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Sing JoyfullySing JoyfullySing JoyfullySing Joyfully St Swithun’s Choir e-newsletter

Vol. 6 No. 5 June 2018

May Heart Foundation service at St Mary’s Cathedral Many of us believed we were augmenting the Willoughby Singers as they led the singing at the annual Heart Foundation service in St Mary’s Cathedral on Sunday afternoon, 6 May. But the Singers were engaged elsewhere and we found that we were it! Fortunately, we had a well-balanced contingent of 28 singers attending. Under Peter Gilkes’ direction we reprised Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine having sung it as the anthem at our service at Swiz that same morning. And we reprised Simon Gilkes setting of Abide with me, sung at our Anzac celebration the week before. There were three hymns and we finished the service with Rutter’s Clare Benediction.

The cathedral is an interesting space in which to sing. It was a joy to listen to Peter Kneeshaw’s work on the organ. The service attracts a large congregation, remembering lost relatives who had suffered diseases of the heart.

Evensong for Pentecost Evensong was sung at Swiz on Saturday afternoon, 26 May, to a comfortably full church. The principle composer for the afternoon was the famous Peter Hamilton: we sang his Responses and his Evening Canticles. The introit was Schubert’s Holy, Holy, Holy; the anthem was Rutter’s I will sing with the Spirit; the Psalm was a selection of verses from Psalm 145, sung to a tune by Thomas Norris, organist at St John’s College, Oxford in 1765. The choir’s self-catering for the high tea that follows each Evensong service is a valuable congregation attractor and we thank each contributor very much. June “Mozart fixes everything” The Cultural Foundation benefit concert for 2018 will be held on Saturday evening, 16 June. Headlined “Magnificent Mozart”, it will feature items composed for church and theatre. Solo voices and instrumentalists will be featured. The Swiz choir will be augmented by voices from the Willoughby Singers.

The Huguenot Society of Australia NSW Chapter We have sung at the society’s annual church service for a number of years now. The 2018 service will be held at St Swithun’s on Sunday afternoon, 17 June, with our own Rector preaching. As year follows year, we are managing to sing the Huguenot national anthem,

'La Cevenole', a little more accurately every time. ������������������������

W A Mozart – Requiem K626 (Lynne Bullock contributed a brief note describing Mozart’s Requiem. This is an edited version of that note.)

Mozart died before he could finish his Requiem K 626. The events leading to its completion did not fully emerge until 1964 and some questions remain unanswered.

Herr Franz, Count von Walsegg, owner of extensive estates in Austria, was a passionate music lover who liked to play chamber music. He would commission works, demanding that sole ownership be passed to him, then copy them in his own hand and claim them as his own compositions.

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His young wife Anna died in February 1791 just before her 21st birthday and he wanted a fitting memorial. Sometime in 1791 he arranged – by messenger – for Mozart to write a requiem which he was also going to claim as his own, so the request was shrouded in secrecy. Mozart was paid 100 ducats (a relatively large sum1) in advance and began working on it probably in October. At about the same time, he was working on The Magic Flute, which was close to opening. A commission for an opera from soon to be crowned Leopold, King of Bohemia, took precedence. He seems to have been dreadfully in debt and, not surprisingly, was becoming increasingly exhausted. His wife, Constanza, relates that at times he thought he was writing his own requiem so she discouraged him from doing it. It remained unfinished at the time of his death from inflammatory rheumatic fever in December 1791, but then Costanza was keen for the completed work to be delivered so the full amount could be paid. One of Mozart’s pupils, Franz Süssmayr eventually agreed to finish it although the first person Costanza turned to was Joseph Eybler, more highly regarded by Mozart. Controversy and some mystery still exists about how much is Mozart’s work and how much is Süssmayr’s but it is clear that the Introit, Kyrie and Sequenz up to the Lacrimosa movement are Mozart’s.

A page from the Kyrie showing three different hands. This page was in Walsegg's possession at the time of his death. Freistädtler and Süssmayr were assistants to Mozart.

A friend and admirer of

Mozart, Baron van Swieten, arranged the first performance of Requiem for 2 January 1793, a year after Mozart had died, in Vienna. The work is in Mozart’s dramatic key, D minor and scored for SATB soloists and choir, organ and strings, two clarinets, two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones and timpani.

The Requiem is often described as being the most heart-wrenching piece of music in the world. It begins with a haunting melody, followed by a dramatic crescendo of minor chords and then the choruses sung in Latin. The most dramatic movement is often considered to be the Confutatis, which has angry singing over a furious string background. Confutatis is followed by Lacrimosa, considered to be the most sorrowful part of the Requiem, and the last part Mozart wrote. ������������������������

1 A gold ducat contained 3.545 g of 97.5% gold. In present day terms, with gold priced at, say $50 per gram, 100 ducats would have a current gold value of 100 x 3.545 x .975 x 50 = $17,300. What a ducat was worth, in buying power, in 1791, is very hard to say. Mozart’s salary from the court in Salzburg was said to be 200 ducats. It was insufficient to cover the needs of his family, hence the extra work he undertook.

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St Patrick’s Breastplate It seems to be a tradition that we sing HTC hymn number 5 every Trinity Sunday. We sang it at both 8 and 10 am services on Trinity Sunday in May this year.

I bind myself to God today are the first words of Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander’s paraphrase of an ancient Gaelic poem called St. Patrick’s Lorica, or breastplate. A lorica was a mystical garment that was supposed to protect the wearer from danger and illness, and guarantee entry into Heaven. She wrote the words in 1889 at the request of H. H. Dickinson, Dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle:

“I wrote to her suggesting that she should fill a gap in our Irish Church Hymnal by giving

us a metrical version of St. Patrick’s “Lorica” and I sent her a carefully collated copy of

the best prose translations of it. Within a week she sent me that exquisitely beautiful

as well as faithful version which appears in the appendix to our Church Hymnal.”

Legend has it that Patrick recited the lorica on Easter Sunday as he went to face the Druidical Fire Worshipers with the pagan king at his court at Tara. Some even venture to suggest that Patrick might have written the original poem.

The tune is the work of the Irish church music composer Charles Stanford who named it in honour of Ireland’s patron saint. His variation for the Christ be with me, Christ within me verse is named for Gartan Lough, a small lake in County Donegal.

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Choir program – 2018

Date Venue Time Tue 12 Jun Swiz 7:30 pm Mozart rehearsal

Sat 16 Jun Swiz 8 pm Mozart concert

Sun 17 Jun Swiz 2 pm Huguenot service

Sun 15 Jul Swiz 10 am St Swithun’s Day

Fri 20 Jul Swiz lounge 7-9 pm Choir social gathering

Sat 25 Aug Swiz 5 pm St Bartholomew’s Day Evensong

Sun 23 Sep 39 Brightmore St, Cremorne 3 pm Choir soiree @ Chez Gilkes

Sat 3 Nov Swiz 5 pm Evensong for the persecuted church

Sat 1 Dec Swiz 5 pm Advent hymn festival

Note that nothing is final until the actual day has arrived, so please be mindful of possible changes.