievement,

to be able to write something like that.

Which obviously becomes so much a part of the subconscious,

in a funny way.

It's used so often in churches all up and down the country.

-It's not just for coronations?

-No, no, absolutely not.

But what I was so interested, I...

When he wrote it for the coronation of my great-great-grandparents,

it was an extraordinary piece of theatre, really.

Which, of course, all went wrong, didn't it, on the day, when...

it all started too early.

I think they got it better organised, didn't they,

for my mama's coronation.

Did you enjoy singing it?

It's a great piece, yeah.

-It's really nice.

-A lot of contrast during the piece.

It's nice filling the space that it was designed for.

But do you feel, with that wonderful moment

with the organ at the beginning, the opening bars,

when it rises to that incredible moment when you all come in?

It is, I think, incredibly stirring.

-It's the climax that...

-You can imagine the occasion.

This version isn't the version that was played at Edward VII's coronation.

-No.

-The start of this one was written for George V's coronation.

-So was it changed quite a lot?

-It was changed, because it started quietly at Edward VII's and...

Slightly too quietly for people to realise that it had started! PRINCE CHARLES LAUGHS

And actually, Queen Alexandra's procession started and the piece started,

but the King was nowhere to be seen, and so the piece finished

and he still hadn't arrived, so they started again from the vivats.

So the Queen's scholars sang them twice.

And then the piece finished.

There must have been the most wonderful panic going on!

Yeah, that coronation didn't go well, because the...

the King's crown got put on back-to-front as well.

It didn't?

-LAUGHTER

-Course, nobody would have noticed, probably would they, really?

-So he then rewrote, did he, the opening?

-Yes, and...

-To make it much stronger and...

-Yes.

-Ah, I see.

Wasn't it lucky he was still there for the next coronation?

LAUGHTER

"To the memory of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, Baronet,

"fifth son of Thomas Gambier Parry and Isabella Fynes-Clinton,

"his wife."

"Director of the Royal College of Music, 1895-1918.

"Member of the Royal Yacht Squadron." Aha.

"With his whole heart he sung songs and loved him that made him."

'For me, it was a real journey of discovery

'because I hadn't had a chance to discover

'the range of his talent and contribution.'

So this film has enabled me to find out an enormous amount.

It's been fascinating, going to visit Shulbrede Priory, this remarkable, ancient place

hidden away in a wood in Sussex, and being shown around by Sir Hubert's great-granddaughter, Laura Ponsonby.

The house contains so many memoirs and personal possessions of Parry

and his wife Maude that you really feel you get to know them.

-BELL RINGS

-It's going to work!

Nobody there, after all that!

FOOTSTEPS

It's like The Goons, you hear them coming from miles away!

Ah!

-Hello, I'm Laura. Welcome to Shulbrede.

-Thank you very much.

I'm afraid you've come on an awful day.

-No, no, I love it.

-Do you know what we call it?

-What?

-Hubert Parry weather! Do you know, every time we've had something connected, we think, "Hubert's here."

Really? With the roaring...

-I love this weather.

-He loved it.

-It's my favourite...

Yes, he used to say, as you perhaps know, he used to say,

"We went out and we had no fun, cos it was calm!"

Or he said, "I shan't go unless there's a gale!"

-Really?

-Yes, he adored it.

Did Hubert Parry come here a lot?

Yes, he did, because my grandmother, Dolly, you know, he had the two...

he had two daughters, Dolly and Gwen.

And Dolly he was devoted to, and she was devoted to him.

He used to come over in his car, as fast as possible.

-And can you remember her?

-I remember Dolly, yes, I do. She died in 1963.

She was very black-and-white.

He wrote two pieces for her, because he said she had two distinct moods,

and we certainly knew that when we were children!

She could be very, very lovely

and she could be very black as thunder.

So anyway she has these two - one rather a dainty piece,

and the other one a very serious piece.

It deals with the pensive and warm side of Dolly,

and it's like the piano version

of Elgar's famous Nimrod,

from the Enigma Variations,

but it's less overpowering.

It's so gentle, but the gentleness doesn't mean it's watered-down.

It's so full of beautiful, beautiful emotions.

It's a house with great charm.

People feel the sort of calmness of it.

Parry was absolutely enchanted with it, and wrote this series of piano pieces, called the Shulbrede Tunes,

which were picturing either the house or the people who were here.

The warmth we feel from him is just so endearing to me.

Be hard to know it was Parry!

Touching, isn't it, really?

It's so natural, while at the same time, it's formally perfect as well.

He was a master of finding melodies, extraordinary.

I think she was, in fact, rather like her father.

She had a sort of inner life and she was quite a thinker.

One of the critics, only a few years after Parry's death,

declared that Parry was the composer who never was.

So I was shocked when I saw the quality of the Shulbrede Tunes

and the Hands Across the Centuries Suite,

the last two suites he wrote at the end of his life.

I was really happy to find these pinnacles of English piano writing.

People don't know the music, they have a prejudiced view of what he's like,

and in a way, the prejudice of the man has perhaps influenced their knowledge of the music,

so they're just not going to listen to it.

-He goes bald very, very early.

-Yes, he does.

He wasn't a straight-laced person, and I always like to somehow tie up the music with the man.

The man was a fantastic person, I'd loved to have known him.

A really warm, tolerant man

of wide tastes.

You know, the story of him and the person who was poaching when he was up before the bench

on which sat Parry, fined him for breaking the law and his poaching,

then nipped around the back and paid him out of his own pocket.

