So taken was Anthony Rooley with his discovery of William Hayes’s extended Ode, The Passions (a Schola Cantorum Basiliensis production from Glossa in 2010) that this legendary explorer of any worthwhile music which lies languishing in oblivion set about assessing and assimilating the music of the Six Cantatas Set to Musick (from 1748) and the Ode, Orpheus and Euridice (1735) by the same English composer.
Our complete musician (scholar, conductor, teacher, writer, lutenist...) then proceeded to enthuse and train his students at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. This new album of these examples of small-scale secular vocal music from the late English Baroque is the result; yet more fascinating finds that have been unearthed by the knowledgeable but discerning musician-scholar that is Anthony Rooley, and testament also to the SCB’s capacity to embrace all necessary aspects of a musical project such as this, from research and study to performance and beyond.
This is a cause to celebrate and to enjoy: not only do we have Anthony Rooley leading a team of singers and instrumentalists from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, but it is in secular vocal music of the Georgian Baroque today; music composed on secular texts in the English language – and not by that sometimes overpowering figure of the time, Georg Friedrich Handel!
For another extended interview here Anthony Rooley reflects on the life and times of William Hayes, the composer’s music and recording this in the 21st century.
Where and how did you come upon the cantatas by William Hayes, and what was your initial reaction to them?
I had first discovered William Hayes in 2000 by way of The Passions, chancing upon this work simply because I was searching out all music that referred to “the power of music”. The Passions just knocked me sideways, to the extent that I decided that when I had time I just had to go and find what else Hayes had created. One of the outstanding collections that I came upon was of these Six Cantatas Set to Musick. From around 2002 I had been nursing the idea of embracing them as an entirety because it seemed to me to be a very carefully-designed collection. It wasn’t just pure coincidence that one cantata followed another, and that it was a set which represented the whole 18th century concept of the English cantata right at its pinnacle. I felt that Hayes had really put his mind behind creating a complex sequence of events – which represented a very human experience – with the very best music.
Therefore, I was really looking forward to an opportunity of putting them all together, as Hayes had conceived them. Over the following years I have had the chance to try them out occasionally, some with Evelyn [Tubb], some with other singers at the Schola, and it confirmed my initial response that it is a great collection.
What do you think the purpose of this collection was, and do you think that it would have been performed as such in Hayes’s own time?
It is well known that Hayes was one of the people largely responsible for getting the funds together to have the Holywell Music Room in Oxford erected, one of Europe’s first purpose-built recital halls and I believe – although I don’t have the evidence to prove it – that this collection of cantatas was most likely designed to be performed in that space as a kind of celebrator opening.
Such a recital room was seen to be quite an important step forward in 1748; this was a new time for new music. Now a new space was being created specifically for the performance of secular repertoire, in an intimate situation, with an appropriate acoustic, such that you could hear the interplay of instruments and their tone colours with great clarity, as well as hearing extremely good diction and coloured words from the singers.
I believe that this set of six cantatas is a fruit of that endeavour, part of constructing one of the world’s first recital rooms; and Hayes’s music is, I am sure, designed with that in mind.
How popular was the cantata form in England at that time?
At the moment we are at a real disadvantage, since there is no easily-available publication for the general musical world to pick up and read about the English cantata, although Richard Goodall did a wonderful piece of musicological work in the late 1980s; his approach being the only one that embraces the entirety of the hundred year span of the cantata in England.
Of course, the cantata in England was initially inspired by taking in ideas from Italy, the typical format being recitative-aria-recitative-aria. However, quite quickly in England, because of the needs of the English language as it was understood then, composers began to experiment with different forms, so that this rigid format was played about with quite a lot and as you can see in the six cantatas here, Hayes does this quite wonderfully.
Yes, we have the da capo aria, but at times, when Hayes gets so excited by the text and the burden of the message, he cuts that formality out. Thus, he is not hidebound by a preset physical sequence. He uses form for his own purposes, according to the needs of each particular text. This I think is one of the beauties of this set. Now, how far did this go in cantata use generally in England? We still have to explore that and I do hope that this production of ours will create enough enthusiasm and interest to encourage other people to explore further afield. There are several other composers who really do deserve our best attention, Maurice Greene being one of them.
Other than being involved in the opening of the Holywell Music Room, is there anything else known about what William Hayes would have been doing and working on at the time when he was writing the Cantatas?
Yes, there is. Hayes thoroughly believed in the contribution of Handel: he was the first man to bring Messiah to Oxford and he encouraged performances of that work there.
He also enjoyed close connection with the Three Choirs Festival [held in Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester in the UK each year] which, even if he didn’t start it, he nurtured and helped strengthen it a great deal – and this is one of the world’s longest running music festivals.
