Bank Holidays: Chagall and St Cedd

It must be a record: two May Bank Holiday Mondays in a row of perfect late spring/early summer weather. On the second, which I'll get round to eventually, we headed out along the river Medway from Tonbridge to the church of All  Saints Tudeley, with its twelve Chagall windows, which we only got to hear about during our Chichester Easter weekend (there's another in the cathedral, as that entry shows). On the first May Monday, we badgered our friends Daisy, François and Garance to excurt from their cottage fastness in the grounds of Layer Marney, the Tudor church and towers of which I briefly extolled back in 2007 and intend to revisit later on the blog,

and drive to the remote Saxon chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell-juxta-Mare (no Latinophobic 'On Sea', if you please) on the south bank of the Blackwater estuary. Our plan had originally been to do a big hike around the Dengie peninsula back in March, which would have involved complicated train and bus connections; but an icy east wind put us off and we settled for an Ingatestone circuit instead. And here we hardly laboured at all, since it's a short walk from car park to chapel; and then, having planned to do a big loop via Tillingham, we succumbed to the summery laziness of a picnic and a nap on the shelly shingle of the mudflats. Picnic snaps, though fun, would ruin the higher purpose of this entry and the privacy of our dear friends, so I'll leave it at shells and channels. Someone may have strewn the cracked mud in the first picture, but I didn't and I like to think it's natural.

Some time in the third century AD Carausius, renegade Count of the Saxon Shore, built a nominally Roman fort here. There's hardly anything of it to see now, compared to Richborough and Pevensey which were probably also Carausius's doing, but the bricks of Othona - as it has been putatively identified, and the name lives on in the discreetly tree-ringed Christian community close by - went into the construction of the chapel and monastery by Cedd, one of Iona-based Aidan's 12 English missionaries, in 654 AD. That makes it the oldest substantial church in England.

I say 'substantial', but the church has lost its rounded chancel or apse and two side chapels. They were demolished when it was turned into a barn in the 17th century; it had remained in use as a chapel-of-ease to Bradwell as late as the 16th century. As my pious guidebook notes, 'St Peter's, which for a thousand years had served man's spirit, came to serve his bodily needs, until the time came when Essex remembered her past.' That happened when the chapel was reconsecrated in 1920 and restored. It's now a centre of pilgrimage and a place of daily worship for the Othona community. The inside has a few simple modern touches like the incorporation of stones from Lindisfarne, Iona and Lastingham, where Bishop Cedd died of the plague in 664 AD.

The only false note is the vestry building close by, 'a major visual crime' as Pevsner rightly observes. Looking out towards the North Sea from the south wall blots that out.

And from the saltmarsh, only the church can be seen.

After our lazy two hours, we did at least manage a very brief walk to the north, looking over the Blackwater Estuary to Mersea past the ruins of World War Two defences.

Looping round gave us other perspectives on St Peter and the first of the rape fields which, whatever you think of them, give a special yellow May colouring to the flat landscape.

We had a close encounter with those ubiquitous, hay-fever inducing fields on our Kent expedition, which could more properly be described as a hike. 40 minutes after leaving Charing Cross, we were making our way through Tonbridge - an unprepossessing high street, until you hit the castle and the Medway- and took a slightly circuitous route around the suburbs to the north of the river until we found the path we should have taken in the first place. Within minutes we were in deepest country- and river-side, with only the odd kayakers and dog-walkers punctuating the birdsong.

I don't know if you quite get the proper sense of spring lushness and bright buttercup meadows from this, but the perfect May afternoon it certainly was.

We consumed our hastily assembled picnic on a bend of the river with a food-curious swan lurking just beneath us. I'm afraid I have to be in this photo to give a sense of the idyll; the ones of J take in more of the landscape, but of course he permits no close facials here.

Crossing the first bridge, our route then took us through what seemed like an endless field of rape, with the right of way barely distinguishable after a while,

vineyards

and orchards with some of the apple blossom still hanging on (we're told the late spring will yield bumper crops in the autumn).

The landscape began to undulate as we came closer to Tudeley, in the foothills (if such they can be called) of the High Weald. Copses of spring beauty punctuated the fields on route to the church.

Then we crossed the graveyard of All Saints to reach the wonders within this historically unprepossessing but neat and beautifully situated church.

Chagall, who only turned to glass design late in life (we saw some splendid specimens in Nice), received the commission for the east window in 1968. It commemorates the death in a sailing accident of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, daughter of a Tonbridge worthy who like Chagall was Jewish by birth (his wife was, if I remember right, French Catholic).

The window carries the legend of death and resurrection. In the lower third the girl lies in the sea, observed by a grieving figure (the Virgin?).

There's a fluidity about all the design rather unusual for stained glass; Pevsner observes that Chagall uses the medium 'as if he were working in water-colours'. Centrally placed are the mother with her two daughters, the dead one wraith-like, and you can just see the bottom half of the red horse accompanying her to the ladder

that leads upwards to the crucified Christ.