So he fined him at the same time and paid the fine himself.

I think that's a wonderful story and, I mean, that really sums up...

Parry's great-heartedness, and his liberal politics as well.

You know, I fight all my life to get the right idea of Parry, because people get the wrong Parry.

You know, they imagine that he's a sort of Tory and...

Quite different to what he was.

It's so typical of what happens in life, isn't it? They always get the wrong impression.

I know, and people go on talking about it.

It's trying to change that impression that's the difficulty.

Here are lots of little steps and things.

-That goes up to the...?

-Yeah, that was the original monastic staircase.

Be careful of your suit, though, because it is quite dirty on the walls.

We keep lots of archives and things in here.

He had very neat writing.

Quite good for reading, unlike his daughter Dolly.

What is that one? Gin?

-Yes. Is that gin?

-Yes.

-Right.

-That's what it says.

Do you know, I've never done that! I should have done it!

One friend of mine, who was a good musician, said, "I can't bear Parry."

I said, "Oh, right. What?"

-"Jerusalem, you know?"

-You see, that's the problem, they only think that's all there is.

-And I said, Well, what else? I said "What else do you know?"

-What else, exactly.

-Silence.

Silence, yep. Hadn't heard the symphonies or anything?

-Hadn't heard anything, no. Nothing.

-A lot of people have never heard the symphonies.

-No.

I tell people about it and they say, "Really?"

What really intrigues me is...

in loving Sir Hubert Parry's music,

but not having known very much... Obviously look into the background

or his family or anything,

and then it's riveting, once you start reading more about it.

You find, for instance,

that Parry was brought up in the village of Highnam,

just outside Gloucester, where his father was the squire

and very much the dominant figure in the family.

His father, Thomas Gambier Parry, was a great man of great energy, I think.

But he had very strict rules,

particularly when it came to religion.

All the staff would come for prayers in the morning, he would read from the Bible.

And he was a man who controlled people, he was in charge.

He was that sort of Victorian who had a very strict view of the way

you should live your life, I suspect, within the confines of the religious restrictions.

It led him to create what I gather John Betjeman described as

"the most complete Victorian church in Britain".

So young Hubert grew up in its shadow.

I hear Sir Hubert Parry's father, Thomas Gambier Parry...

-Who built this church...

-..was also very devout.

He was a very devout man and a great philanthropist.

He had married the lovely Isabella,

who was his first wife, and together they talked about

building a church here in this place, because there wasn't one.

Thomas did it at incredible speed.

Remarkably, that whole building was ready in every respect in 21 months.

It's a complete work of art,

masterminded by one man and his vision.

He wanted to enrich his own church with his own frescoes

and so he began to paint the chancel arch scene, the traditional Judgment scene.

What a contribution it gives to the whole effect of that building.

So if you sit on the left of the church, you're going to heaven,

sit on the right, you're going off to hell.

Oh, Lord!

-THEY LAUGH But it's quite a mild doom picture...

-It is very mild.

-Unlike some of them.

-Compared to some of them, the old ones are fantastic.

Yes, some of them are pretty grim.

I hadn't realised that, near the end of his life,

Hubert Parry set to music a poem by John Donne about the Last Judgment.

Perhaps his father's grand mural in Highnam Church was in his mind.

"At the round Earth's imagin'd corners blow

"Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise

"From death, you numberlesse infinities

"Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe

"All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow

"All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,

"Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes

"Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe."

# At the round earth's imagin'd corners

# Blow your trumpets... #

They're very different sorts of trumpets to the trumpets of I Was Glad.

On a completely different celestial level.

# Blow your trumpets, Angells... #

It's music on a grand scale.

# And arise... #

There's an incredible sense of ecstasy about it

when the voices rise up to the top A in the treble part.

# ..arise

# From death

# You numberlesse infinities... #

The "numberlesse infinities of soules", there's serious fear portrayed,

with the lower voices treading death-march-like underneath.

# You numberlesse infinities of soules

# And to your scattered bodies goe

# And to your scattered bodies goe

# And to your scattered bodies goe... #

I don't know it very well, that one,

but it is rather remarkable. It has this most marvellous...

The beginning has this extraordinary effect,

With all the voices together,

the way it...

reverberates is staggering at the beginning.

# All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies

# Despair, law, chance, hath slain... #

There's one extraordinary passage in this motet,

where Parry seems to pull all the pillars away

from the strong, tonal support to the piece.

And that is in this ethereal section, where he sets,

"And you whose eyes

"Shall behold God."

# And you, whose eyes

# Shall behold God... #

It's not only in the extraordinary angularity of the musical lines, it is almost - what might one say -

- atonal.

We don't know where we are.

It's a vision of the Almighty.

# And you, whose eyes Shall behold God

# And never taste

# And never taste death's woe

# And never taste death's woe... #

Within 12 days of giving birth to Hubert,

his mother, Isabella, died of tuberculosis.

This was dreadful for Thomas Gambier Parry,

of course, but ultimately, of course,

it was pretty dreadful for Hubert, too,

who grew up very lonely as a boy.

Three of Hubert's four elder brothers had died in infancy,

which is why his father dedicated the church to the Holy Innocents.

Little Hubert would come to church and behave nicely.

He was... obviously had a great deal of religion in his life as a little boy.

He played the organ from a very early age, when he was sort of seven or eight,

before his feet could reach the pedals.

I say, look at these!

'What riveted me, of course,'

was to discover that his father was such a good watercolourist, marvellous.