Hayes was at one time organist at Gloucester Cathedral and, in fact, the year after Handel’s death he put on a performance of The Passions there, concluding the evening with a special Ode, that he had written lamenting the death of Handel.
Thus, Hayes was right there in the Oxford scene and the neighbouring towns within a day’s travel and nurturing music at every point.
Do you think that, together, the six Cantatas and The Passions provide a suitable conspectus of William Hayes’s compositional qualities?
They stand well for what they are, but Hayes’s music goes further than that and there is one particular oratorio that appeals to me, called The Fall of Jericho, which uses a wonderful expanded eight-part choir. There is some really wonderful thunderous music. It is more obviously Handelian in its style, partly because it is an oratorio in its form. But there is some brilliant choir writing there.
I think too that the Hayes Ode on the Death of Handel deserves attention. I don’t think that we have had a lament for the death of Handel which stands up to comparison. This piece would be a lovely statement: Hayes himself writing something which is in praise of the man he so admired too, but in a music which stands on its own, with its individuality.
Whilst we have also included the Ode, Orpheus and Euridice on this new recording, there are also a couple more odes to explore.
The Cantatas employ a range of different authors for their texts. Do you think that this was Hayes’s choice, and do you think that he was trying to create a unity of expression across the six works?
In a sense, unity, but by the means of diversity. By this, I think that what he does is to choose very carefully the sequence of events.
A winter scene at Ross in Herefordshire is very autobiographical. What Hayes is doing – and who knows, he may have been the writer of this text; it is so autobiographical and, if he didn’t write it, he chose someone whose writing was almost like his own voice – is to decide to place this cantata first, like a young man reflecting on his own origins. Here Hayes is writing music about Ross-on-Wye (which was the first place in the world that encouraged tourism as we know it today – people came from afar to admire the natural beauty of the Wye Valley and Ross at the centre). It is where he grew up, he is very familiar with it, and it has this intimacy of personal recollection. It is deeply touching actually; it has a naivety about it which carries a lovely beauty.
From there, he moves to the Why Lysidas shou’d Man be vain, which draws more on ancient philosophy and ancient teachings about the nature of human life, all delivered with a wonderful straightness. It is really so pointed, that it tells us that even kings end up in the earth, so that all humanity in this sense is equal. It is a lovely philosophy – quite a tough one, but we cannot avoid this for all that.
While I listen to thy voice, Chloris recalls the power of music as manifest in one particular singer – this idea of the fair singer moving our soul goes back quite a long way. In fact, one of my major studies here at the Schola in Basel has been to put together a project called ‘The Fair Singer’, looking at the praise of a woman, one who is not only physically beautiful, but can sing and can often play the lute as well. When you hear ‘Chloris’ or ‘Chloe’ sing (it is usually one of the two...), you are so deeply moved that you are never the same again quite. Thus, this third cantata explores that idea, the power of music to move the soul, profoundly.
This leads us to Chloe’s dream, which has quite a different approach to women. Here the woman is very ‘naughty’, she pretends to be asleep whilst this young man (Amyntor) woos her and she struggles not to wake. It is really a very naughty, quite erotic text. In this way, you can see how Hayes has carefully built the sequence up, really in terms of human experience, which suggests to me that he was not only Master of Music in Oxford, but he was a very human man, and enjoying all the experiences of philosophy as well as sensuality.
We next turn to To Venus a rant, which is what I call a very ‘laddish’ cantata, where as a young man ‘he’ will not be put down by these powerful people, he will go his own way.
The set concludes with the most beautiful cantata – An ode to Echo – in praise of nature, with the echo, wonderfully conceived and beautifully orchestrated: Hayes’s use of instruments here is really quite sublime.
All in all, I think that what we have is a most attractive sequence of events, with Hayes deeply involved in philosophical consideration, both as an individual and as a man of his times. To have all this reflected so carefully and consciously in the music is a marvellous thing. You feel you are at the presence of a deeply-thinking, deeply-feeling man of the mid-18th century. He is opening his heart to you; it is like a very direct statement across the centuries.
How successfully do you feel that Hayes responds to these texts from a musical point of view?
To take one instance of his success to my mind, there is Hayes’s use of lyricism in the first cantata: we have this beautiful melody which is archetypically English in its tunefulness, and which adapts itself to the new words each time, in an exquisite kind of way. It is extraordinary how well Hayes makes small changes to the melody – it is essentially the same – but the new words just change the Affekt of that melody. This is very much part of the English tradition – we can look back to Dowland, for instance, and find the same kind of beauty of experience. Hayes is embodying here that sense of the language, English, allowing itself to be expressed in free melodic inspiration, even though as though, as Thomas Campion described, English is famously clogged and loaded with consonants. That very ‘clogging’ is part of its individuality when it is used in a conscious way, as Hayes does here.
