Herbert Howells Requiem

Though Howells wrote his Requiem in contented times, it would go on to become associated with personal tragedy, as Jeremy Pound explains

-  Jeremy Pound

The work

How different might Herbert Howells’s career have been had it not been for the antics of music critic Robert Lorenz at the first performance of the composer’s Second Piano Concerto? Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society and conducted by Malcolm Sargent with the notable Bach pianist Harold Samuel as soloist, the premiere in London on 27 April 1925 was a high-profile one. And so, when Lorenz stood up at the end and loudly exclaimed ‘Thank God that’s over!’, that moment hit the headlines too.

Howells was not blessed with the sort of robust character that could shake off such humiliation lightly, even if the work did also have its notable supporters. Confidence shattered, he started to turn his back on the concert hall and direct his sights increasingly elsewhere for inspiration – not least to the composers of the past and, significantly, to the world of sacred music.

This shift in direction would lead in 1932 to his Requiem, for which he took his teacher Walford Davies’s 1915 A Short Requiem as his model. A fast worker, Howells is believed to have all but finished it within four days. It was intended for the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and its choirmaster Boris Ord, but for some reason Howells never sent it, at which point the Requiem’s trail goes cold. Three years later, however, tragedy befell the composer that would turn his world on its head, give the writing of his Requiem an eery prescience and later lead to a commonly but mistakenly held belief as to when and why he wrote it.