When I saw his paintings, I couldn't get over them.

Gosh. Incredibly competent, isn't it?

Eat your heart out, as far as I'm concerned, when you look at those.

'So this rigid man of religion was at the same time a creative free spirit

'who collected art on his travels

'and painted landscapes as well as murals.'

Venice...

'Thomas had experienced the Italian light, the strong sunlight.'

And it was into his watercolours he could portray this.

Strong, strong colours.

Fantastic. I love the sky here with...

the bits of green.

Oh, well.

Why do I bother?

'I would have thought that such an artistic man

'would have welcomed his son's musical ambitions.

'But Thomas Gambier Parry was an amateur,

'and that was all he expected of his son.'

'He always encouraged Hubert's music.'

But it was, of course, never intended to be a career, that was quite clear,

and I fear Hubert must have realised

what his father was going to say the whole way through,

but the urge in Hubert was too great and it was going to burst out at some stage.

They may not have been aristocracy,

but Thomas Gambier Parry had bought a large estate,

he was now a very established man of the county of Gloucestershire.

'His son was not to be a professional musician.

'Not the thing to be done from the landed gentry.

'Consequently,'

when Hubert let it be known that he wanted to make a career in music...

..Thomas Gambier Parry flatly refused.

-He was always away, apparently, wasn't he?

-Oh, yes.

Thomas Parry, he was always going to Italy?

-Yeah, he loved Italy.

-Yes. So I suppose Hubert Parry hardly ever saw him?

This is a height chart,

I believe, from the mid 1800s,

and there's reference to Hubert as he was growing,

-there's different heights.

-We had one in my grandmother's house,

Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. We were all measured as children.

Same sort of height as me, I think, probably.

And I'm shrinking fast!

'He had an elder brother who was very brilliant called Clinton,

'who was, I suppose, eight years older than him.

'But Clinton took drugs, he took opium,

'he womanized and he took drink, and he was sent down,'

or went down, from Oxford about three times.

And he was desperate.

Clinton was sent off to South Africa

to farm, and...

that was an utter failure, financially and in health terms,

because Clinton just was drinking more and more.

He lost his faith, and his father, with all this bad behaviour,

but particularly because of the loss of faith, he disinherited him.

He was the elder and he would have had the estate of Highnam and all the lands and everything.

Anyway, he was totally disinherited.

And then Parry,

in 1873, I think, it is that...

he loses his faith, and he feels honour-bound to write to his father,

and so he writes him a long letter.

-"Dearest, Possie..." Because they called him that, didn't they?

-They called him Possie.

"After considerable hesitation, I've come to the conclusion

"that it is my duty to write you a letter

"which is very likely to give you pain

"and likely also to make you angry."

I would love to see into Hubert's mind

as he prepared to write that letter.

It says a lot for his integrity,

because he knew exactly what his father wanted of him.

Parry felt he must do this because he was going to inherit Highnam

and he didn't want to inherit it under false pretences.

And then we do actually have Thomas Gambier Parry's reply.

"I had set my heart and based my hopes on you.

"And now even you appear to have failed me.

"It is too deep a grief.

"You, my loved Hubert, cast off the Lord who bought you."

He'd had such a shock from Clinton's behaviour,

and now his precious Hubert was coming along the same lines.

And he really wondered what he was going to do with someone

who admitted that he didn't believe in all that the Church of England stood for.

He was an infidel, in his words.

"I have sometime past noticed in you, with painful anxiety,

"growing pride of intellect,

"great impatience of any opinion contrary to your own."

-BOTH CHUCKLE

-Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

-Yes, it does, rather!

-Oh, dear.

-Mmm, so there we are.

-He must have had great...

-I suppose he had great resilience and strength of character, didn't he?

-Yes, he did.

-He really was...

-Hubert.

If you'd had the chance to meet Hubert Parry,

-do you think you'd have got on?

-Oh, yes.

I'd loved to have met him. And I'd love to have met

Sir Edward Elgar as well, I must say.

And I'm sure...

I'm sure Sir Hubert Parry was an enjoyable character.

The beef steak.

A backslapping, jovial character.

Clutching your hand in a very strong paw,

or thumping an old colleague on the back - almost knocked the teeth out!

I think it was Vaughan Williams who said they were deceived by his rubicund bonhomie.

They imagined that he had the mind,

as well as the appearance,

of a country squire.

The fact is

that Parry had a very nervous temperament,

as we all knew who had anything to do with him.

Here's a man who is lonely, very sensitive,

a heavily-conflicted man.

His heart, he says, comes on really bad. I suppose sort of palpitations or something.

He was often the victim of stress,

thanks to the long hours he put in at the Royal College of Music,

where he was a profound influence

on the coming generation of British composers.

The idea was that music was going to make you into a better person.

He said to Vaughan Williams,

"Write choral music that befits an Englishman and a democrat."

-VAUGHAN WILLIAMS:

-Parry's great watchword

was character.

He was always on the lookout

for what was characteristic.

And even if he disliked a piece of music,

he would praise it if he found anything in it that had character.

Actually writing a tune, it seems to me, can so often be denigrated by people nowadays,

but it is actually a very difficult thing to do, I would have thought,

because nowadays I don't think you get many tunes.

There aren't many compositions that people go around humming afterwards.

They're here and gone.

One of the things that makes Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind

such a good tune is that you can recognise it within three notes...

And you know what that is, which is the trick of a very great melodist, I think.

They were singing it on the beach at Dunkirk, I seem to remember,

in that film which I saw some time ago,

which was so moving.

