Patrick Comerford
Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church in Stony Stratford was the venue last night (16 March 2024) for the MK Chorale Spring Concert, ‘War and Peace’. The programme included Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass (Missa in angustilis) and the Vaughan Williams cantata, Dona Nobis Pacem.
MK Chorale was accompanied on Saturday evening by the Alina Orchestra, conducted by Mark Jordan, and professional soloists, Helen Groves (soprano) and Thom Isherwood (baritone), with Olivia Shotton (alto) and Jacob Cole (tenor). The concert also supported the work of MK Chorale’s charity of the year, Unity MK, a local charity offering practical and emotional support for people experiencing homelessness or who are at crisis point.
MK Chorale was founded by Hilary Davan Wetton in 1974. It has about 100 members. The patron, Jean Rigby, is a long-time principal with English National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, and a former Stony Stratford resident.
Haydn’s reputation was at its peak in 1798 when he wrote his ‘Nelson’ Mass, but his world was in turmoil. Napoleon had won four major battles with Austria in less than a year, his armies had crossed the Alps and threatened Vienna itself, and Napoleon had invaded Egypt to destroy Britain’s trade routes through the Middle East.
When Haydn finished this Mass, he named it Missa in angustiis (‘Mass for troubled times’). But as he wrote the Mass, Napoleon was dealt a major defeat by Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, and the mass gradually became known as the ‘Nelson Mass’.
The Mass has six movements: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei, and reaches its climax with the plaintive plea for peace in Latin at the end of Agnus Dei:
Agnus Dei,
qui tolis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei,
qui tolis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei,
qui tolis peccata mundi,
dona nobis pacem.
Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world,
have mercy on us.
Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world,
have mercy on us.
Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world,
grant us peace.
Those dramatic, concluding words, dona nobis pacem (‘grant us peace’) prepared the way for the second part of the evening’s programme, Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams.
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) wrote Dona nobis pacem, a cantata for soprano and baritone soli, chorus and orchestra, in six continuous sections or movements.
Although Vaughan Williams is often best-remembered for collecting folk songs that he adapted as hymn tunes, he also wrote many works for chorus and orchestra, selecting and setting great texts for some of his finest works.
The oratorio Dona nobis pacem dates from the early 1930s and was written as a warning against war as another World War seemed to be looming on the horizons. The texts come from the Mass, the poet Walt Whitman, the Bible, and the politician and anti-war campaigner John Bright.
The work takes its name from the concluding phrase in the invocation to the Lamb of God sung or recited during the fraction at the Eucharist:
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace.
The opening and closing movements take their names from the opening and closing words of this liturgical prayer, so Vaughan Williams, in this inter-war plea for peace, opens and closes this oratorio with the Paschal invocation of Christ, pleading for the peace that he offers to a broken world.
With the current war in Ukraine and the violence in Gaza, Israel and Palestine, that plea – Dona Nobis Pacem, ‘Grant us Peace’ – has a new urgency and a renewed poignancy.
The first German Zeppelin air raids hit England in January 1915. Vaughan Williams, who was then 42, enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was assigned to ambulance duties, working with the wounded on the front lines in Flanders.
After World War I, Vaughan Williams held to his belief that music was a means to preserve civilisation, even amid war. He formed a military chorus and went on to dedicate his life to teaching others to make music. He promoted a ‘United States of the World’ where ‘those will serve that universal state best who bring into the common fund something that they and they only can bring.’
His oratorio Sancta Civitas, ‘The Holy City’ (1923-1925) was filled with vision, sadness, and suffering, and the music was ahead of its time in its use of dissonance. His cantata Dona Nobis Pacem has its roots in that earlier oratorio, expressing his anguish over the worsening political situation in Europe that would lead again to war.
When Vaughan Williams was invited to provide a work for the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society in October 1936, he remembered an unpublished setting he had composed for Walt Whitman’s ‘Dirge for Two Veterans,’ a poem in Whitman’s collection Drum Taps (1865), written at the end of the American Civil War.
He now resurrected this composition as the centrepiece of his new work, preceding it with two further poems by Whitman in Drum Taps, ‘Beat! beat! drums!’ and ‘Reconciliation.’
