Composers Datebook

"The Three Choirs Festival" is one of England's most time-honored musical traditions. Established around 1715, it centered on the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Herford, and by the 1890s, had become THE place to go to hear the best new choral and orchestral works. For example, Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" was premiered there in 1910, and in the audience was an 18-year-old aspiring composer named Herbert Howells. Years later, Howells would relate how Vaughan Williams had sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontius" with him. Howells studied music with the organist of Gloucester Cathedral before heading off to London and the Royal College of Music. He also got married and had two children. In 1935, his 9-year-old son Michael contracted polio and died three days later. At the suggestion of his daughter Ursula, the grief-struck Howells began composing memorial works as private therapy, choral sketches he considered too painful to complete and too personal to have performed. But in 1950 Howells was asked for a new work to be premiered at Three Choirs Festival, and, at the urging Ralph Vaughan Williams and others who had seen Howell's private scores, one was finally completed for performance. Howells titled it "Hymnus Paradisi," and led the premiere himself on September 7, 1950, one day after the 15th anniversary of his son's death.