Legend has it that Pope Paul VI was persuaded to allow the continued use of the pre-conciliar Mass by Agatha Christie, whose name appeared on a list of British cultural luminaries appealing for the preservation of the Tridentine liturgy. (In its usual form, the story says that the pope read through the petition, exclaimed, “Ah! Agatha Christie!” and scribbled his signature on the proposed indult.) Much ink has been spilled on the history of the “Agatha Christie indult.” Its tone was humanist and ecumenical; it emphasized the cultural importance of the Mass, and its powerful symbolism for opponents of technocratic materialism. Many of the signatories were not Catholic or even avowedly Christian—Irish Murdoch put her name on the petition; so did the poet Kathleen Raine and the Marxist historian Philip Toynbee. For the musician, the names that stand out on the petition include Vladimir Ashkenazy, Joan Sutherland, and Yehudi Menuhin; William Glock, the controller of the B.B.C.’s music division; George Malcolm, the music director of Westminster Cathedral; and the composer Lennox Berkeley.
The appearance of Berkeley’s name on the list is especially bittersweet; the least known of these figures today, he was also probably the greatest British composer writing music for the traditional liturgy in the years before Vatican II.
Berkeley’s Missa brevis, which is now rarely heard in Catholic churches, retains a presence among church musicians through performances by Anglican cathedral choirs: The composer approved a version of the piece with an English text a few years after its publication. But the piece was written for performance at high Mass at Westminster Cathedral, where Berkeley’s sons were boy choristers, and is perfectly proportioned to the structure of that liturgy. Each movement of the Mass emerges from silence and disappears into silence, even the movements that one would expect to end with a triumphant climax. After reaching a blazing D major fortissimo just before the end of the Gloria, the choir fades away and the organ accompaniment recedes to the point of inaudibility; the final “Amen” is like a sigh.
The tendency toward understatement and elusiveness of expression in this Mass is typical of Berkeley. The liturgical intent, perhaps, is to create a kind of church music in which the individual sung parts of the Mass are no longer discrete musical compositions but moments within the unfolding of one long, continuous prayer. One of the consequences of this is that each of the Mass’s movements ends just short of a fully satisfying musical resolution: The “Hosanna in excelsis” at the end of the Sanctus ends with an ellipsis rather than an exclamation mark. The music seems meant to conduct its listeners into and out of silent contemplation; having dimly adumbrated the vision of another world hinted at by the liturgical text, the composer leaves his listeners to their prayers.
Nothing could be better suited to the traditional Mass—in terms of liturgical sensibility or, frankly speaking, length—than Berkeley’s music. Yet all of the qualities that make this music work so well in the liturgy make it a terrible fit for the concert hall; it feels ridiculous to start clapping after the diaphanous “dona nobis pacem” that ends this Mass. The Masses of Palestrina or Byrd are stolid enough that they can leave a strong impression when heard in concert or on record, even if the conditions are less than ideal and the performance is not very good; they have a certain abstract integrity that allows them to survive rough handling. Berkeley’s liturgical music is too delicate for that, too episodic. This is music that could only have been written by a devoted Mass-goer, and it is as music for the liturgy that it will stand or fall.
The Church has not been kind to the memory of its twentieth-century composers. Lennox Berkeley was only one of the many musicians who worked hard to bridge the gap between the world of musical modernism and the Catholic liturgy in the middle years of the century. In truth, this gap always seemed like a wider one than it really was: Contrary to the public image of modernist composers as godless technocrats, most of the major technical innovators of twentieth-century concert music held to some form of traditional faith. Olivier Messiaen was a fervent and very French Catholic; Stravinsky was a stern adherent of Russian orthodoxy. Yet it was not always clear how the new harmonic techniques of this generation were to be reconciled with a liturgical tradition founded upon ancient repertories of chant, hymnody, and choral music. The task that Berkeley and his contemporaries faced was the nearly impossible one of forging a distinctive synthesis of old and new, maintaining the highest standards of artistic integrity and fidelity to tradition at the very moment that the tradition was crumbling.
