Music notes: V. Sunday of Easter

2020.05.10

The Gospel for this week – in which Jesus calls himself ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’ – inspired the Collect of the Day and two hymns [457 and 487] that will be sung Sunday.

The better known of these is ‘The Call’, set to music most famously by 20th-century British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams as part of Five Mystical Songs on poems by 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert (we hear the original solo version rather than the congregational arrangement). Each stanza begins with a list of epithets for Christ, then unpacks them in surprising ways: a road that refreshes rather than tiring; a truth that reconciles rather than dividing; a life that ends death rather than the reverse; a feast that keeps improving, rather than cloying or harming due to excess, as it proceeds; a host so generous and so desirous to serve that he, like the royal feast-givers of the parables, goes to extraordinary lengths to invite and make fit guests.

The opening hymn [518], ‘Christ is made the sure foundation’, is the second half of Hymn 519, ‘Blessèd city, heavenly Salem’, the two parts of which have been used at Morning and Evening Prayer on the Anniversary of the Dedication of a Church since at least the 9th century; it draws upon the image of Christ as the cornerstone of the Church found in Sunday’s magnificent selection from I Peter (part of a series from that Epistle likely addressed to the newly baptized, fittingly read in Eastertide). Perhaps the other greatest British composer since the Renaissance, Henry Purcell, furnishes our musical setting, taken from the concluding ‘Alleluia’ of his anthem ‘O God, thou art my God’. The prelude is one of Purcell’s handful of surviving works for the organ.