Samuel Wesley’s Missa de Spiritu Sancto (1784)

In April 2003 Woking Choral Society is planning to give only the second performance in the United Kingdom of the most substantial work by one of England’s finest and most important composers: Samuel Wesley. The story of his Missa de Spiritu Sancto (Mass of the Holy Spirit) of 1784, and how it came to lie buried and unknown for so long, is an extraordinary one. But before relating it, we need to answer the question many will ask - who was Samuel Wesley, and why is his music worth reviving?

Sam Wesley lived from 1766 to 1837, thus being born four years before Beethoven and outliving him by eleven years. He was the second son of Charles Wesley the hymn-writer, nephew of John Wesley the founder of Methodism, and father of the better-known Victorian cathedral organist and church composer Samuel Sebastian Wesley (with whom he is often confused). Samuel Wesley showed prodigious musical talent as a child (he wrote no fewer than three oratorios before he was twelve years old), and there never seems to have been any doubt that he would make a career in music. As well as being a prolific composer, at any rate early in life, he was the outstanding organist of his day, pioneering the concept of the virtuoso organ recital. His powers of extemporising were legendary: Edward Hodges described such a performance in 1829 as "truly astounding.....the most wonderful I ever heard, more even than I had before been capable of conceiving; the flow of melody, the stream of harmony, was so complete, so unbroken, so easy, and yet so highly wrought that I was altogether knocked off my stilts)".

Wesley was also a good violinist and later became increasingly active as a free-lance conductor and lecturer on music. He was widely read and had a far deeper knowledge of the composers of earlier times - Byrd and Palestrina in particular - than most other musicians of his generation. In his teens he chanced to hear a service at the Portuguese embassy chapel in London, and from this developed a life-long fascination with Gregorian chant and the music of the Roman rite - much more elaborate, as performed in the embassy chapel, than anything to be heard in Anglican churches at that time.

Wesley was involved in the impressario Salomon’s London performances of Haydn’s music in the 1790s, and at the turn of the century discovered the music of J S Bach, then totally unknown in Britain. Thereafter, he inspired and led a movement to intoduce Bach’s music (or what little of it was available) to English audiences. He and his close friend Vincent Novello gave recitals of the organ and violin works: he co-edited the first (and long the best) English edition of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues, conducted the first performance in England of the motet Jesu meine Freude, and attempted without success (because, like the Missa de Spiritu Sancto it was in Latin) to get the B Minor Mass published.

But in struggling for recognition Wesley laboured under some severe disadvantages. In the first place he had the misfortune to live at a particularly low point in the history of English music. The flourishing operatic tradition of early 18^th century London was long over, symphony concerts were spasmodic and dependent on the activities of a few impressarios like Johann Peter Salomon, who brought Haydn to London (the influence of Haydn is very apparent in Wesley). The regular concerts at places like Vauxhall Gardens (for which J C Bach had written much music) were no more: the choral society tradition, so strong in Victorian England, had barely begun and cathedral music was in a very low ebb. The long illness and madness of that great Handel-lover George III meant that there was very little Court patronage of musical activities. Nor were the rest of the aristocracy much interested in them. Music publishing businesses were small and only music of a fairly popular kind could expect to find a publisher.

However, the constraints imposed by this unfavourable background were as nothing to those arising from Wesley’s own difficult and uncompromising temperament, scandalous private life and recurrent ill-health. He appears to have been a manic-depressive, and suffered throughout his life to long periods of acute depression, often coming at critical junctures for his career. One such, from around 1787 to the mid 1790s, was a severe setback in his early maturity; another, in 1817, led to a year’s incarceration in a private lunatic asylum. In 1784, enchanted no doubt by the music and rituals of the embassy chapels, he became a Roman Catholic (at a time when Roman Catholics were still disenfranchised and barred from many public offices), leading to estrangement from his father and dismay among his other Methodist relations. Although he later maintained his conversion had been for musical rather than doctrinal reasons it was another cause of establishment wariness.

Despite his talent he failed to secure a permanent, salaried post until the end of his life and in consequence had to support two large families mainly by teaching. (Two, because his stormy first marriage ended in separation in 1810, following his liaison with his 16-year-old housekeeper, with whom he thereupon set up house and had five further children.) He was always impecunious, frequently under threat of imprisonment for debt, and had at times to resort to humdrum music-copying jobs and the generosity of friends to keep going. He could afford little time for composition and opportunities and resources to secure performances of major works were few.

Most of Wesley’s music has always been, and remains, unpublished. Much of it was written to Latin texts for the embassy chapels, which automatically ruled out mainstream recognition in England in the conditions of the time. In his teens he produced a number of excellent classical symphonies and concertos and throughout his life a quantity of fine organ and other instrumental music. His greatest work is his Confitebor Tibi Domine, a setting in Latin of psalm 110 for soloists, chorus and orchestra, written in 1799. This work, given by Woking Choral Society in 1986, had only one performance during his lifetime and had to wait until 1972 for its second. It is still unrecorded.

But the story of the Missa de Spiritu Sancto is even more remarkable. Shortly after he became a Catholic in 1784 at the age of 18, Wesley celebrated the event by writing a full-scale festal Mass in 21 movements, for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, lasting some 95 minutes. He dedicated it to Pope Pius VI and sent it off to the Vatican. It remained (unperformed) in the Vatican library until 1885, when an English Catholic layman, Hartwell Grissell, was able to obtain agreement to bring it back to London. On Mr Grissell’s death the manuscript was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Musem in Cambridge, but the world had to wait until 1997 before the Mass was finally published by Francis Routh and his Redcliffe Edition, and performed for the first time in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Even that performance contained one or two cuts.

On first hearing the work one’s immediate point of reference, as with the Confitebor, might be a Mozart or Haydn mass. However, it quickly becomes apparent that there are other influences present - the English and Roman traditions of polyphonic writing (particularly Byrd and Palestrina) and Gregorian chant are the most obvious. Given the mastery of counterpoint it is also hard to believe that Wesley had not already come under the sway of J S Bach, of whose music he was later to become such a notable advocate. But Wesley, even at 18, is no mere wearer of other people’s clothes. These influences no more dominated him thanVivaldi’s music, say, dominated Bach. The flavour of the final compound, vivid and alive with the sheer joy of music-making, is inimitably and unmistakeably Wesley’s own.

Nick Steinitz

© 2002 (based on an article written in 1986)