The fact that the soldiers were singing

Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind

in the midst of all this carnage and horror was...

..very telling about the way in which it formed

such an important part of people's consciousness...

# The beauty of thy peace... #

..as a hymn, a tune that reminded them so much of home and England,

and at a time when everything was so ghastly you thought you were never going to survive.

# Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire

# Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire... #

It shows great genius to be able to write something like that

which sticks in the mind, because it has all the right elements to make it do that.

I think Parry was pretty astute in how he constructed that tune.

Whether it was conscious or unconscious, I don't know,

but Parry was tapping into some of the best-known tunes in England at that time,

what used to be known as national songs, and he's half quoting about four of them.

If you can do that and get away with it with a tune which is highly original,

you certainly know what you're doing.

What we've got here, which is rather interesting,

is the actual manuscript of Jerusalem.

-Oh, I see, how splendid.

-It's the real thing.

Royal College have got one, but theirs is an orchestral one. This is the very first one which he wrote.

-See, it doesn't actually have a title.

-Right.

And then it puts here, "Kindly let us have matter for title."

-This is not Hubert's writing.

-Oh.

-So, "What is the title?"

-He never wanted it to be called Jerusalem, did he?

-No, he didn't, no.

We've got a note from my grandmother saying he hated it, he wanted it to be called And Did Those Feet, yes.

There's almost a folk element about the piece.

I mean, Elgar used to say he used to write modern folk tunes,

and in some ways I think Jerusalem has that kind of quality.

This is a famously difficult piece to play.

All those ladies at Women's Institutes who play it every meeting

and those of us who attempt to play it in churches and at weddings and funerals and so on,

we always blench at this quite difficult introduction.

I've never heard anybody try to miss it out.

Nobody ever begins Jerusalem with...

PLAYS BEGINNING OF VOCAL SECTION

We know somehow that this introduction

is a most important part of the tune,

which explains it and justifies it.

It's a very characteristic sound,

and it becomes even more characteristic

when Parry contradicts that chord that says so clearly D major...

..with that in the bass. Not...

..but....

And what Parry is doing here is setting up a melody that's going to be what we call pentatonic,

that's to say, it uses that five-note scale...

..that so much folk music from England and from Ireland,

Celtic folk music and so on, use this pentatonic scale.

D, E, F sharp, A, B.

And the note that's conspicuously absent is G.

# And did those feet

# In ancient time... #

That little twiddle, almost,

which just touches on G.

So exactly the same little snippet - # Ancient time

# Walk upon Eng... #

"Ancient time" is finishing the line, and "walk upon Eng..."

is beginning the line. It's the same music.

# Walk upon England's mountains green... #

-Then we have this...

-PLAYS NOTES

-..and he jacks it up.

-PLAY NOTES

Same idea, but one note higher.

# On England's pleasant pastures seen... #

Parry's going to make it up now to the G, and he has...

There's the G.

And then he could have written...

But he very slightly changes it.

He doesn't change it enough to make it difficult to sing.

And, having put G so much to the forefront,

the note that was despised and rejected at the beginning, as it were,

we now get the whole opening on G.

# Jerusalem builded here

# Among those dark Satanic mills? #

-He doesn't want to begin...

-PLAYS CHORD

..while the singers are still singing...

-# Dark Satanic... #

-PLAYS CHORD

Because their last word would be lost.

And so he lets the singer sing...

# Dark Satanic mills. #

-And then he comes in with this a beat late.

-PLAYS CHORD

So he really needs to lose a beat, so he does.

PLAYS REFRAIN

Now, the great bonus of Parry having omitted that beat

is that it makes us ready to come in on the beat with, "Bring me my bow."

Because "and did those feet" comes in...

# And did those feet. #

But...

# Bring me... #

I've never heard anybody get that wrong.

# Bring me my bow

# Of burning gold... #

And there's a couple of marvellous changes in the second verse.

The "mountains green" in the first verse...

Very plain dignified harmony become "arrows of desire".

And he just spices it up, just enough.

# Bring me my spear

# O, clouds unfold

# Bring me my chariot of fire... #

The composer Henry Walford Davies left a lovely description.

He says here, "Sir Hubert Parry gave me the manuscript

"of this setting of Blake's Jerusalem one memorable morning in 1916.

"We looked at it long together in his room at the Royal College of Music,

"and I recall vividly his unwonted happiness over it.

"One momentary act of his should perhaps be told here. He ceased to speak,

"and put his finger on the note D in the second stanza

"where the words "o, clouds unfold" break his rhythm.

"I do not think any word passed about it, yet he made it perfectly clear

"that this was the one note and one moment of the song which he treasured."

It's fascinating to work out why, out of a song with so many moments to treasure,

this might have been the one that Parry pointed out to Walford Davies,

and it's because this is where Parry solves the problem that's set him by the poet, William Blake.

And all Blake's lines, with the exception of this one, are single statements.

"And did those feet in ancient time

"Walk upon England's mountains green."

There's two lines together, but the lines are not interrupted.

But this one... We've had, "Bring me my bow of burning gold

"Bring me my arrows of desire."

and then we have two things in one line.

"Bring me my spear O, clouds unfold."

And Parry was set the problem of showing

that this one line in the whole poem had two bits.

And he did it by

putting that crotchet, so that instead of being...

# Bring me my spear

# O, clouds unfold. #

..it becomes

# Bring me my spear

# O, clouds unfold. #

And that was the bit that Parry was proudest of,

and it was the bit where he had locked horns with Blake.

