Choristers and Lay Clerks

The 1879 Royal Commission on Cathedral Churches brooded over the choirs at the choral foundations. The members were under no illusions as to the continuing low standards of most of their choirs and the need for drastic measures to secure improvements. They were advised on all sides that boarding schools should be created for the choristers, so that these choirs no longer relied on local boys from the poorest families, but gave the sons of professional men an education that should equip them for entry to one of the reformed public schools.

They were not clear how a body of educated singing men could be obtained: educated Englishmen did not sing. Some thought that the newly established theological colleges in cathedral cities offered the best solution. Musically gifted ordinands (it was acceptable for clergymen to show an interest in music) could be taught to sing by men already ordained who had received the appropriate vocal training. Such men could form the choir of the cathedral while practising parochial duties in the city churches. But the Church of England made no such arrangements.

In 1879 Christ Church, which had previously run a day school for boys from the town, compelled all 16 boys of the choir to board at 1, Brewer Street. New College's boarding school (founded 1386) claimed to be the oldest school in England. In 1903 ‘a handsome new boarding-house’ was built on Savile Road, ‘where boys come’, it was reported, ‘from all over the country’. Magdalen College School, where choristers were educated, also an ancient establishment, had been reformed and re-invigorated in the second half of the nineteenth century. 1900 saw the retirement of a headmaster who had been a boy at the school, won First Class Honours at Christ Church in Mathematics, and rowed and run against Cambridge. That was some reassurance for those fathers who, as one music master asserted in 1927, regarded music ‘as a fitting pursuit for maiden ladies and foreigners with long hair’.

In 1899 a visiting American choir-trainer thought the quality of the boys’ voices at Magdalen ‘the most beautiful that could be imagined’. The choirmaster's golden rule was to ‘cultivate soft singing’ and ‘strengthen the head voice’, he discovered: the Informator Choristarum did not allow the least ‘forcing or pushing of the voice’ by the boys.

Some indication of the best-loved concertos and those most frequently performed in the concert hall in the earlier part of the twentieth century is given by Tovey in the works he selected for his famous Essays in Musical Analysis which appeared in the 1930s. These were originally written as programme notes for concerts given by the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh that he founded in 1917. Tovey included a handful of concertos by Bach including the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor and the third and fourth Brandenburg Concertos, and by Handel just the Organ Concerto, Op. 7, No. 1. He selected thirteen works by Mozart including five piano concertos. There is the Cello Concerto in D major by Haydn. There are all the Beethoven concertos except the Piano Concerto in B flat, Op. 19, and all Brahms's works in the genre. There is Chopin's Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 21, Schumann's three concertos – the Violin Concerto hadn't yet been discovered – and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Op. 64. There are works by Saint-Saëns and Max Bruch and Glazunov. The twentieth-century works include Stanford's Clarinet Concerto, Elgar's Cello Concerto, Delius's Violin Concerto, and Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Tovey thinks that the number of ‘great works in the true concerto form is surprisingly small; far smaller than the number of true symphonies’. And yet you search in vain the early record catalogues, the pre-First World War listings, to find recordings of these comparatively few canonical masterpieces.

The size and nature of Elgar's recorded legacy

Elgar first went into a recording studio in January 1914 at the age of fifty-six. In the next twenty years he was to take part in more than fifty recording sessions and leave behind him a recorded legacy of more than fifteen hours as an orchestral conductor.

His earlier recordings, those up to 1925, about a third of the total, were made by means of the acoustic process. In an orchestral acoustic recording session you would have seen thirty or forty men huddled together in front of one or two or occasionally three recording ‘horns’ sticking out from the wall, capturing the sounds. There would be only a handful of violinists, perhaps six in all, and probably only a single cellist, who would be mounted on a platform which could be moved back and forth, nearer or further away from the recording device. The flutes and clarinets and oboes would be sitting immediately behind the small body of strings, but if the first flute or the first clarinet had a solo, he – invariably he – would stand up and gingerly but quickly make his way through the strings and lean forward within a few inches of the mouth of the horn. Bassoonists would often be seated opposite the violinists with the horn players mounted on platforms high behind them with their backs to the conductor so that the bells of their instruments were directed at the recording horns.

In the twentieth century the English cathedral and collegiate choir has consisted typically of about sixteen trebles – boys with unbroken voices, aged between about eight and thirteen (often with four additional ‘probationers’) – and at least six men taking the three lower parts. Numbers have varied from time to time in any particular choral foundation; in recent times York, Durham and Winchester Cathedral choirs have all used twelve men, as have Magdalen College, New College and Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. King's College and St John's College in Cambridge have both used fourteen men's voices, each with six basses. St Paul's is the largest establishment of all, with thirty-eight boys and eighteen men.

Historians, journalists, critics and cathedral musicians themselves have been sure they can identify a style of singing peculiar to these choirs which they define by reference to purity of tone, accuracy in intonation, precision in ensemble, and an absence of rhetoric. The ‘essence’ of the cathedral choir said one authority is ‘the boy's voice’, and its men are ‘at their best when they blend with that clean white tone’. Again and again throughout the century the same epithets have been used to characterise the singing, ‘pure’, ‘otherworldly’, ‘ethereal’, ‘impersonal’; writers who do not admire the style refer to its ‘coldness’, its lack of ‘passion’ or ‘personality’, to the cultivation of beauty of sound at the expense of any real expressiveness, to ‘under-interpretation’, to rather barren meticulousness; a French critic writes about ‘performances that are millimetrées, as if they were mathematical exercises’.