Love is Come Again

NOTE: All of the music on this program is from the recording Love is come again with the Monteverdi Choir and John Eliot Gardiner. It is on the Soli Dei Gloria label and is CD SDG 731.

 

 

From Limelight: John Eliot Gardiner comes from interesting stock. His father was a rural revivalist with an interest in naturism, his grandfather was an Egyptologist and his great uncle, Balfour Gardiner  was a composer, whose Evening Hymn is still a great favourite with Anglican choirs. Balfour Gardiner also established a farm in Dorset with which John Eliot is still involved. Apparently this involvement has earned the conductor the nickname “Uphill Gardiner” because of his unusual farming methods.

 

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From the liner notes:

 

It is the early spring of 1963 in Dorset, and the endlessly creative Marabel Gardiner—stage director, art historian and singer—is working on a new play to mark the Easter festival in her local church. She enlists the help of her son John Eliot, who is midway through his undergraduate studies at Cambridge, to curate a programme of live music for the drama. Between them, and with much support from family, friends and the local community, they create the Springhead Easter Play, ‘Springhead’ being the name of the Gardiner family home. The play is all in mime, and is punctuated by a specially constructed sequence of plainchant, motets and carols.

A year later, John Eliot Gardiner heads back to Cambridge after the first revival of the Easter Play to conduct a student performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers (1610) in his college chapel. The Monteverdi Choir is born; the rest is history. Yet for the next twenty years, until the final performance in 1984, John Eliot will make time every Easter to join his mother and the parishioners of St Andrew’s Church, Fontmell Magna to perform the Springhead Easter Play. It is clear when we sit down to discuss his memories of the play that it was not only a personal highlight of the year, but a profound musical and spiritual experience.

This recording presents much of the music from the original play. It may be thought of as a companion to the Monteverdi Choir’s 1998 CD Once as I remember, which told the story of an earlier Marabel creation, the Springhead Christmas Play, performed in the house itself. Both were structured around a series of tableaux, the Easter Play narrating the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ through a combination of the different Gospel accounts. The listener is invited on a journey in music, from the horrors of Calvary to the wonders at the tomb, on the road to Emmaus and at the Sea of Galilee.

Marabel Gardiner spent a seminal year in Florence in her late teens, where she gained a deep knowledge and lifelong love of Italian Renaissance art. Paintings such as Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Resurrection’ and Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ were a constant inspiration. John Eliot recalls in his notes for Once as I remember ‘a dignified, ritual-like purity’ to her theatrical style: both the Christmas and Easter Plays had ‘a touching mixture of formal, stylised and naive elements’. Stillness and meditation were key elements of the drama. Marabel’s handwritten production notes for the plays demonstrate the imagination and care which went into the design, dress and stagecraft of the performances.

Music provided both the narrative thread and moments of reflection. An evangelist (John Eliot himself) would sing the Gospel texts, using an adapted English version of Heinrich Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi (Story of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ). A mixed group of amateur and professional singers from the Monteverdi Choir would combine to perform the polyphony, while neighbours from the local farming community would represent the various disciples and act out the story. The Easter weekend at Springhead was eagerly anticipated by those members of the Monteverdi Choir who would join the locals. As well as the play itself, Carol Savage, an early member of the choir, recalls ‘music and dancing in the barn, and feasting and recitations on the grass outside’. A local farmer, Ralph Coward (always cast as one of the Emmaus disciples), would recite poems by William Barnes in the Dorset dialect; Rosalind Gardiner, John Eliot’s older sister, would play the violin for Playford dances, which were called by their father Rolf (Simon Peter in the Easter Play) and led by Marabel ‘with her straight back, in a long dress decorated with a huge brooch’.

Now John Eliot Gardiner and today’s Monteverdi Choir return to the soundtrack of those weekends at Springhead. Some larger-scale works have been added to the original programme, such as ‘Woefully array’d’, a setting by William Cornysh of a poem attributed to John Skelton, and the ‘Abendlied’ of Josef Gabriel Rheinberger. But the spirit of the Easter Play is retained: a dramatic retelling of the Resurrection story, employing disparate musical styles and frequent shifts of focus and perspective, all held together by the creative vision of a Dorset mother and her son.

The Crucifixion
The Easter Play opened in near darkness. Two women and two disciples would kneel at the nave altar, staring upstage, seemingly into the void. They were in fact contemplating the imagined figure of the crucified Christ, who was not portrayed in person at any point in the play. A lone voice would sing the English ballad-carol ‘The seven virgins’, otherwise known as ‘The leaves of life’. The text tells the story from the Apocryphal Gospels of Mary’s visit to her son at Calvary, and his words to her from the cross. The carol’s exact origin is unclear: the first known version of the text is found in a Manx carol book of 1826; the tune was later collected by Cecil Sharp in 1923.

The Crucifixion tableau was further accompanied by a selection of music for Holy Week, in this instance Cornysh’s ‘Woefully array’d’ and ‘O vos omnes’ by Carlo Gesualdo. These starkly contrasting works capture the spirit of the Easter Play in their direct, declamatory style and sharply articulated shifts of mood, as Christ himself exhorts the listener to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.

Easter Morning
The Resurrection scene would begin with the women going early in the morning to Jesus’ tomb, as told in the Gospel of Mark. John Taverner’s ‘Dum transisset Sabbatum’ sets the text, using the cantus firmus technique of a plainchant melody inserted into the middle of the choral texture, here sung by the baritones.

