Three hundred years of music at the Three Choirs Festival

International soloists and conductors, the Philharmonia – one of the UK’s finest professional symphony orchestras – chamber music ensembles, young performers and of course singers in abundance take up residence for the Three Choirs Festival, which this year celebrates it 300th anniversary and takes place 25 July – 1 August.

The original ‘Three Choirs’ were members of the cathedral choirs of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester, who got together with amateur music-lovers in the pubs and hostelries of each city to perform secular repertoire that might not have been entirely appropriate for the cathedral choirstalls. The precise origins of these ‘music meetings’ are lost in the mists of time, but research by Ivor Atkins, organist of Worcester Cathedral a century ago in the era of Edward Elgar, dated the first formal gathering for two days of morning cathedral services and evening concerts at 1715.

Since then the tradition has continued until the present day, rotating in turn between the three cities and interrupted only by the two world wars. The popularity in the mid-18th century of large-scale works such as Handel’s Messiah meant that the cathedral choirs of men and boy choristers had to be augmented by female singers, recruited from London and the north of England where the choral tradition was more established. By Victorian times Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester had their own choral societies whose members could join the cathedral musicians to form the Three Choirs Festival Chorus.

It wasn’t just the numbers of participating musicians that increased over the centuries; extra days were added and the festival has steadily grown in scope to the point where eight full days are now packed with events, including talks, walks, exhibitions, drama, lunches and an extensive Three Choirs Plus community programme as well as concerts and daily cathedral services.

CHARITABLE PURPOSES

In the days before telethons and fun runs, let alone online donations, charity fund-raising was an important aspect of Three Choirs Festivals. Thomas Bisse, Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral, preached a sermon published under the title of ‘A Rationale on Cathedral Worship or Choir Service’ at the ‘Anniversary Meeting of the Choirs of Worcester Gloster and Hereford, Sept. 7, 1720’; a few years later Bisse suggested that the music meetings would be enhanced by charity collections for the assistance of clergy widows and orphans, along the lines of the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy held at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. One of the first beneficiaries of the Three Choirs charity was ‘Posthumous Whitney, son of Hester Whitney, widow of the vicar of Clifford’, whose apprenticeship to a local barber and wigmaker was paid for out of the fund.

The Festival Charity for 2015 is British Red Cross, chosen for its humanitarian focus on helping people in the UK and around the world to be cope with disaster, whether on a personal or a local scale.

MONEY TROUBLES

The festival’s finances have not always been very secure. During the turbulent years after the revolutions in America and France, the rise of Napoleon and war between Britain and France, funds were running low and an appeal in the Hereford Journal for additional Stewards to underwrite the festival costs met with no responses until the Duke of Norfolk offered to enlist a large number of singers and instrumentalists to give two concerts in aid of the festival at his Holm Lacy country house. Embarrassed, the local gentry decided to chip in after all to enable the festival to go ahead without the support of the Holm Lacy concerts.

BRICKS AND MORTAR

Hereford is the smallest of the Three Choirs cathedrals, and became even smaller in 1786 when the west end of the nave collapsed, and was reconstructed one bay shorter than previously. It was at Hereford in 1834 that the organist Samuel Sebastian Wesley first moved the choir and orchestra out of the choir area and into the nave for concert performances. Audiences were packed into every nook and cranny; a newspaper report on a performance of Messiah in 1868 describes people standing or sitting on the tombs and on the steps of the gallery – no Health & Safety regulations in those days!

Maintenance of a medieval building such as Hereford Cathedral is an on-going task; the roof is currently undergoing major repairs but this year’s festival will benefit from a splendid new lighting scheme which has just been completed, illuminating the glories of its architecture as never before.