He prefaces this group of Whitman poems with a setting of the liturgical text, Agnus Dei, and followed it with a passage from a speech given in Parliament by John Bright in 1855 during the Crimean War: ‘The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings …’ Indeed, Vaughan Williams claimed to be the only composer ever to have set a passage from the proceedings of the House of Commons.
In the last two sections, he uses a series of Biblical passages that together express optimism for future peace.
The text is rounded off with a verse from Saint Luke’s Gospel, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men’ (Luke 2: 14) and a final repetition of the plea Dona nobis pacem, ‘Grant us peace.’
The whole work is welded together by his sense of urgency. As Vaughan Williams’s biographer, Simon Heffer, said, his main inspiration for Dona Nobis Pacem ‘is drawn not from the soil of England, but from the whole world going mad around him.’
Dona nobis pacem was first performed in Huddersfield on 2 October 1936, with the Huddersfield Choral Society and the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates, and was performed at countless festivals and concerts in the anxious years leading up to World War II.
Dona Nobis Pacem also anticipates by 25 years Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, with its dramatic settings of Latin liturgical texts and poetry and its emphasis on reconciliation.
Given its connections with both World Wars, this cantata seems appropriate to revive as the world lives with the catastrophic consequences of the Russian invasion of and war in Ukraine.
Vaughan Williams’s perspective is no longer bound to the geography of England. His empathy now enfolds a world faced with another war. In setting biblical and poetic texts to music, he pays a subtle tribute to Verdi’s Requiem, which he admired – for example, the drop of a semitone on the word dona, bass drum key-shifts by thirds, and wild brass fanfares.
Dona Nobis Pacem is scored for chorus and large orchestra, with soprano and baritone soloists. It opens with a heart-rending cry. This angelic cry from the soprano, Dona nobis pacem, is repeated at intervals, in different settings, punctuating the entire piece. From the beginning, the angel is the first to appear, soaring high and distant, beseeching peace against a choir alternatively gloomy with war, then echoing in serenity.
In the event, Vaughan Williams’s warnings and entreaties went unheeded, and the oratorio’s optimism turned out historically unjustified in the short run. Vaughan Williams devoted the years of World War II to helping refugees find shelter and work, providing food by planting huge vegetable gardens and keeping chickens, and helping to stage free lunchtime concerts.
Nor does the oratorio’s hope does not come cheap, and the humanitarian warmth and splendour of his vision remains. With Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, Dona nobis pacem remains one of the most satisfying musical answers to the questions posed by war itself. It fills a large canvas and its theme is anguished and impassioned on a cosmic scale as it pleads for peace, tolerance and understanding.
The six sections or movements are:
1, Agnus Dei
2, Beat! beat! drums! (Whitman)
3, Reconciliation (Whitman)
4, Dirge for Two Veterans (Whitman)
5, The Angel of Death (John Bright)
6, Dona nobis pacem (the Books of Jeremiah, Daniel, Haggai, Micah, and Leviticus, the Psalms, the Book of Isaiah, and Saint Luke’s Gospel)
1, Agnus Dei:
The cantata opens with a soprano solo, one voice offering an apprehensive Agnus Dei, a well-known phrase in liturgical texts. She introduces the theme, singing it over the orchestra and choir.
The chorus joins in her fervent cry for peace. In answer, the drums of war are heard in the far distance, no longer a contagious dance rhythm of centuries past but, instead, the harbinger of war.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,
dona nobis pacem.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, Grant us peace.
2, ‘Beat! beat! drums!’
The second movement is a violent depiction of war and a furious setting of Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Beat! beat! drums!’
The words in this movement are based on a poem in Drum Taps written by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). This poem was written after he had served as a volunteer nurse in the American Civil War. He was stunned by the death toll of over 600,000 in that war over the space of four years.
Whitman’s words describe the drums and bugles of war bursting through doors and windows. When war erupts, nothing and nobody is inviolate. Peaceful lives in schools and churches, of brides, farmers and sleepers, of old men and children are in turn swept aside by the warring sounds.
The setting of this movement is for choir, heralded by volleys of brass and rattling percussion. In the use of the bass drum and its key shifts by thirds, Vaughan Williams here recalls Verdi’s Dies irae.
The movement erupts with articulate fear, depicting a violence that destroys peaceful daily lives. In the examples – merchants and scholars disappearing while others pray, weep, and entreat – we sense the numbers of people being swept into war’s unremitting violence once again in the 1930s.
