ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Works Haydn Put On For Nelson

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31109, 12 July 1966, Page 12

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Works Haydn Put On For Nelson

On September 2, 1800, Lord Horatio Nelson and his friend Lady Hamilton, guests at the Austrian town of Eisenstadt, heard Prince Esterhazy’s Kapellmeister, Joseph Haydn, conduct two of his own works in the Bergklrche. The same works, the “Nelson” Mass and the “Te Deum,” will be sung on Saturday week by the Royal Christchurch Musical Society in the Civic Theatre. Haydn wrote 14 Masses, of which 13 are extant and 129 others are attributed. The “Nelson” Mass in D minor, one of his six great last masses, has been one of his most famous and most popular. Haydn called it “Missa in angustiis,” which has been roughly translated as “Mass in Time of Fear,” for it was written at a time of a great European crisis—Napoleon’s fleet had slipped past the British blockade and was on its way to invade Egypt. The

name of Nelson has been associated with the work because it was first performed on the day the news arrived of the admiral’s victory at Abukir Bay in 1798. A tale that Haydn heard of the victory before he had completed the Mass and added triumphal trumpet flourishes in honour of Nelson has turned out to be only legend. HIGHLY REGARDED Written a few months before “The Creation,” the “Nelson” Mass has been described by the Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon as “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition” and “the rightful heir of the late symphonies for London.” Although Haydn finished writing symphonies with his 104th in 1795, “the Mass form, for soli, choir and orchestra,” said Robbins Landon, “gave him a last opportunity to sum up the eighteen-century symphony in one last and golden harvest.” In this music Haydn was at

his nearest to being revolutionary, praising God for all he was worth in wild syncopation and with unprecedented fortissimo outbreaks.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, who heard the score conventionalised by nineteenth-cen-tury editors, said that hearing this Mass was one of the most moving experiences of his old age.

The second work performed in honour of Nelson, the vigorous Te Deum in C of 1799, is one of Haydn’s shorter works. Until this year it is believed to be Haydn s only Te Deum, but Robbins Landon unearthed another and conducted it at Rotterdam last month for the first time since the eighteenth century. The discovered work is the “Esterhazy” Te Deum, composed in 1764 to celebrate Prince Esterhazy’s safe return from Paris. RVW CANTATA

The Royal Christchurch Musical Society last sang the “Nelson” Mass and Te Deum in 1964. Next week it will

offer a little more in its programme than Haydn offered his guests—a third work. Vaughan Williams’s “Dona nobis paceni.” This cantata, which the choir has performed in 1953. 1954 and 1960, was described by a music critic of "The Times" as an apt and practical precedent for Britten’s “War Requiem.”

“It was written to the same scheme—secular poems on the horrors of war on a mass scale, on the tragedy and possibility of forgiving at the individual level, and on the futility of the carnage, are sandwiched between the more ritual language of religious texts,” the critic wrote.

"In Vaughan Williams’s case the religious text is mostly from the Old Testament and mostly in English, and his ‘here-and-now’ poems are mainly by Walt Whitman, inspired by the Civil War. Other similarities with Britten stand out, notably the graphic use of trumpets and drums, and—akin to ‘Curlew River’—the recurrence of fragments of the opening plainsonglike theme. “But it is not just on account of its structure that ‘Dona nobis pacem’ is successful; the musical matter abounds in felicitous touches and only flags somewhat in the fourth section (Dirge for two veterans). Above all, Vaughan Williams succeeds in making the final peace as inspiring as the music for the preceding inferno—something which Elgar and Berlioz managed with mixed success.” TWO NEW SOLOISTS The soloists next week will be Ngaire Johnston (c.) and Richard Greagor (t.). who have previously sung with the choir, and Jean Williams (s.) and John Fisher (bs.), two newcomers.

Miss Williams came originally from Ashburton. After studying at the University of Canterbury she spent two years touring with the New Zealand Opera Company as an understudy, doing small parts and as a member of the chorus. Last year she worked at the Downstage Theatre Cafe in Wellington doing a variety of jobs from singing and organising to cooking. This year she is studying singing in Wellington with Mrs Rosemary Gordon on a Queen Elizabeth II Arts

Council bursary. In October she plans to continue her studv of singing in Europe. John Fisher, who comes from Dunedin, has been a soloist with choral societies in Dunedin. Gore and Invercargill, has had parts in eight opera productions and two musicals in Dunedin, has done recital and concert work, and is appearing in a current television series, "Songs From the Shows." The choir and Civic Chamber Orchestra will be conducted by Robert Field-Dodgson.