Around the world, composers who had forged their own distinctive Catholic Modern musical styles faced the liturgical upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies and devised various strategies for survival. Some signed letters of protest or wrote passionately about the importance of Gregorian chant and the choral tradition. But others sought to renew the Catholic Modern project by creating novel, hybrid musical genres that would suit the new situation. In the libraries of universities one can still find works by some of these composers: Alexander Peloquin, Norman Dello Joio, Malcolm Williamson, Petr Eben, Hermann Schroeder, Anton Heiller. These are not names to conjure with today, but all of them were respected composers with modest international reputations, shaped in their youth by pre-conciliar Catholic musical traditions, who applied great creativity to the task of creating music for the new missal of 1969. These composers wrote responsorial Psalms and refrain-based hymns in keeping with a new emphasis on accessible congregational singing, adopting the new format in which a cantor in the sanctuary assists the choir and organist in leading. These pieces vary wildly in style and difficulty, from relatively straightforward and accessible adaptations of chant melodies to daringly complex settings requiring a virtuoso organist or even a small orchestra. Some of these composers adapted fashionable styles from Broadway or folk music but then incorporated them into their own style in a kind of bricolage. One finds settings of Psalms where the refrain sounds like a show tune, but the accompanying harmonies are highly dissonant. What these musical settings have in common is their present-day obscurity: They have all vanished without a trace.
Berkeley could view the changing fortunes of church music with more equanimity than some of his peers because he was never employed primarily as a church musician. His compositions for Westminster Cathedral in the early Sixties are of the highest standard, but there are only a few of them: two Masses, a Salve regina, and a handful of other motets almost exhaust the catalogue of the music he wrote for his own Church. Most of his music on sacred themes was instead written for the concert hall or commissioned by Anglican choral foundations: an Epiphany anthem for Westminster Abbey; a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis for Chichester Cathedral; a Christmas carol for King’s College, Cambridge. In these works Berkeley favored early modern texts; he was drawn to nuptial mysticism, which seems to have moved him deeply: Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” poems by Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw, and the poetry of Saint Teresa of Avila in a cycle of four songs for mezzo-soprano, one of his greatest works.
For the most part, though, Berkeley’s musical activities were carried out apart from the church, in the context of the conservatory and concert hall. To the extent that Berkeley is remembered by most musicians, he is remembered as a kind of British equivalent to Gabriel Fauré: a composer of urbanity and exquisite technical polish, a miniaturist with a gift for melody who excelled as a composer of chamber music, piano music, and songs. This is high praise indeed, and there is much truth to it, but coming from the British critics of Berkeley’s time a comparison to a French composer suggests a slight hint of condescension. Berkeley was set apart from other English composers of his time by the restrained classicism of his style; by his close friendship with another “un-English” outsider, Benjamin Britten; and by his unusual decision to leave Britain for his musical education to study with the famous music teacher Nadia Boulanger.
A notoriously severe, even formidable, woman, Boulanger was the most feared and respected music instructor of the twentieth century. She taught three generations of renowned performers and composers at her flat in Paris and demanded of them an absolute mastery of traditional harmony and counterpoint. The vast majority of her foreign students, however, were Americans; at the time it was unusual for an English composer to go to Paris rather than London for studies. Berkeley had been referred to Boulanger by Ravel, an early hero who looked at some of Berkeley’s scores on a visit to London in 1926. Boulanger, then, was to provide him with training in the traditional technique of musical composition. But she also modeled, with a frightening single-mindedness, a life of industrious, untiring dedication to music. Prodigiously gifted—she was a virtuoso performer as a pianist and organist and one of the first women to attain success as an orchestral conductor—she limited her own personal performing engagements in order to dedicate herself to teaching. Outside the classroom, Boulanger was known for her profound devotion—equally divided—to both the Church and the memory of her sister Lili, a budding composer who had died tragically at the age of twenty-four. For Lili’s sake Boulanger abandoned her own ambitions as a composer; all her students were expected to attend an annual memorial Mass and tribute concert, at which Boulanger could be observed sitting at the door and taking attendance. (These events usually took place at the church of La Trinité, where Nadia was a loyal and dedicated parishioner; her loyalty to the parish was matched only by her loathing of the parish organist, one Olivier Messiaen. Their surviving letters record Boulanger’s profound displeasure with the young Messiaen’s organ playing at her sister’s memorial; in later life Messiaen would tactfully arrange to be absent for the Lili Boulanger memorial Mass every year.)