Beat! beat! drums!
Beat! beat! drums! – Blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows – through the doors – burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;
Into the school where the scholar is studying;
Leave not the bridegroom quiet – no happiness must he have now with his bride;
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field, or gathering in his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums – so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums! – Blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities – over the rumble of wheels in the streets:
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses?
No sleepers must sleep in those beds;
No bargainers bargains by day – would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
[Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?]
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums – you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums! – Blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley – stop for no expostulation;
Mind not the timid – mind not the weeper or prayer;
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man;
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums – so loud you bugles blow.
3, Reconciliation
The heart of Dona nobis pacem is found in the third movement, ‘Reconciliation.’ In this movement, Vaughan Williams uses this heart-wrenching poem by Walt Whitman in its entirety.
Although Whitman’s long lines are not easily set to music, the words have an almost intolerable beauty, marked by truth and compassion in the face of the shocking carnage suffered by humanity.
‘Reconciliation’ transcends the threatening atmosphere with a striking, bitter-sweet moment. Set like a lullaby, Whitman’s text offers a promise to the dead enemy – ‘a man divine as myself’ – that time will wash away the awful deeds of war, a promise sealed with a kiss.
The text is matched in perfect spirit by the beautiful setting by Vaughan Williams, sung by the commanding yet gentle voice of the baritone soloist. The baritone introduces the first half of the poem, which the choir echoes and varies.
The baritone then continues with the rest of the poem, followed by the choir presenting a new variation of the first half.
At the end, the soprano repeats a variation of Dona nobis pacem, which we heard in the first movement, hauntingly soaring above the final lines of the chorus.
3, Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly,
Wash again and ever again this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin – I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
4, Dirge for Two Veterans (Whitman)
Vaughan Williams based this movement on an earlier setting of the same words he had composed in 1914, before the outbreak of World War, and which he now incorporates into Dona nobis pacem.
This is a setting for a third poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), ‘Dirge for Two Veterans,’ from Drum-Taps (1865). The poem provides a second drum study for Vaughan Williams, but the drums this time are not the drums of war but the drums heard after war, the drums of death and burial, the drums of mourning and a funeral procession.
The drums and brass are transformed into instruments of noble commemoration; the strings and harp create a serene field filled by the choir fill with tender, loving words.
We are invited into a moonlit scene where we find a mother, highlighted by the moon, watching the funeral march for her son and her husband, both killed together in battle.
Her grief is symbolic of the grief shared by all families when lives are cut short one generation after another.
A compassionate world witnesses the scene with one heart, giving love as the moon gives light. The mourning turns to an outpouring of compassion and love as the wife and mother opens her heart and pours out her love for husband and son.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music;
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
4, ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’
The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finished Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
Lo, the moon ascending!
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon;
Immense and silent moon.
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-keyed bugles;
All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring;
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.
For the son is brought with the father.
In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell;
Two veterans, son and father, dropped together,
And the double grave awaits them.
Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive;
And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumined;
(’Tis some mother’s large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)
O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music;
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
5, ‘The Angel of Death’
Vaughan Williams’s text for the fifth movement, ‘The Angel of Death,’ is derived from a speech on 23 February 1855 in the House of Commons by the great Victorian politician and reformer John Bright. In his speech, Bright condemned the Crimean War.
John Bright (1811-1889) was a leading Quaker, a Radical and Liberal statesman, and one of the greatest orators of his generation. The historian AJP Taylor says ‘John Bright was the greatest of all parliamentary orators … the alliance between middle class idealism and trade unionism, which he promoted, still lives in the present-day Labour Party.’ He is best remembered for his opposition to the Corn Laws, which came to an end in 1846.
Bright was an MP from 1843 to 1889, promoting free trade, electoral reform and religious freedom. He was almost a lone voice in opposing the Crimean War. In a speech in Birmingham in 1865, he became the first politician to refer to Westminster as the ‘Mother of Parliaments.’
Bright’s speech in 1855 draws on images in the Passover story in the Book Exodus, where the Angel of Death kills the firstborn children of Egypt, but spared any Israelite where the lintels and the door posts have been painted the lintels of his door posts with the blood of the lamb (see Exodus 12: 21-32).
Of course, the Exodus story makes no mention of the ‘Angel of Death’ as the author of this tenth and final plague. But Bright’s eloquence helped to popularise this image.