The scene continued with a carol for Easter Day, ‘Love is come again’, a version of the French Christmas carol ‘Noël nouvelet’ with words by the Anglican priest and poet, J. M. C. Crum. An addition for this recording is a setting of the Easter Monday responsory ‘Surrexit pastor bonus’, by the French Renaissance composer Jean L’Héritier, a more reflective and serene take on the Resurrection narrative.

Mary Magdalene at the tomb
As Mary Magdalene weeps by the tomb, we hear Thomas Morley’s ‘Eheu! Sustulerunt Dominum meum’, in a translation by John Eliot Gardiner. This motet first appeared in Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke of 1597 and sets Mary’s response to the angels’ question in John 20:13: ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’.

Heinrich Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi was published in 1623 and first performed that year in Dresden. It tells the Easter story in a series of choruses, duets and recitatives accompanied by viol consort—a precursor to Bach’s Passions a century later. Marabel and John Eliot Gardiner adapted some of its sections for the Springhead play, translating the text into English. Another adaptation follows: ‘Bless’d Mary Magdalene’ is based on a fifteenth-century carol, better known to the text of the ‘Ave Maria’.

The road to Emmaus
As well as the Schütz Historia, a number of other works were adapted for the Easter Play, such as the medieval Easter Sunday hymn ‘Victimae paschali laudes’. Here, the evangelist narrates the journey of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24). At Springhead the disciples were portrayed by two local farmers, complete with travelling cloaks and shepherds’ crooks. John Eliot recalls the challenge of singing the narration ‘to fit with the walking pace of these two old gentlemen locked in a mimed conversation—on their way to market, as it were’. The choir picks up the story with two motets: Rheinberger’s ‘Abendlied’, composed at the age of fifteen, and the first part of William Byrd’s ‘Alleluia. Cognoverunt discipuli Dominum’, again in translation.

The disciples now realise they are dining with the risen Christ, and return in haste to Jerusalem where the rest of the disciples are gathered. Jesus appears to them with his familiar greeting, ‘Peace be unto you’. The joyous conclusion to this scene is a sequence based on the seventeenth-century German hymn ‘Die ganze Welt’ and Samuel Scheidt’s ‘Surrexit Christus hodie’. First we hear the Jesuit priest Jacob Gippenbusch’s arrangement of the hymn, then Scheidt’s similar melody (also known to a Christmas text, ‘Puer natus in Bethlehem’), and finally Percy Dearmer’s ‘Hilariter’, a translation of ‘Die ganze Welt’ for the Oxford Book of Carols.

The lake side
The final scene dramatised Jesus’ appearance to Simon Peter at the Sea of Galilee. The Easter hymn ‘O filii et filiae’ was adapted for the first part of the Gospel text, alongside a plainchant ‘Kyrie eleison’. Since Schütz did not go beyond the Emmaus scene in his Historia, some lateral thinking was required for the remaining evangelist section, and inspiration was found in the music of a composer for whom John Eliot Gardiner had sung as a boy treble: Benjamin Britten. Jesus’ question ‘Lov’st thou me?’ fits perfectly to a motif from Britten’s 1952 work for Peter Pears and Kathleen Ferrier, ‘Abraham and Isaac’, later published as the second of his five Canticles.

Interspersed with the chant are two polyphonic works. Leonora d’Este was a nun, the daughter of Alfonso I, Duke of Ferrara and Lucrezia Borgia. It is possible that she composed a number of motets for female voices, including this five-part setting of ‘Ego sum panis vivus’, published in 1543. The scene closes with a response from the lower voices, ‘If ye love me’ by Thomas Tallis.

Epilogue
The instrumental forces for the Easter Play would normally consist of a continuo team of organ and cello. For this recording the choir could not pass up the opportunity to join the English Baroque Soloists for something a little more grand. Giovanni Gabrieli wrote his Symphoniae sacrae (1597) for St Mark’s, Venice, where he was organist. His setting of ‘Surrexit pastor bonus’ from that collection consists of ten vocal lines in two antiphonal choirs.

The Easter Play would always close with the singing in canon of ‘Non nobis, Domine’, as the whole cast processed out of the church. A close friend of the Gardiner family, the composer John Gardner, wrote this solution of the anonymous canon for the Springhead Easter Play with the voices entering at the fifth. It quickly became the iconic song of all Springhead musical gatherings, usually sung in a circle around the great paulownia tree in the courtyard.

The Springhead Easter Play follows in a centuries-old tradition of Passion Plays and Easter dramas, from those of the medieval monasteries to today’s spectaculars at Oberammergau. The Resurrection story continues to provide evocative source material for dramatists and composers to this day, but for John Eliot Gardiner it is at heart a story of ordinary folk trying to make sense of the world around them at a febrile and dangerous time. When I ask him what was so special about those weekends at Springhead, he cites the reassuring seasonal rituals that mark the turning year and the collaboration of people from different walks of life (young musicians from London, members of the local farming community in Dorset) in retelling the story—much like the disciples, a disparate group. Marabel Gardiner’s succession of tableaux focused on the experience of the disciples and their reactions to the unfolding drama; in so doing, the play demonstrated the very real transformative power that the Resurrection story can still have for us now.

Much of the music on this recording will be familiar, in one form or another, to choral singers the world over. Music is a common language in periods of confusion and difficulty; it too can help make sense of the world; it too has a transformative power. The Monteverdi ensembles hope that this recording will evoke something of what Carol Savage remembers as ‘those happy days’ at Springhead, and offer a moment of reflection in these troubled times.