 Over the next 15 years, with further funding from the d'Avigdor-Goldsmids, Chagall designed 11 more windows to cover the entire church. For the artist, 'the Bible is a synonym for Nature', so birds, beasts and natural settings are important. In the first window, west in the south transept, is Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit.

while animals predominate in what I think must be the fifth window,

and deep blue governs the four jewelled side windows of the chancel.

Angels are everywhere here, the one to the north tumbling towards Chagall's signature

and the one on the south bearing under the left wing the inscription VAVA, Chagall's pet name for his wife.

Light was most suffusing the golden 'joy and hope' windows on the south side of the nave

where the detail is more impressionistic, other than the smaller angel swimming in light yellows.

At what cost was this unity of vision achieved? Well, many parishioners weren't too happy about the removal of the old windows - do I catch a whiff of antisemitism? - but were partly appeased when these were placed in the vestry with a light box behind them. A sample shows they were rather charming in their own right.

And so, after this long examination of an art gallery more precious than I could have imagined, we completed our loop by passing through the hamlet known as the Postern, with its scattering of farm buildings and handsome Georgian houses. The oaks were all in glorious early leaf

and mixing with the hawthorn flowers in the hedgerows

We'd done the whole circuit in an afternoon, and arrived back in town with time for me to go straight to the LSO's free-for-all Berlioz concert conducted by Gergiev in Trafalgar Square, which I've written about with great enthusiasm for the circumstances on The Arts Desk. Just three snaps on a beautiful evening then (marred only by the roars of the English Defence League dregs-of-the-dregs). Elmgreen and Dragset's rocking-horse boy on the Fourth Plinth looked more ironical than ever seen from below, where I was sitting.

Eventually I moved centre-stage for the Witches' Sabbath of the Symphonie fantastique and discovered the hard core all attentive there. Didn't snap during the main performance, of course, only the encore, the Rakoczy March from The Damnation of Faust.

I ended the TAD piece with a little eulogy for the fire-breathing tuba-man at Embankment station. He really was playing the notes when the fire came out.

Ultimate busker class, that, and a delightful end to a second, equally perfect Bank Holiday Monday.

Hussey's gifts

Here's a churchman who has left the world a better place: the remarkable, or at least remarkably persuasive, Walter Hussey (1909-85). I was going to put 'the good dean', but then I read Frances Spalding in her book on the Pipers describing him as 'a conflicted person...unable to conceal his passion for boys' (not so much of a problem only if, like Britten, he never acted on it, and Spalding's turn of phrase suggests he did).

The almost-finished portrait by Graham Sutherland below hangs in Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, which we're returning to visit when it's open; Hussey chose Pallant House as the recipient of his own collection and it now has one of the best selections of British 20th century art in the country as well as a series of enticing exhibitions.

Anyway, as vicar of St Matthew's Northampton, his home town, Hussey helped to commission wonders I'd like to go and see there, chiefly a Madonna and Child by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland's striking Crucifixion. These gave the cue for the art of the new Coventry Cathedral. The others we can hear or read at will - Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb was composed for the church's 50th anniversary, and there was other music from Finzi, Tippett. Malcom Arnold, Rubbra and Lennox Berkeley.

Auden (pictured below in 1939, some years before the commission in question)  wrote Hussey a rather tart prose Litany followed by an Anthem for St Matthew's Day - hard to find, though I've just come across excerpts in an Australian newspaper. They include an amusing-serious prayer for 'all who, like our patron saint, the Blessed Apostle and Evangelist Matthew, occupy positions of petty and unpopular authority, through whose persons we suffer the impersonal discipline of the state...deliver us, as private citizens, from confusing the office with the man...and from forgetting that it is our impatience and indolence, our own injustice, that creates the state to be a punishment and a remedy for sin'.

I'm getting carried away by Auden's drollness, but let me just also include the following: 'deliver us, we pray thee, in our pleasure and in our pain, in our hour of elation and our hour of wan hope, from insolence and envy, from pride in our virtue, from fear of public opinion, from the craving to be amusing at all costs, and from the temptation to pray, if we pray at all: "I thank Thee, Lord, that I am an interesting sinner and not as this Phrarisee" '.

Our Easter weekend visit to Themy and Eben in the Cathedral Close was the chance to find out how much we owe to Hussey, the great yet cosy building's dean from 1955 to 1977: chiefly the John Piper altarpiece, Sutherland painting and Chagall window. Arriving there as a known advocate of the new, Hussey had to tread more carefully at first with the antique sensibilities of the clergy.  The first task was to reinstate the Arundel Screen we so admired on Easter Saturday. Work on the chapel of St Mary Magdalen followed, showcasing Noli me tangere, a work by Sutherland more miniature by far than the Northampton Crucifixion or the vast Coventry tapestry.

Introduced to John Piper by Spence and Moore, Hussey discussed with him what might be done with the high altar reredos now that the 16th century Sherburne Screen was revealed. Piper didn't much care for Hussey's proposal of gleaming enamels, suggesting instead a tapestry which he wanted to avoid approaching in 'too painterly a way' like Sutherland's in Coventry and settling on shapes rather than figures. Woven by Pinton Frères near Aubusson, the finished work has six panels. Central are symbols of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, while on either side are those of the four Evangelists matched to the four elements.