# Nor shall my sword

# Sleep in my hand... #

# Till we have built

# Jerusalem... #

And so he gives terrific practical expression

to the idea that we're going to build Jerusalem.

And this, of course, is very close to Parry's politics and his whole ideals and philosophy and so on.

It's very interesting that the long note and the high note is "built".

"We have built."

# Built Jerusalem... #

And at the end, after the voices are finished...

PLAYS REFRAIN ON PIANO

..the piano comes back.

And it could have just gone...

But, no, we have...

Up to the G.

That's a very interesting thing that Parry should have done that,

-because this is an aspirational melody, it's a melody...

-PLAYS RISING MELODY

..which keeps doing that.

And yet - and here I think is the key to its Englishness -

it begins with its highest note.

That A is its very highest note.

Perhaps that's Jerusalem.

Perhaps that chord is Jerusalem.

-And perhaps this is...

-PLAYS LOW NOTES

..Parry's realisation that there's a long way to go.

And the end, the rising fourth echoing up to the G...

..is perhaps Parry's realisation that we're not quite at Jerusalem yet.

-Is that Sir Hubert?

-Yes, there's Hubert.

-Rather a good one, isn't it?

Yes, it's good, isn't it?

And that's a drawing.

We don't really quite know the circumstance of it.

And then here he is, look.

This one.

-That's him at Eton.

-Oh, yes.

And there he's head.

That's Hubert. Yeah.

CHARLES CHUCKLES

Extraordinary, aren't they? He plays every sort of sport, absolutely loved football.

Football and music. The thing is that he played it so violently.

Sometimes he was taken off on a stretcher.

It meant that when he was laid up, he could then write his music.

Parry was genetically predisposed, I think, to danger

and hyperactivity, you might say.

-Oh, and here's his yacht, is it?

-That's right. That's the Wanderer.

-Mad keen, was he, on sailing?

-Absolutely mad.

Every August he took off and went as far as he could and hoped it would be as rough as possible.

He was an early car driver.

He starts driving in 1904, and he writes in his diary,

"Had a go at driving and found it decidedly difficult."

But then, once he's got behind that wheel,

he's absolutely mad about it and he drives all over the place.

It's pretty dangerous.

Just behind the door here, we have his...

Parry's driving coat. He really did like going fast.

One particular chauffeur Parry drove, and at the end of the ride,

the chauffeur got out and was sick.

He loved being Mr Toad, really, I think.

He loved active sports,

and Maude, his wife, never really participated in any of these.

In fact, the only way she often participated was in the accidents

that Parry had when he was driving,

where she was quite badly injured on at least one occasion.

He had a terrible smash with Maude.

She was then given Veronal to try and calm her down,

and it was thought that she became a bit addicted.

He writes, "I turned round,

"saw Maude heaped insensible, with blood streaming."

Oh, Lord.

-BOTH CHUCKLE

-Oh, dear!

When it comes to how my attention was caught by Parry's music,

I think it was being introduced to his symphonies, which I never knew about.

Most people have no idea.

Don't think you did, either, till I suggested you listen!

I mean, they were a revelation.

I can't remember who it was... whether it was Andrew Lloyd Webber who recommended them.

Somebody like that.

So it was a real thrill to find the Proms last year putting on his fifth and final symphony,

which was written in 1912,

performed three or four times, and then forgotten.

Two recordings have been made relatively recently,

but it hadn't been played live since before the First World War.

The fifth symphony is a truly splendid piece

with first-class material. You can't forget the wonderful opening

'with its great sweeping theme.'

I know that you will be the best performers of Mr Parry.

So Symphonic Fantasia, yes?

Movements have titles. The first movement named Stress. ALL LAUGH

Yes, it's about conductors.

Yes, yes, yes. The second movement, Lento.

Named... What do you think?

Love!

HE MIMICS KISSING Yes, yes.

Big love, not sexual of course. No.

No!

ALL LAUGH

The third movement, yes, Vivace.

HE HUMS Play!

-Play after love.

-CONDUCTOR CHUCKLES

In finale, Moderato. Named Now.

'I think Parry saw this as an opportunity to write a work

'that had major autobiographical significance for him.'

Three, four. ORCHESTRA PLAYS

It's lovely here.

It's...

I always think he must have been such a generous,

such a big-hearted man.

Remarkable man.

CONDUCTOR: A slow tear.

I always feel he must have been a gentleman in the true sense of the word.

It's something I've been longing for since...

I started my research on Parry back in the late 1970s.

'I felt that'

it's really very, very good music for me personally.

This is the generous Parry, I think.

-Glorious.

-Marvellous.

'Emotionally, it's so rich and full,'

its tune is so beautiful.

'This symphony has something very, very special.

'It's a symphony fantasy.

'Its fantasies are great.'

'If you scratch a French composer, underneath you'll find Massenet.

'If you scratch an English composer,

'certainly the first 50 years of the 20th century, you'll find Parry underneath.'

'I can tell you that he is a very good composer, really very good.

'I never thought that he's very British, or especially British, you see.

'For me, it was really very interesting music.'

Good. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Yes, may I ask the trombones...

It's a very professional thing.

A symphony has a classical form, very good construction,

and very, very short. Very...

You know, some composers start and they cannot stop on time,

but he's absolutely well-organised in his compositions.

Great, great piece.

'I'm with this orchestra 15 years,

'so we know each other and they immediately understand from me

'if I trust this music, I love it, or not.'