I love also Hayes’s use of recits. These are usually incredibly brief, but they are not lacking in how they advance the storyline. Returning to the first cantata again, when he gets to the Vivace mai non presto section in the final aria (“Virtue, the charmer sleep replies”), it is wonderfully ‘teaching’. It is philosophy being taught again, with this melodic attractiveness to get the message through. It is almost like a musician’s equivalent of a very inspired preacher, and what Hayes is preaching is the delight of being human, human experience.
The importance of religious thinking of the time in Hayes is a very librated version of it, the kind that you would expect to find in an Oxford which hadn’t yet got stuffy with its study of philosophy. It was still able to be very creative and, in fact, I believe that Oxford was one of the focal points for the development of advanced philosophical thinking in the 18th century.
Hayes pulls together the various facets and gives us a music which truly reflects that sense of liberty of thought, but thought which has responsibility as well. He doesn’t shirk responsibility, which is why the sense of the words in “Why Lysidas shou’d Man be vain, if bounteous Heaven has made him great?” is so powerful.
Hayes draws on poetry which was written some time beforehand (as well as then contemporary texts). Was that a common practice in those days?
This applies to While I listen to thy voice, written by Edmund Waller and published in 1645, so exactly one hundred years before. Hayes’s setting here is part of a century’s sequence of settings by other composers, because it is about the power of music. It is very carefully chosen, but Hayes was part of a long tradition, bringing it in a sense to a culmination. I am not sure how many settings there are after Hayes – although that of course doesn’t apply in other respects because the text that he set as The Passions was continued to be set through the 19th century. We are not aware of this text (by William Collins) today, because it more or less disappeared around the time of the First World War. These kinds of passed-on traditions got ruptured by the brutality and destruction of that war, and we lost touch with that continuing tradition.
However, the text of The Passions was transmitted just as Waller’s poem was transmitted from the previous hundred years prior to Hayes. This is something I think that you could expect in a university town such as Oxford; there were people there who specialized in English, studying its language and development. There would be people there who were aware of the poetry of Edmund Spenser, and this is why you get Spenser’s Amoretti set by Maurice Greene (and that goes back so even earlier than Hayes looking to Waller).
The awareness of history and tradition, and the passage of time, was very much part of the daily life of such people at that time.
Given your own musical and literary experience with the story of Orpheus and Euridice, how does Hayes’s contribution, also recorded here, stand out, compared to settings by other composers?
The Ode is written in sections, but the sections move from one to another with a wonderful kind of fluidity. The piece begins with an overture which is really a welcome to a situation which is going to be full of joy and pleasure. It is quite open and alert in its style, of course reflecting the French overture style, and then it goes into a wonderful playful Allegro fugue, with the instruments just delighting in their freedom.
Essentially, it is inspired music for Orpheus himself. Thus, the whole orchestra is reflecting that sense of Orphic divine frenzy, and we are expecting some wonderful things to happen. Then, when we hear Orpheus come in and speak, he speaks of himself in the third person and makes this curious transition from someone speaking about Orpheus to being Orpheus himself, as he goes into the aria: “Come my charmer, let us leave these gloomy shades, this dismal cave”. The words here take so much pleasure in contrasting what the mind might conceive of Hades to be like – that Stygian gloom, for instance. Hayes clearly delights in reflecting all that in his music.
Hayes takes the alto into his lower register, causing him to go across his break – very consciously so, and it is brilliantly done. Most countertenors today say, “Oh, it lies too low for me. I don’t like to go across my break”. And actually, that is what the skill was for the countertenor at that time. Fortunately for our recording, we could draw on a singer who is brilliant at this – Daniel Cabena, who is a Canadian countertenor who has been studying here in Basel for the last couple of years. He just so loves going across the break; with a touch of implied humour when he gives his final note down the octave – he just makes you smile. And it forces Euridice to do the same, for the soprano range – she has to go down into her chest too!
There is a touch of humour there the whole of the time, but at the same time that humour is in service to underlining the mythological story of Orpheus and Euridice in its reinforced part, which is there in the human psyche. Of course, it was Ovid who created that side of the story – it didn’t exist in the earlier Orphic legends. From Ovid onwards that sense of loss, of parting, has somehow become part of the human psyche and what Hayes does is touch on that deep psychology, that deep awareness and put it into a most beautiful musical sequence. It is irresistible.
