Choral Classics - My Beloved Spake

Egon Tschirch: Song of Songs, No. 11 (picture cycle 1923)

It was a great joy to introduce Choral Classics at St Stephen Walbrook this week, inspired by the text and themes of the Song of Songs. My script is below. Watch a recording below: 

My Beloved Spake – Patrick Hadley [3m]

 

Hello and welcome to St Stephen Walbrook for twenty five minutes of sublime music sung by our talented Choral Scholars under the direction of Olivia Tait and accompanied by Phoebe Tak Man Chow. My name is Phillip Dawson and it is a great pleasure to introduce five Choral Classics based on the text and themes of the Song of Songs. 

 

A Hebrew idiom - like King of Kings or Holy of Holies - the Song of Songs means the greatest song. It’s a song of love - and an enigma in the biblical canon. Not mentioning God directly and using sensual language that is in places only just metaphorical - the Song is attributed to King Solomon. 

 

But, with seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, the intensity of this intimate dialogue between two lovers probably rules him out as either the object or subject of desire; the reference most likely a nod to his fabled wisdom. 

 

The wisdom here being that found within the great gift of God’s love. 

 

Images of the natural world abound, as in the piece we just heard by Patrick Hadley, a setting of verses from the start of the Song, composed for the marriage of two friends. As they listened, did the happy couple imagine themselves, I wonder, as Adam and Eve in their blissful state - before life in the Garden of Eden was tainted?

 

“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone….The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.”

 

 

Whilst today it is the somewhat spicy syntax that seems to jump off the page, for most of its history the Song of Songs has been interpreted allegorically - as the covenant between God and his people Israel or, for Christians, between Christ and the Church - or the relationship between Christ and his mother Mary. 

 

The latter is the focus in our next piece, in which British Canadian composer Healey Willan uses the same text to conclude his Three Motets in Honour of Our Lady. Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

 

 

Rise up my Love – Healy Willan [2m] 

 

 

The soaring beauty of Willan’s composition is imagined in stone in this prothalamion - a text for those about to be married - written by the Christian poet Luci Shaw. Like the Song of Songs, this is not a “he loves me, he loves me not” type affair. Yes, in true love there is mystery. There is paradox. But no question of unfulfillment. What God has put together, let no man put asunder. 

 

Reading - Prothalamion by Luci Shaw

 

How like an arch your marriage!

Framed in living stone,

its gothic arrow aimed at heaven,

with Christ (its Capstone and

its Arrowhead) locking

your coupled weakness into one,

the leaning

of two lives into a strength.

So he defines your joining’s length

and width, its archetypal shape. Its meaning 

multiplies: the letting in of light,

the opening of your vision to the sight

of new and varied landscapes, planned

but yet to be explored.

A paradox, for you, who stand

today before us--

you who doubly frame this arch--

may now step through

its entrance into the promised land.

 

 

We step briefly into the New Testament now - as we hear Tallis’s setting of text from the Gospel of John. 

 

Recording the words of Jesus to his disciples, here the living word - reminds us that love lies at the heart of the new covenant. 

 

 

If ye love me – Thomas Tallis  [2.5m]

 

 

We return to the text of the Song of Songs and music by the Flemish composer Jacobus Clemens (the non papa bit probably added by him not to disavow his own priestly orders but to avoid confusion with another priest and poet of the same name). 

 

Composed in 1550 while working for a religious brotherhood devoted to performing good works - and good music - in honour of the Virgin Mary, Ego flos campi - I am the flower of the field - is an allusion to Mary’s perpetual virginity. 

 

I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
A fountain of gardens, and a well of living water flowing down from Lebanon.

 

 

Ego flos campi – Clemens non papa [6m]

 

 

Anne Bradstreet was a lily among thorns. Giving up an aristocratic lifestyle for the travails of a pioneer, she became the first woman to be recognised as a poet from the New World. 

 

Amidst the suffering and disease which claimed the lives of many of her family and fellow travelling companions, she found strength in love, as revealed in this poem addressed to her ‘Dear and Loving Husband’ Simon; the magistrate of the new colony whose work often took him far from home. 

 

Reading - To my Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet 

 

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

 

 

Anne Bradstreet saw the love binding her relationship with her husband not in the same vein as we might see Romeo and Juliet or Heathcliffe and Catherine - but like the lovers in the Song of Songs, whose love is not tied to suffering and death but transcends it. The revelation that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it, forms the climax to the Song of Songs, set to music in our final piece by William Walton. 

 

This timeless wisdom secured the poem a place in the biblical canon and offers us hope that one day, God’s gift of true love will once again permeate his creation; untainted by our own selfishness and sin. 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for joining us for Choral Classics this week. Please do donate generously by tapping your card at the payment point by the door before you leave - we rely on your donations to fund our music here. 

 

There is no Choral Classics next week, but please join us at 12.45pm for our Sung Eucharist for Ash Wednesday when the choir will sing William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices.

 

From Olivia, Phoebe, the choir and from me, until next time, goodbye.

 

 

Set me as a seal – William Walton [3.5m]

Image : Egon Tschirch: Song of Songs, No. 11 (picture cycle 1923)