Everybody came to me and said, "Oh, we never heard about this symphony."

I was really happy.

You share something with this orchestra, which I don't know if anybody's told you yet.

-I think your cello teacher was Naomi Butterworth?

-That's right.

-Ivor, one of our double bass players,

-he's disappeared...his teacher....

-Oh, it's the double bass.

I went around saying, "Which of you in the cello section...?"

-and they all rushed off.

-His teacher was Naomi.

-But it's the double bass.

-Yes, it was one of the basses.

Oh, she was wonderful, Naomi.

When I was at Cambridge I used to go and play in little quartets

-and things occasionally, very, very badly.

-Oh, no, no.

It was wonderful. I loved making music with other people.

I used to sit there practising, you know,

banging a tuning fork,

practising to Karajan's recording of Beethoven's 5th or something.

Sir Hubert Parry, who was such a great figure in the Edwardian period,

and I suppose has been overshadowed

or perhaps considered overtly jingoistic or something.

I don't think it is at all, but...

in a funny way...

I suppose he got sort of lumped in with feelings about Elgar and everything else.

On the other hand, Elgar acknowledged quite a lot, didn't he,

in terms of his debt to Sir Hubert Parry?

Blest Pair Of Sirens was hugely influential on Elgar and undoubtedly on Vaughan Williams,

who, after all, said that he thought Blest Pair of Sirens

was one of the greatest choral works ever to come out of this island.

I do remember a particularly incredible performance

of Blest Pair Of Sirens,

which we were so excited to be part of. And...

I suppose at that age you're not aware of the complexity of the music,

you're more aware of its energy and it just swept us up. It was wonderful to sing.

He used to write, didn't he, for choirs of 2,000?

Those were the days!

# Blest pair of sirens

# Pledges of Heaven's joy

# Sphere-born harmonious sisters... #

At a concert on my 60th birthday at Buckingham Palace they played it.

It was wonderful.

I think that was the first time I'd heard it.

ALL SING IN HARMONY

But to hear it in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace

was absolutely fantastic.

'The acoustics are so good in that room.'

THEY SING IN HARMONY

In one sense, it was Parry paying homage to Bach.

There is undoubtedly an element of that in the extraordinary eight-part counterpoint.

# Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne

# To him that...

No wonder it was received uproariously, a marvellous description I read.

# With saintly shout

# And solemn jubilee

Elgar said, "One of the noblest works of man."

He really loved that work.

It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.

A work of pure Englishness.

What was so miraculous about this piece,

and which I think was probably the major watershed in Parry's career,

is that Parry had this extraordinary affinity, I think,

with Milton's texts.

There's that wonderful fugal passage towards the end,

um, "Oh, may we soon again renew that song,"

which, actually, when it starts, you don't know it's a fugue.

It's just a long, long tune.

# Oh may we soon again

# Renew that song

# And keep in tune with heaven

# And keep in tune with heaven... #

"Oh, may we soon again renew that song

"and keep in tune with heaven...

"Till God ere long to his celestial concert us unite."

I mean, it's wonderful stuff, isn't it?

He's setting up this enormous musical structure,

which he then plays out completely.

And it's correct academically in that regard,

but also there's that yearning.

I just think it's romantic.

It also has a kind of...

How do you describe it?

A contradiction in terms, but a kind of domestic grandeur.

Do you know what I mean?

I find it's music that makes me feel better.

# And sing in

# Endless morn

Gloriously harmonious!

# And sing in endless

# Morn of light. #

Fantastic.

There's an extraordinary picture of him as an Eton schoolboy, which looks unbelievably modern.

It looks like a 1980s shirt that he's wearing,

collarless shirt.

He's probably just come in from sport or something.

He looks very soulful, very thoughtful, rather vulnerable.

It's a wonderful photograph.

A lot of people were very smitten with Hubert Parry.

He was described sometimes like a Greek God.

He clearly wasn't short of admirers.

He used to visit his schoolfriend

George, Earl of Pembroke

and his younger sister Lady Maude Herbert

at their ancestral home in Wiltshire.

There he met the teenager Maude

and absolutely fell for her.

They boated along the river and walked along the estate.

And then I think her family became rudely aware

that it was becoming more serious.

And they became secretly engaged, but eventually this was found out

and Lady Herbert, Maude's mother, was absolutely appalled

and she wrote Parry a 19-side letter.

I've nicknamed it The Odious Letter.

It's telling him why he can't marry Maude and he won't be able

to bring her up in the style to which she's accustomed.

-Was it 19 sides?

-19 sides, yes.

-Can you read it?

-Just.

"My dear Hubert.

"I'm very much grieved to have to write to you on the subject of Maude,

"but you've left me no alternative but to write,

"or speak, and I prefer the former."

Yes, I can understand that one, perhaps!

She explained for all sorts of reasons

why the marriage that they planned could never be.

"I confess I am lost in astonishment

"when I think how you could have the courage

"to entangle Maude into an engagement

"when you have no home to offer her nor any prospect of one."

Because, of course, Hubert Parry had no fortune

because his father, Thomas Gambier Parry,

had spent most of the fortune that had been inherited.

He had no title.

He was not a member of the aristocracy.

"Had her father lived,

you would never have ventured to take so cruel a course.

"I say cruel deliberately,

"for you have brought terrible suffering on Maude and on me."

"And what is more," she said,

"Maude absolutely hates music and it is absolutely central to your life."

