The Shakespeare Concert attracts a full house to the retrochoir
as the three small chapels behind the high altar at Southwark Cathedral are
called. John Merbecke was tried here for heresy in 1543, condemned to death by
burning, but let off because he was ‘but a musitian’ who knew no better. Arthur
Smith tells the story of Dickens’ relationship with Shakespeare with more
drollery than I have written into his script. The singing cellist pleases the
crowd with her singing. Some women are curious to know her age. The voice is mature,
but the physique is a child’s.
I attend a concert given by four West country choirs of
serving and retired police officers. The compere from the Avon and Somerset
Constabulary tells us the constable singing the baritone solos has been trying
in vain for years to pass his sergeant’s exams. ‘You ain’t done your chances no
‘arm at all there, son,’ he says as the baritone’s long final note of The
Impossible Dream disappears down the nave of Wells Cathedral. I have become
very keen on the police and have had my photo taken by them on the A129
eastwards out of London. The picture costs me £60, but I reflect that I would
only otherwise have spent it on a new set of lute strings.
The singing cellist’s godfather is be made mayor of Waltham
Forest and he has asked us to accompany him, a former professional operatic
tenor, in a lute song. My strings are old and liable to snap, but costly to
replace. This is the disadvantage with unusual instruments. A set of strings
for a guitar costs a tenner, for lute six times that. I have taken a job teaching
German and French at a town 30 miles out of London to pay for them, or rather
the police photo opportunity. We go out work to pay the police who wouldn’t be
necessary if we didn’t go out to work. Mrs Jones says I’d be better off staying
in.
The job is where the composer William Byrd went to live with
his family in 1593, an obscure place, so he thought, where he could be a
recusant Roman Catholic at a time of widespread persecution and harassment from
Protestant zealots. But he reckoned without the local Anglican church warden who
repeatedly reported him and his wife for non-attendance at church, incurring
hundreds of pounds in fines. No one was harmed in either his case or mine. Self-righteous
bigotry was a cover, then as now, for robbing ordinary citizens.
The passionate music Byrd composed for the Catholic church
is performed rarely even today but is given movingly by the Cardinall’s Musick
at the Wigmore Hall. The choir, which won the Gramophone record of the year in
2010 for its Byrd, is currently on a nationwide tour performing all Byrd’s once
banned Latin music. Conductor Andrew Carwood delivers what he identifies as
Byrd’s masterpiece, Infelix Ego, with gutsy fire. I am drawn in to Byrd’s
clandestine world by the crushing intensity of his long, brave statement.
