Parry Before Jerusalem by Bernard Benoliel

Author:Bernard Benoliel [Benoliel, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780429821417
Google: xPWODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-25T04:52:54+00:00

In the evening the Festival successfully revived the Ode to Music, which The Times called a work of ‘dignity and fine feeling’.

It is likely he took his doctor’s warnings literally and concluded his time was short; his output was in effect completed. These revisions to earlier compositions really amount to putting his affairs in order. The death of Edward VII in May 1910 heightened his sense that an era was ending as a new king, a generation younger than himself, ascended the throne. At his college address in September, Parry spoke from personal experience when he said: ‘The King, who was the inventor and Founder of the College in days before most of you were born, was so true and liberal and large-hearted in his goodwill to the college that our circumstances can never be quite the same now he is gone from us’.16

The coronation itself necessitated yet another revision: I was Glad was included with the enthusiastic approval of George V and required an expanded introduction. It also brought a commission for the coronation Te Deum. The event was not without diversions: ‘We watched the general rehearsal with amusement. The peers in their coronets looked extremely foolish and muddled hopelessly.’ The performance of I was Glad was satisfactory, the Te Deum less so: Parry was happier with the Worcester Festival performance in September.

It is a curious postscript that the culminating scene of the Lawrence Olivier film of Rattigan’s The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) features an ecstatic Marilyn Monroe gazing at that procession of coronets in the 1911 Coronation while I was Glad is ringing out, not in Parry’s 1911 orchestration, but anachronistically in the Gordon Jacob rescoring.

A month later Lady Herbert died at 89, after two strokes. Although Parry travelled from Highnam by car and Maude by train, they failed to reach Herbert House, London in time. Mary Herbert, ‘very done up and distressed’, took Parry ‘up to see poor Mama’s body. Very distressing. Marble look of the face: very peaceful and horribly pathetic. Sisters praying disturbed me’.17 For the next few days he and Maude were caught up in the elaborate Catholic funeral arrangements culminating in a Requiem Mass at Westminster Cathedral: ‘Processions of priests and acolytes, genuflections, manoeuvres. Long sing[ing] some of it very bad’. At the luncheon afterwards in Portman Square Parry had an ‘Unfortunate dispute with Gladys, who thought the singing the loveliest she had ever heard!’ This was followed by the service at Mill Hill, ‘Very long and very tiring business. Finished at 3.15. Said good-bye and came away with Maude. Maude dreadfully done up in evening’.

He continued to avoid ambitious projects and contented himself with a set of Chorale Preludes for Organ promised as a gift for C.H. Lloyd. Lloyd’s enthusiasm encouraged him to produce a number of late organ works that continue to be played. But no one at the end of 1911 could have predicted the unprecedented five-year burst of creativity that concluded with Jerusalem in 1916.

The new year began

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