A very brief touch occurs when a third voice enters the Ode, a tenor, who is in fact Mr Hayes himself! – it was sung by Hayes (he was said to have a charming, sweet tenor voice, very light, not loud, but with wonderful enunciation). He loved to step forward in his lovely robes and sing these short little sections, which in a sense sum up the whole work; in a few words he tells the story of the whole Orphic tragedy, in straightforward, almost newspaper reporting language (“this is how it was”). I would give anything to have heard the first performance in the Holywell Music Room when Hayes stood forward and told us what the story is really about. You can hear him saying, “Okay, you have heard this countertenor going on for ages, you are now going to hear the soprano going on for a long time, but actually this is what the story is about!”
When one listens to this Ode, it makes one weep. The words of the final duet and chorus, “with streaming eyes and throbbing tears”, involve Orpheus and Euridice as she is departing into the underworld and he is losing her. Hayes creates the Affekt so brilliantly here: their repeated “adieu, adieu...” is heart-melting.
In performing and recording the Hayes works as part of the teaching process in Basel, what kind of insights do you feel that you have achieved?
After all the rehearsals at the Schola everybody came to realize the depth of the music, the breadth of it and what liberties one could take.
An example of such liberties is that Hayes has a very lovely use of the interrupted cadence – he puts a fermata over it. The tendency of people who have been studying Baroque music is just to acknowledge that it is there but to move on quickly. I said, “No, no. William Hayes is using it very consciously, and what he is wanting you to do is to stretch the tempo a little and rest on that cadence for a moment. It is a moment of thought. That fermata sign means ‘think on this’. And if you have learnt to stretch it, you will find that the whole sequence of works that we are doing is punctuated by these moments of deep thought.” By the time of the concert that we gave in Basel the performers were doing this more organically.
Hayes’s use of the interrupted cadence with fermata is an incredibly conscious way of stretching tactus and it takes you deeper in, and sometimes it is to make you smile, sometimes it is to make you think deep thoughts. But he is doing it very, very consciously and I would say that that feature alone was one of the most important things to help this circle of people here in Basel realize that they were working with music of a different time and place.
As a consequence, this process of studying, then recording and performing is stretching the understanding of music from this time from England?
Definitely. At the heart of our ensemble we had a brilliant team, the cellist and the two keyboard players. They are the guys who deserve the laurels in this. Of course, we have some good singers and some lovely performances, but these three instrumentalists created the continuo, they just revelled in it. They realized quite early on that they were working with something of a real special nature.
It was great to be able to have such inspired young people with such natural talents and such in-depth study that they had had here. One of the lovely things about this project is that you bring in people of different levels. Evelyn is one of the teachers here and was able to bring her experience and wisdom and the others would hear her sing and be inspired by what she did. It helps you to bring out a final product which has a superb energised focus.
As well as being somebody with a deep and probing mind William Hayes appears also to be possessed of what is called the archetypal English humour. Is that the case?
Very much so, and throughout the rehearsals for this production, I would keep saying to the performers, “you mustn’t forget that this is in fact intended to make one smile, there is a touch of English humour here.” And they would all fall about laughing, immediately thinking of Monty Python or Dinner for One! (And this is where students here have such a range of nationalities – I had an ensemble of eight the other day and there were seven nationalities in amongst them.)
I think that all this is a very powerful aspect of what Hayes is doing. He has a lightness of touch, but it has a gravity, and when it is needed he can emphasize the gravity. It works so well because of that wonderful sense of human playfulness. In fact, in the picture we have of Hayes, he was known as a man of charming sanguine temperament – sanguinity here relates to the blood, the colour of sanguine being red-to-yellow (red pure would be choleric); sanguine was a mixture of red when you needed it, yellow when you needed to come back to it. This idea of the Renaissance philosophy of the humours was very much playing still in cultivated circles and I think that in his music, one can see Hayes being aware of the use of the humours, and the elements in this Renaissance philosophy sense. Therefore, he is working on this deep level, but knowing when to bring in lightness, to charm, to seduce and to deeply satisfy.
What hopes do you have for this new recording?
What I am hoping with the Hayes Cantatas release is that it is going to open up the minds and awareness of a few people, who will begin to think, “What else lies out there?” For me, it is almost the first step in a journey of exploring the unknown paths of the 18th century. I am not saying that I am the only one who has ever done this, even if I am the first, I think to do the Hayes Cantatas (as I was to a number of secular works by Maurice Greene), but there are others working in the field. And of course we have had the help and support of Simon Heighes who did the research on this for his Oxford PhD, and he is a certainly an enthusiast.
MARK WIGGINS © 2013 Note 1 Music / Glossa Music photos © Susanna Drescher