Herbert Howells (1892-1983)
Piano Quartet in A minor, Op. 21

Howells composed this work in 1916. He later revised in in 1936. Duration 27:00.

Background 

In 1904, the German critic Oskar Hermann Schmitz rather nastily characterized England as “Das Land ohne Musik” (“the land without music”) — hardly true, but “the land without a home-grown musical style” would probably be justified. Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, most English classical music was imported from the Continent, and the relatively few accomplished English-born composers were writing in Continental, primarily German style.  Howells was one of the composers who led a “second English renaissance”—a revival of self-consciously “British” music in the early 20th century.  Together with his teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, and a host of younger composers—Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, Percy Grainger, and others—he created a distinctly English style that had roots in German and French music, but which was also based upon the rich heritage of English, Scottish, and Irish folk music. Though he is best known today as a composer of sacred music, Howells left an impressive body of orchestral and chamber works, including the early Piano Quartet heard here.

The Piano Quartet is dedicated to the “to the hill at Chosen and to Ivor Gurney who knows it.” The Chosen, or Church Down Hill is a landmark eminence, topped by a medieval church, a few miles from the city of Gloucester.  Gurney, a poet and composer and his friend Howells had hiked on the hill before Gurney joined the British army in 1915. Gurney was wounded in 1917, but returned to service, only to be gassed. Gurney—almost certainly a victim of what would be diagnosed today as PTSD—never really recovered from this, and spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals.  Their mutual friend Marion Scott wrote a program for the work based upon her conversations with Howells. On the strength of a recommendation from the formidable Stanford, who referred to Howells as the “my son in music,” the Piano Trio was the first work to be published by the Carnegie Trust, in a series dedicated to music of the finest British composers.

What to Listen For

This work is scored for violin, viola, cello, and piano. In Scott’s program, the first movement (Allegro moderato, tranquillo) ⁸ works as follows: 

“When the first movement opens it is dawn, and the hill wind, pure, eternally free, and uplifting, is blowing: gradually the greyness changes to crimson, the half-light to radiance, mystery to vision, Dawn to day.”

This is a fine description of what goes on musically in the movement, with a murmuring opening in the strings giving way to a folklike main theme in the piano.  (Howells did not quote actual folk songs in this work, but wrote his themes with foursquare English folk style ⁹ in mind.) The texture clears and piano introduces a second folk-style idea. The strings step aside in the middle for an impassioned piano version of the main theme, and reworkings of this theme dominate the end. In describing the second movement (Lento, molto tranquillo) ¹⁰, Scott writes:

“The second movement is the hill upon a day in mid-summer, and the thoughts are those which come as a man lies on the grass on his back, gazing upward into the vast vault of the sky, seeing ‘the giant clouds go royally’, watching the blue depths of height untold flow outward to surrounding immensity until, floating on the flood of wonder, mind and soul almost loosed from the earthly anchorage.”

The music is appropriately dreamy: at first the piano and strings alternate in laying out a relaxed theme. Only once, near the end does the music rise to something approaching passion, but the ending is a hushed reprise of the opening mood. For the third movement (Allegro molto, energico) ¹¹ Scott’s program is quite brief:

“The finale is the hill in the month of March, with splendid winds of spring rioting over it, and flashing in the exuberant rush, wild daffodils goldenly dancing. That is much of the basis of the quartet as Herbert Howells allows to be told.”

This is exuberant music, its main theme a lively English folk dance (or Howells’s imitation of one). The second idea starts almost ominously in the piano, it is worked into optimistic music by the strings.  There is a brief melancholy reminiscence of the first moment, before the exuberant folk dance returns in full force, dominating the end of the movement.  For his part, Ivor Gurney responded both to Howells’s dedication and Scott’s program with a poem:

“Beauty of song remembered, sunset glories,

Mix in the mind till I do not care nor know

Whether the stars do move me golden stories,

O ruddy Cotswold in the sunset glow.

I am unrapt, and not my own, immortal,

In winds of Beauty swinging to and fro.”