Acknowledgement to Dave Alkan for the hashtag, too good not to take over. When I get to sing in the Prom on Wednesday I expect I’ll want to write about the experience rather than the repertoire, so here are some thoughts now.
JQM (as I believe it’s known in the trade) has long been one of my favourite anthems so I have a supply of scores and recordings to compare. I first discovered it while going by train from Shrewsbury to Swansea, so after doing it in Elgar’s arrangement with the BBC National Chorus of Wales it’s likely to be permanently associated with that country.
It’s a bit of a mystery piece in some ways. Why did Purcell set Latin? It’s not a very obvious liturgical text, and in fact this particular translation of Ps 3 is not attested elsewhere, which brings its own problems. Somewhere along the line the word maxillam became maxilliam, and Purcell sets the incorrect word to a rather jaunty dotted rhythm, in a ‘fantasia on one note’ passage for the bass soloist. (It’s easy to see palaeographically how the error would have crept in – an extra vertical line got added after the three in ‘-ill-‘ to make ‘-illi-‘.) Elgar (and some others) restore the Latin text at the cost of the rhythm.
Looking at different scores and recordings, it is interesting to look at how fashions have come and gone. Nowadays the anthem does not usually end with a tierce de Picardie (nor does it in Elgar’s version). And there must have been an edition which flattened two alto notes on the word ‘sustentat’; the recording of Salisbury Cathedral which introduced me to Jehova does this, but no others.
Ballad of Heroes recalls various other pieces by Britten – most directly the War Requiem but also Rejoice in the Lamb (lots of chanting on middle C) and perhaps more surprisingly A Ceremony of Carols, written shortly afterwards. Because I did Ceremony for O-level Music and so know it very well, I tend to use it as a yardstick for everything else by Britten. In this case the stretto in the middle section of the Ballad reminds me of that in This little Babe. Ballad of Heroes must be the only piece of classical music to mention ceramic flying ducks, which are surely what the ‘beautiful birds on the wall’ are. (Auden couldn’t resist a dig at the aspirational middle class.) They went on the market around the time the poem Britten sets was written.