Choral Classics - Farewell

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1970 (his final work)

It was a great pleasure to introduce Choral Classics at St Stephen Walbrook on Thursday 23rd June 2022. My script is below. You can watch the recording below (the video will not appear in ‘mobile view’ – please click “view web version” at the bottom of the home page if reading on a tablet or phone) or watch on YouTube at this link. 

CHOIR : Parry, Never Weather Beaten Sail from 'Songs of Farewell' (3.5m)

Hello and welcome to Choral Classics, sung for the last time by this talented twelve – great Apostles of Choral Music – our Choral Scholars under the direction of Olivia Tait and accompanied by Phoebe Tak Man Chow.

The theme we’ve chosen for our music and readings this week is ‘Farewell’ and over the next twenty minutes we’ll explore the painful and positive nature of saying farewell, goodbye.

We’ve just heard Never Weather Beaten Sail; a lyrical setting of a poem by Thomas Campion which forms the third of six Songs of Farewell by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, composed towards the end of his life and during the First World War, in which many of his students were killed or injured.

The composition is understood as Parry’s valedictory wave – a musical farewell not only to his own earthly life but also to the structures of the society - and the Europe - that he knew. As war wages once again on the continent, this musical plea for God’s calming presence upon the chaotic waters of our world seems as necessary now as then.

Our next piece is by the ‘Barnsley Nightingale’ - contemporary singer-songwriter Kate Busby, arranged for choir by Jim Clements. Underneath the Stars describes a farewell between two lovers, meeting for the last time beneath a beautiful starlit sky. As in Parry’s Song, we encounter the bittersweet nature of farewell at multiple scales. The repeated penultimate refrain that we act under our ‘own free will’ evokes the memory of the expulsion from Eden. The final, enduring words are those of loving kindness; ‘Go gently’.

CHOIR : Rusby, Underneath the Stars (3.5m)

The ultimate farewell punctuating all life on earth – death – is the theme for the majority of the published work of the Protestant Irish poet Evangeline Paterson, who died in the year two thousand.

Her style is not to shield us from reality of this final goodbye – but to face up to it.

“As Christians, I think [death] is something we have constantly in our minds” she explained. “But not in any morbid sense. I see death as a tremendously exciting passage into something unbelievably better than we have here.” “Life wouldn’t be complete without it.”

(Source : https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/jicsc/04-032.pdf)

Reading : Deathbed by Evangeline Paterson

Now, when the frail and fine-spun
Web of mortality
Gapes, and lets slip
What we have loved so long
From out our lighted present
Into the trackless dark

We turn, blinded,
Not to the Christ in Glory,
Stars about his feet,
But to the Son of Man,

Back from the tomb,
Who built fires, ate fish,
Spoke with friends, and walked
A dusty road at evening.

Here, in this room, in
This stark and timeless moment,
We hear those footsteps
And
With suddenly lifted hearts
Acknowledge
The irrelevance of death.

The revelation that Christ has conquered death – made it irrelevant – is the inspiration for our next piece of music. The beautiful ‘Abendlied’ or Evening song was written by Josef Rheinberger in 1855 when he was just fifteen years old. The text is taken from the description of the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the disciples on ‘a dusty road (to Emmaus) at evening’.

‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ They ask. So he went in to stay with them.

CHOIR : Rheinberger, Abendleid (3.5m)

The poet Edward Thomas had a passionate but platonic relationship with the author and hymn writer Eleanor Farjeon, which has been immortalised on stage.

Offering an alternative perspective to Kate Rusby’s ‘Go gently’, Thomas’s poem ‘Go Now’ describes a man and a woman parting ways and the lasting effect that her words had on him. As in Rusby’s song, the poet cannot separate his love for another with the beauty of the natural world. Like Paterson’s poem, Thomas is a realist. Concluding that in human relationships, unlike our relationship with God, we must accept that sometimes a farewell is forever. The text contains a much needed reminder to us all – never to forget to cherish and value our close relationships. 

Reading : ‘Go Now’ by Edward Thomas

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:


With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.


Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.


Thank you for joining us today and a special thank you to our Choral Scholars for their beautiful music over the past year. We rely on generous donations from people like you, who love our ministry of music here at Wonderful Walbrook. There are ways and means of making a contribution before you leave the church to help us sustain it and we are most grateful to you for your support.

Do stay with us for our Choral Eucharist which begins at 12.45pm, which is just a click away if you’re watching online.

So time it’s for us to bid a fond farewell to Choral Classics for this term and to this year’s Choral Scholars.

I’ll leave this talented twelve to say goodbye to you in their own special way. Performing a golden oldie, composed by James “Pookie” Hudson in 1952 – a lament on having to leave his girlfriend, Bonnie Jean each night after her mother kicked him out onto the street. This choral version has been arranged by Kirby Shaw.

CHOIR : Carter and Hudson, Goodnight Sweetheart arr. Shaw (2m)

Image : Untitled Mark Rothko, 1970 - his final work, which was found just feet away from where the artist committed suicide in 1970.