Well, Maude didn't absolutely hate music

but it certainly did not dominate her life.

"As an honourable man, I must charge you to release her from this tacit engagement.

"It never can be."

"Not one woman in ten marries her first love

"and certainly not one man in a thousand."

But not even 19 pages managed to persuade Hubert to abandon Maude.

They continued to meet in secret and he simply waited

for his would-be mother-in-law to change her mind.

I think Parry always let his heart in many ways rule his head,

or at least in this case, love prevailed.

What he then did in order to placate both sides,

both his father and the Herberts, was to go into business.

He went into business at Lloyd's Register of Shipping.

Which he actually absolutely hates,

but it means actually that he can go to lots of concerts in London.

And so then things change.

He's got a job and so he marries Maude.

Now, this is the music Parry wrote for The Birds by Aristophanes

and it concludes with a bridal march,

which was used at the wedding of the present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

Again, all this red ink.

Actually, I long to hear this one. I've never ever heard it.

She was very charming, apparently.

She was fond of playing practical jokes.

She told all the staff and herself to put on sticking plasters,

that they'd got some terrible disease.

But she turned out to be somebody who was

perhaps not really terribly interested in his music.

And she was constantly ill.

And he rather clung on, I think, to the memory of what she once was.

And in a sense, Lady Herbert was right

in that there were problems in the marriage.

Maude had a great deal to put up with.

She just realised he was impossible and she was impossible as well.

She confided to someone that

it was impossible to be married to a genius

and in fact that geniuses shouldn't marry.

Very creative people probably are quite difficult, I suspect,

cos the other person living with them has to live with the muse.

It's hard to say whether Maude's illnesses were genuine or not.

She does seem always to have been ill.

The strange thing though

is she was able to muster a considerable amount

of energy when the rights for women began to emerge.

She went on walks, on protests and so on with her friends.

She knew the Pankhursts.

Otherwise, she spent an awful lot of her time at home reclining on divans.

This resulted in Hubert being sort of tethered, as it were.

After first performances of his work,

when he wanted to mingle with friends and acquaintances

who'd come to the first performance,

he'd be dragged away because she had to get home in time for bed

and all that sort of thing.

He did begin to find this very tiresome and it lasted a lifetime.

She was a trial, I think, to him.

In his diaries he very often puts what the weather was like.

You know, "Weather stormy. Maude fair to middling."

The family was no doubt used to the tantrums and his son-in-law

Arthur Ponsonby very much took Parry's side,

as he wrote in his diary shortly after Parry's death.

Oh, yes, here we are.

"With all his outward buoyancy

"and apparent cheerfulness,

"he was terribly lonely and always had been."

"His wife never cared for his music,

"never shared his life, was no companion,

"and with her funny arrested development

"and self-centred smallness of vision,

"was no help or comfort to him at all."

"His devotion to her was pathetic."

"She hampered him, irritated him....

"..bullied him, was a drain on him."

"This gave him a note of melancholy which came out in his music."

-How complicated relationships can be.

-Indeed, yes.

The two great gods for Parry were Brahms

and Wagner, whom he assimilated rather skillfully

in terms of melody and rhythm.

Through his eyes we see Wagner anew.

There was a time when Wagner was seen as irredeemably avant-garde and horribly modernistic.

Parry got the message and was influenced by Wagner.

Parry was able to get free tickets for the second cycle of The Ring in 1876.

We know from Parry's diaries, he said he was cold with ecstasy

when he heard Gotterdammerung, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and so on.

It changed his life.

Sh. Sh. Fantastic, my friends.

Really?

Please.

I was asked by Christopher Warren-Greene...

Do you know him? I'm very fond of him.

We first met when he was first violin of the Philharmonia.

He was very keen I should conduct Wagner's Siegfried Idyll

as a birthday present for my wife as a surprise.

So some of the Philharmonia came down and we did it as a surprise.

But gosh, it was difficult.

-On the stairs?

-Not quite. But it was...

..extremely embarrassing doing it.

The orchestra were very nice about it.

Parry was very pro-Wagner.

-Was he?

-Yes.

I'm afraid the older I get, the more I love it.

Is this Parry in Austrian Tyrolean vein.

Yes, exactly.

-Wonderful change of key.

-Yes.

I always think is just the one moment

of light relief in the symphony.

Everything else has this tremendous intensity.

Yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

-That's lovely.

-Almost waltz-like, isn't it?

Of course, we've got some influences of

Brahms, Schumann, maybe a little bit Tchaikovsky,

you see, but it's full of his emotions.

APPLAUSE

The terrible problem is I was so longing to hear it all.

-What's...

-Shhh!

-It's so nice to have the background.

What for me was so wonderful was to hear it live because

you only have a chance otherwise to listen to the recordings.

So it's a complete revelation

-to hear it with an entire orchestra in this way.

-Absolutely.

-My real worry is I may never hear it again.

-Yes.

So the magic of the moment was fantastic. I can't tell you.

It's very rich orchestration,

very nice music, and BBC Phil have some special affinity for this.

It's taken a lot of effort to get it played

because it's never been played at the Proms.

-No, never.

-That's the extraordinary thing. Quite extraordinary.

-Yes, it was a very good idea.

-Is it fiendishly difficult to play?

-It must be.

-It is quite difficult but it is lovely to play.

It's lovely, decent, passionate music.

When did you discover Parry's music?

Oh, just some years ago.

I heard his very famous song Jerusalem

in one of the Proms and Mark Elder conducting,

and I was very, very touched with this melody.

