For the last few years Lichfield Cathedral Choir have set a themed quiz at Advent and Lent, with a question each day. I have in the past had fun identifying Cathedral choir stalls and music setting the word ‘star’, though I didn’t attempt the organ consoles set in Lent 2018.
Advent 2018 was more tempting; enciphered dedications of pieces sung by Lichfield Cathedral Choir during the year. I wasn’t one of the top scorers, but there were only 3 of the 24 I couldn’t do, and a fourth I solved outside the 24-hour window. I was able to identify every piece for which I deciphered the coded dedication. I took pride in submitting solutions as soon as possible after the questions were released at midnight each day, which kept me up some nights, though never really late! I did the decipherments by various methods: identifying the cipher, looking for the most commonly occurring symbols and matching them to common letters, using dates (where these appeared unenciphered), or trying to find common words such as ‘commissioned’ or ‘dedicated’ and formulaic phrases (a method which has been fruitful in expanding our understanding of Etruscan).
This set me thinking about dedications in general. At least for anthems and service music, they only appear from the end of the 19th century onwards, perhaps because before then people just composed music as it was needed rather than being commissioned. The prevalence of commissions, and the consequent need to be serious, may also be why no one in music seems to have gone in for the sly humour of Nikolaus Pevsner in this area. However I have a few favourites, generally those where the dedicator has taken the opportunity to put the dedicatee’s name in virtual lights for a reason other than that they paid for the piece to be written. (And while I am a devotee of a composer who turned dedications into a minor art form, I shall leave Berg out of this post.) I have mentioned before Kodály’s UXORI CARISSIMAE on his Missa Brevis, getting the message out in a way that it would not have been had he written it in Hungarian. Another is Debussy’s gently punning one for his Ariettes oubliées to Mary Garden “inoubliable Mélisande”, so that his opinion of her creation of the title rôle in his opera would forever be on the record. I may add some more to the list as they occur to me.