Afterwards, Benjamin Disraeli told Bright: ‘I would give all that I ever had to have delivered that speech.’ However, the speech did not prevent the Crimean War. As Bright had predicted, the campaign wasted many lives. More were lost through incompetent preparations than on the battlefield. Despite the technical military advances the British military had acquired, the war was marked by incompetence and 600,000 people were left dead.
Shocked by the disaster, and frustrated at being unable to avert it, Bright experienced a nervous breakdown. He lost his seat as MP for Manchester, although he was soon elected MP for Birmingham in 1858.
Bright’s words seem so appropriate to quote today and seem so relevant when we consider the present war in Ukraine, 170 years after the Crimean war. At the time Vaughan Williams was writing this oratorio, Bright’s speech was finding new relevance in England with the rise of Nazism and Fascism on Continental Europe, and a fear of yet another great war.
Bright’s words were given new prominence in those fearful days in the 1930s, when they were quoted by the pacifist former Dean of Canterbury, HRL (‘Dick’) Sheppard (1880-1937), in his We Say No (1935), published a year before he founded the Peace Pledge Union and a year before Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem was first performed.
In this movement, Vaughan Williams creates an atmosphere of anxiety and expectation, which leaves us wondering whether the war will ever end, whether we shall ever find peace.
The ostinato bass which has played out the ‘veterans’ in the last movement now plays in the Angel of Death.
The fifth movement begins with the baritone soloist and a quote from John Bright’s speech in which he tried to prevent the Crimean War: ‘The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land …’ Darkness seeps through the music, first quietly then with a dramatic interjection of Dona nobis pacem.
In the final movement that follows, the fearful news of the presence of the Angel of Death shall cause the chorus to burst into another cry for peace, but only more trouble rolls across the land: ‘We looked for peace, but no good came … The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved …’
5, ‘The Angel of Death’
The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land;
you may almost hear the beating of his wings.
There is no one as of old …
to sprinkle with blood the lintel
and the two side-posts of our doors,
that he may spare and pass on.
6, ‘Dona nobis pacem’
In his final movement, Vaughan Williams draws together a number of Biblical sayings urging communal action for peace. With the fearful news of the presence of the Angel of Death, the chorus bursts into another cry for peace.
The attraction these Biblical texts held for Vaughan Williams is puzzling to many. At Cambridge, Bertrand Russell described him as ‘the most frightful atheist.’ By the 1930s, the music critic Frank Howes (1891-1974), editor of the journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, described him as a ‘cheerful Christian agnostic.’ Yet much of the composer’s work throughout his life is concerned with the journey of the soul.
The movement opens with sombre quotes from the Book of Jeremiah, with the soprano and choir intervening with the plea, ‘Dona nobis pacem.’
But more trouble stalks the land: ‘We looked for peace, but no good came …’ The snorting of Dan’s horses momentarily recalls the apocalyptic equine visions of Vaughan Williams’s earlier oratorio, Sancta Civitas (1923-1925).
The words of Jeremiah continue mournfully: ‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved …’
The solo baritone is reassuring ‘O man, greatly beloved, fear not, peace be unto thee.’
Chorus basses intone the great text from Micah, almost every word a poem: ‘Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ The word spreads among all instruments and tongues in prospect of a New Jerusalem: bells ring out in a riotous succession of keys and peals.
The movement then continues with more optimistic texts, including a brief setting of the news of the angels at Christmas: Gloria in excelsis Deo, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward me.’ A phrase that sometimes is too familiar, is repeated, ringing with celebratory optimism.
It ends with a quiet coda of Dona nobis pacem, introduced by the soprano again, adding the choir to finish the piece. The soprano’s ‘Dona nobis pacem,’ floating hauntingly overhead, sounds a warning that we must heed, lest we revert and again sacrifice ‘righteousness and peace’ which ‘have kissed each other’ to war.
Her voice alone lingers at the end like a solitary ray of hope, a light in the night. The final message is optimistic. Grant us peace.
6, ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’
Dona nobis pacem.
We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble! The snorting of his horses was heard from Dan; the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land … and those that dwell therein …
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved …
Is there no balm in Gilead?; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?
‘Dona nobis pacem’ with the Eastman-Rochester Chorus, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra and Michaela Anthony, soprano