But of course this symphony was something new.

Does it seem to you English?

-Is it English music?

-Firstly, it's great music.

Yes, but does it have an English flavour or not?

I can tell you that I love Elgar very much.

Sometimes Elgar influences but at same time,

he is very natural in his emotions.

-It couldn't be Russian music.

-No, no!

And it couldn't be French.

What is it that defines the Englishness in it?

That's what fascinates me. Because it IS English in a funny way.

I don't know what it is that produces it.

The answer is in a way rather similar

to if you ask that about Elgar, which I'm always being asked about.

People always say, "What is it about Elgar that makes him English?"

It's the same with Parry. What is it about Parry that makes him English?

And it's extremely difficult to say.

I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically English in the style

because, as we've said, it comes very largely

out of Schumann, Brahms and Wagner.

It must be English,

-do you not think?

-We were finding other things outside the English box.

-Like?

-Oh, crikey.

-A bit of Wagner.

-Oh, a bit of Wagner.

In a way it's wrong to say because it's a piece in its own right, a very good piece of music.

-A bit of Strauss perhaps.

-Yes, a bit of Strauss.

But a good piece. Oh, crikey, yes.

But he does sound English, only because we know he's English

and we can hear that he sounds like...

sometimes like Vaughan Williams and sometimes like Elgar,

the people that he influenced, not the other way around.

The question of reticence is crucial

to English music. It's crucial to Englishness actually.

We speak rather elliptically.

"Not bad at all." Meaning very good indeed.

"Not being funny." Which means for two pins I'd knock you down.

And these codes that we have to speak to each other

are also replicated in our music.

I think our music understates but it understates in a way

that those who can understand do understand.

And because it's in that sort of personal code,

those of us who like it react to it in a very, very personal way indeed.

Do you feel the landscape in it? I don't know.

Lots of people have written emotional music.

But this has something that defines it, I feel.

I think that it's that question of reticence,

of stiff upper lip, if you like,

that Parry is unconsciously including in his melodies

because I don't think he was trying to be English.

I think he just was English.

Almost a century after his death, it's amazing how many fine pieces

by Parry are still hidden away, waiting to be rediscovered.

I went to see the manuscript of the Magnificat in the British Library

and no-one had looked at this book

for a staggeringly large number of years.

The Magnificat itself has hardly ever been performed

and yet it contains perhaps one of Parry's most extraordinary gems

where he writes for no more than a couple of clarinets,

a bassoon, two horns,

lower strings, a four-part chorus

and a wonderful, sonorous violin obligato.

It's almost the violin concerto that Parry never wrote.

This movement is about mercy

and has a particularly beautiful connection to this song of Mary.

It's absolutely gorgeous and it's wonderful to have blown the dust off it.

I think during the 1890s,

he was almost the unofficial composer laureate.

He found English music at a moment when it needed

to take on German values

and no-one did it more honestly and enthusiastically than Parry.

So I think his position is assured, it's unique.

Come the turn of the century, I think he was eclipsed.

He was in at the birth of an English style in music

and everybody tends to forget exactly what it is he did,

because he was unfortunate enough to be followed by Elgar.

He's a much finer composer than 30 or 40 years ago,

perhaps even 20 years ago, we thought he was.

You can be swept away by a good Parry piece, you know.

It's got that quality.

It just needs someone to hold a torch for it and do it.

Perhaps he felt towards the end of his life

that he'd somehow been superseded by...

I suppose the modernist movement, really,

that was abandoning all the accepted musical traditions

as a result of the Stravinskys and Schoenbergs and others.

And I can understand that.

I can understand how that must make you feel, well, what was the point of all this?

And indeed, of course, the poor man was completely swept aside and neglected.

Right at the end of his life, Parry sets the Songs Of Farewell,

these six exquisite, you could say, miniatures,

but actually, as the sequence goes on, they become more and more

grand and intimate and ambitious in their musical language.

He had a whole series of minor heart attacks, I think, towards the end.

I suppose you do become only too aware of your mortality.

But also, given the fact that they were written during the First World War,

when the gloom and the overshadowing disaster of casualties,

which was of course hitting the Royal College with

many of the pupils, current and ex, must have seemed deeply oppressive.

And there is an element of that, I think, in the Songs Of Farewell.

The text for the last of the Songs Of Farewell is the only one that is taken from scripture.

"O spare me a little,

"that I may recover my strength

"before I go hence and be no more seen."

It's that of a man, I feel, who is already ill.

And asking for strength to carry on with his work.

He keeps repeating the text,

so I think it must have meant a great deal to him.

I think that really shows there is something of the believer in Parry.

It won't be long before I end up at 70, if I still survive.

And I suppose you do start to think to yourself,

as Sir Hubert Parry wrote to Herbert Howells,

that he'd passed the last milestone.

He felt he hadn't actually achieved all he should have done,

but I think many of us must think that.

There is that thread of melancholy,

a nervous sensitivity,

which was not confident about his music and what he'd achieved.

That's a new experience for me.

That's what so wonderful

is discovering even more of his extraordinary...

What is so wonderful, I think, is we so rely on

people like that and composers to interpret

the extraordinary moments that we as human beings face,

whether it's coming into this world or

somehow finding ways of dealing with the... um...

the stresses and strains and challenges of being human.

And then, of course, the departure from this life.

If it wasn't for these remarkable composers we wouldn't be able

to find a way of relating to these extraordinary mysteries, really.

So thank goodness for people like Sir Hubert Parry.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]