What a marvellous designer Piper would have made for Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, on the evidence of his earth, air, fire and water. The latter two are to the right of the Tau cross, matched to Luke's winged ox and John's winged eagle (seen in the detail up top) while to the left earth joins Matthew's winged man and air Mark's winged lion (below)

Of course the installation in 1966 caused a hubbub. A canon pointedly attended the opening evensong in dark glasses. But there were plenty of others who loved it, like the Chichester resident who wrote, as quoted in Spalding's book, that she 'felt here was something glowing and alive and symbolic of what the church must and should be in the present age. It took away the feeling that Christianity is old and crumbling like the cathedral'.

I love its vibrancy, and never more than at the Easter Vigil when the lights finally went up and the altarpiece's magic was glimpsed through the Arundel Screen. J thinks it's a bit of its time, but agrees that high quality art works don't often join the old in churches and cathedrals (I think of the amateurish tapestries in Durham). Hussey also had commissioned for Chichester a window by Chagall

which is based on the celebration of the final psalm, 150: 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord'.

It's encouraged us to make an expedition in due course to Tudeley Church near Tonbridge, which has no less than 12 Chagall windows designed and executed over a period of 15 years.

Curiously, nothing can seem more modern in Chichester Cathedral than the two Romanesque panels in Caen limestone (second quarter of the 12th century, it's now believed) depicting Christ arriving in Bethany and the subsequent Raising of Lazarus. Those expressive heads seem both old and new. Sadly they're now behind glass, and hard to see, but we illuminated them with torchlight, which may give the faces a rather unwonted look. Thus Christ

as well as Martha and Mary.

But I digress. One final extraordinary commission, thanks to Hussey's far-sightedness, was Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. Humphrey Burton's magnificent biography of 'Lenny' quotes a letter Hussey wrote to him in which he notes,  'I think many of us would be very delighted  if there was a hint of "West Side Story" about the music'. More than a hint emerged: Burton also tells us that the 'Why do the heathens' sequence, cutting percussively into the lyric treble/countertenor solo of the middle movement, was reworked from a discarded chorus in the musical's Prologue.

There was some debate about Bernstein's slightly tricksy wish for the actual premiere to take place in New York first; Hussey soon graciously deferred. But how remarkable that soon after, in July 1965, an Anglican cathedral played host to the Psalms as sung in Hebrew. That makes them, along with all the metrical changes apparent even in the opening,

devilishly difficult as well as liberating to sing, as I know from performing them with the Renaissance Singers, organ and percussion, in Edinburgh during my student days.

Later I heard Bernstein not long before his death conduct the Chichester Psalms with the London Symphony Orchestra and then-treble Aled Jones; by that time the master was taking them a bit too slow and reverently. I met him not long afterwards, courtesy of Ted Greenfield who took me along to the Candide recording sessions in December 1989, Bernstein's last. He grabbed me by the hand, and strode towards the gents with me still locked in his grasp, fortunately soon released. But what a man! Like half the cast, he was struggling with a nasty strain of influenza that was doing the rounds and even attacked Buckingham Palace, leading Bernstein to call it 'the royal flu'. He died the following October.

Here he is, anyway, conducting the three movements of the Chichester Psalms. The coming-together nature of the piece is further emphasised in 1977 by the Berlin location, the young Austrians in the choir alongside the Vienna Boys' Choir soloist and the collaboration of Bernstein's beloved Israel Philharmonic.

Bach cantata for the week is 'Es ist euch gut, dass ich hingehe', BWV 108, for the fourth (Cantate) Sunday after Easter. Composed for Leipzig in 1725, so for performance exactly a week later than the pick of last week's three cantatas ' Ihr werdet weinen und heulen', it boasts another splendid chorus, this time at its very core: a fugue in which the theme is very briskly snatched up, that opening idea varied with an elegantly rhythmed turn or gruppetto on 'zukünftig' (the future) in the third set of 'runs'. The text of the bass's opening aria, with a lightness-of-being oboe d'amore stealing the show, is taken from Christ's so-called 'Farewell Discourse' in John 16. Strictly speaking, the 'true vine' speech belongs to the previous chapter, but it's all I need as excuse for its fascinating realisation in a 16th century eastern orthodox manuscript.

Third of the vocal solos, with a second solo instrument in the shape of a violin obbligato, is the alto's 'Was mein Herz von dir begehrt'. There are interesting expressive shadings on 'Herz' and later, in the setting of 'überschutte' ('shower') and repeated notes on 'schaue' (regard). These new sentiments having run their course, there's no vocal repeat of the first section, and the short cantata is quickly tied up with the affirmative final chorale. Once again Suzuki with Gilchrist and Blaze - bass Dominic Wörner much less good, salvaged by the Japanese oboe d'amoreist - delivered the goods; on YouTube Harnoncourt is the only familiar choice.

The photos of the Piper altarpiece, the detail of the Chagall window and the Romanesque faces are mine. Sutherland portrait courtesy of the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; the rest (I think) Wikidomain.