A teacher as strong-willed as Nadia Boulanger served as a litmus test for her students’ character; a relentless taskmaster, she drove most of them to tears at some point in their lessons. Many of her students who would never dare confront her in a lesson found the Lili Boulanger memorial to be a particular sticking point; Philip Glass, a late pupil, made a point of skipping the event every year, a daring gesture that heralded future rebellion. Berkeley, by contrast, was the perfect pupil, absorbing her lessons in technique and sharing many of her musical enthusiasms including her devotion to Lili Boulanger, whose music Berkeley would praise in the English press. Years after completing his studies with Boulanger, Berkeley described how frightened he was in 1973 to have her in the audience for a program of his music. One might expect such anxieties from a young composer just establishing himself in the world, but Berkeley was then seventy years old.
It was in Paris that Berkeley completed his transformation into an ideal pupil of Boulanger by converting to her religion. Early critics tended to assume that Boulanger’s influence predominated in Berkeley’s movement towards the Catholic Church, especially after the death of Berkeley’s own mother; Boulanger did not pressure her students to convert but made her own faith known to all her students (she gifted a copy of Pascal’s Pensées to the American composer Elliott Carter). But Berkeley’s attraction, about which Boulanger seems to have been reticent, had taken shape earlier. As a student at Oxford, Berkeley was already a connoisseur of French literature, acquiring a taste for decadent, Bohemian writers: Huysmans, Gide, Mauriac, Julien Green, authors unlikely to have been recommended by the decidedly un-Bohemian Nadia Boulanger. The Catholic world of interwar Paris, dominated by the intellectual influence of Jacques Maritain and his followers and their brand of neo-Thomism, offered no shortage of opportunities for Berkeley, with his literary interests; to read Péguy and Saint Teresa of Avila in this environment was decisive in bringing him to the Church. Berkeley’s Catholicism retained its Francophile character all his life; excerpts from Green were read at his Requiem Mass.
Berkeley’s education in the world of Maritain and Boulanger gave a particular ideological flavor to his version of musical modernism. For Berkeley, the musical ideal was an essentially classicist one, shaped by the example of Boulanger’s self-effacing devotion to craftsmanship and Maritain’s revival of a scholastic aesthetics emphasizing an objective beauty of clarity and proportion. Berkeley’s best works—the Serenade for Strings, the Piano Concerto, the Horn Trio, and Oboe Quartet—all exemplify this kind of excellence. Not a note is out of place; every effect is achieved with an absolute minimum of effort. The models of choice are Mozart and Stravinsky, not Wagner or Messiaen.
For a brief moment, this style—sober, neoclassical—had some claim to be the official compositional pratcice of the modern Catholic Church. The Apollonian restraint advocated by musicians such as Boulanger aligned with prevailing trends in liturgical music to deprecate anything that hinted of operatic extravagance, in accordance with early twentieth-century magisterial interventions by Pius X and Pius XI. Maritain came very close to crowning as the official musician of neo-Thomism the composer Arthur Lourie—an émigré Russian composer and epigone of Stravinsky whose works have been almost completely forgotten. But if the neoclassicism advocated by Boulanger and Maritain ever had a moment of unquestioned dominance, it passed quickly. There were always other competing traditions, and in England Berkeley would see his own popularity wax and wane according to changes in musical fashion.
