‘Not angels but Anglicans’, the title of a 1970s book on Anglicanism, might be a fair summary of this splendid account of the music and musicians of Christ Church Cathedral. This writer has memories of angelic choirboys giving a deep bow to each member of the congregation on receiving back collection plates that were rather more valuable in themselves than in the amount of money that lay on them. He also has memories of organists and choirmen equally as grumpy as any of those listed in this history. Cathedrals may be houses of God but the people that run and serve them are only too human – with all the frailties to which humankind is prone.

Christ Church and St Patrick’s, as Dr Boydell shows, are the only two Irish cathedrals that could ever compare with the great English cathedrals in the choral scale and the complex ordering of the liturgy, whether pre- or post-reformation. By skilfully combining their resources they managed to attract many of the best voices from the larger kingdom to Ireland’s capital. Dublin in the eighteenth century was a musical city the equal of many in Europe.

Such peaks, we are shown, were usually short-lived. The Act of Union may have been intended to unite eternally the two kingdoms and the two churches but the church succumbed to disestablishment in 1870 and twenty-six of the counties became independent in 1922. The union deprived the city and the cathedral of the trappings of state, disestablishment removed its few remaining endowments and independence left it a tiny Anglican rump in an overwhelmingly catholic state. Yet against this must be remembered the mid-Victorian surge as the Roe restoration renewed the fabric and re-endowed the choir. So too must the vision of Dean Salmon never be forgotten in the reinvigoration of the music by the enforced change from boys and men to that of a mixed voice ensemble from 1975.

Through the vicissitudes of time and the anathemas of Ireland’s turbulent history of bad religious tensions, Christ Church has moved to the relative serenity of the twenty-first century where choirs and church leaders move freely between each other’s churches. Here music can bring together within the Anglican liturgy the ethereal sound of Palestrina, the rich magnificence of Haydn, the grand opulence of Stanford who learned his early musicianship in this place, or the modernisms of Tippett and Leighton.