This evening service on Sunday 13th August will look at some of the more interesting monuments and graves in our wonderful churchyard through pictures, words and music, and tell their stories. A prayerful and interesting service, we welcome all who would like to attend.
We will look at a slideshow of graves of some of the oldest inhabitants; the oldest graves; graves of some notable residents; and some notable benefactors to the Church, considering also the comfort that belief in Christ gives the bereaved.
I wrote about John Sanders last month in connection with ‘The Reproaches’. We’ll sing his responses on this occasion. They were written in 1983 to mark the centenary of the death of Richard Wagner. There is much use of the Dresden Amen with its characteristic motive of a rising scale, extensively used by Wagner in his opera Parsifal. This gives the music a very positive feel. I can’t remember whether Parsifal is a particularly positive opera – a bit of a marathon to find out!
The anthem by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) is ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead’, a setting of words from the Gospel of St Luke, Chapter 24 verses 5-7. These are the words of the “two men .. in shining garments” who appeared to the women who first discovered the stone rolled away from Christ’s tomb, so highly relevant to this time of Easter. Stanford composed this work in about 1890, three years after he had been appointed Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge in addition to his post as Organist of Trinity College. This might have been quite enough for most people, but Stanford had been invited by George Grove (of music dictionary fame) to become involved with the Royal College of Music from its opening in 1883 as composition tutor and orchestral director. It could be said that among his lesser known achievements was as teacher of many of the leading composers of the first half of the twentieth century, including Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, John Ireland and Vaughan Williams. However, in attempting to get them to follow in his own Brahmsian tradition, Stanford seems to have ensured that they developed their own voice – success indeed. And then, of course, there was his own composition and conducting. Stanford’s compositions were not limited to the church music on which his reputation is mostly based today. A view that all is not necessarily lost for his other work can be found in The New Grove: “his two last and arguably best operas, The Critic (1916) and The Travelling Companion (1919), had still not attracted the attention of professional opera companies by the mid-1990s.”