“The most important things about a person are usually the least easily described,” said Berkeley’s pupil John Tavener. “Lennox’s expression, for instance, when, unknown to him, I have seen him after Mass at Westminster Cathedral.” Tavener’s testimony is typical of the recollections of Berkeley’s students, who have described the absolute integrity and sincerity of his musical vision and its congruence with his faith. Yet the circumstances of Berkeley’s life were such that he could not have been a “Catholic composer” in the same sense as Palestrina, or even in the same sense as Anton Bruckner. The appetite for a Catholic Modern style of liturgical music was too limited, the choirs that might have sung it too few. Berkeley’s liturgical works are in many ways the most personal works in his oeuvre, but they occupy only a small percentage of his output. The influence of Berkeley’s Catholicism can be found elsewhere among his works, but it is often very subtle. Writing about his Mont Juic, an orchestral suite based on Catalan dances written wote in collaboration with Britten, Berkeley noted parenthetically, “I have read somewhere that the great Carmelite mystic St. Teresa of Avila used at times to make her nuns dance.”
No one who loves Berkeley’s music could regret his dedication to the secular genres of art song or instrumental music; these are genres in which Berkeley excelled, and it would be an insult to his legacy to wish these works unwritten so that he could have written more liturgical music instead. And yet, sixty years after their composition, Berkeley’s Missa brevis and motets seem to represent a road not taken in the history of liturgical music: a style combining lyricism and a certain austerity, evoking interiority that Berkeley found in the writings of Pascal and Saint Teresa, Péguy and Julien Green. The appeal of this style appears to have been limited; as Britten and Herbert Howells received commission after commission to write Anglican liturgical music, Berkeley found himself mostly ignored.
The muted reception of Berkeley’s liturgical music corresponds to the fate of a whole generation of composers writing for the Catholic liturgy in the middle of the last century. Many of the qualities that set Berkeley apart from his Anglican contemporaries can be seen in other Catholic composers of the same generation in Europe and North America—composers whose works attempted in different ways to blend ancient traditions of chant and polyphony with the regnant neoclassical style of their time. It would be difficult to write a unified history of this music; these composers largely worked independently of each other, and many of them only wrote a few liturgical compositions, dedicating themselves mostly to secular concert music. To the extent that they constituted a unified movement, it is one that dissipated around the time of the Second Vatican Council, with some of its members giving up in protest and others finding ways to adapt to the times.
One of the few composers now writing Catholic liturgical music who belongs to this tradition is James MacMillan, a musician who has dedicated serious thought to the ambivalent legacy of musical modernism and the ways that it can be reconciled with the needs of the liturgy. His compositional temperament could not be more different from Lennox Berkeley’s; MacMillan’s music thrives on conflict and unexpected juxtapositions; it incorporates a kind of raw aggression that would have been impossible for the urbane Berkeley. But like Berkeley, MacMillan has had more success with sacred music in the concert hall than in the liturgy. After a series of public clashes with archdiocesan liturgical offices, MacMillan announced in 2017 that he had “given up the liturgy wars” and would no longer be writing congregational music for the Catholic liturgy. Although his choral music continues to be highly popular, including with Catholic choirs, works such as his Miserere or Christus vincit are stand-alone compositions designed to be usable either as motets in the liturgy or as religiously inspired concert pieces.
Last year, James MacMillan’s name appeared as the lead signatory on a letter sponsored by the Latin Mass Society appealing for the preservation of the Tridentine liturgy in the wake of Traditiones custodes. Deliberately evoking the history of the Agatha Christie indult, this new letter presented an “ecumenical and non-political” plea to Pope Francis to relax restrictions on the celebration of the usus antiquior liturgy. Among the other signatories of this new letter is Michael Berkeley, the son of Lennox Berkeley and now a distinguished composer in his own right. So far, the letter has received no response. The position of the modern church composer is more tenuous and equivocal now than it was in 1971; it is hard to imagine a prominent place for the music of MacMillan or Michael Berkeley either in the major institutions of Catholicism or in its traditionalist enclaves. At the moment, there seems to be no latter-day Agatha Christie waiting in the wings.
