1872-1880 – Welsh ‘Hwyl’ and other Accents           

A remarkable event took place at the Crystal Palace on 7 July 1872.  This was a contest for Choirs from across England and Wales, arranged by August Manns.  For me, the most outstanding Choir came from South Wales, mainly because their unique sound, their ‘hywl’ (as they call it), resonated within me richly.  The large audience gave them a tumultuous ovation, and it was a very emotional experience for everyone – singers, orchestra, audience alike.

It had additional meaning for me because a number of people known to me through various owners, and most especially the Richardson family, were all together at this one moment in time.  It was an example of ‘musical time’ and ‘clock time’ co-existing.

(Revd Hugh Price Hughes)

Sitting among the Richardson family members was a young Wesleyan minister from South Wales, the Revd Hugh Price Hughes. He got his entry ticket from the famous Baptist preacher, the Revd Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who lived close to the Crystal Palace at Beulah Hill, Sydenham. Hugh, when preaching often became excited, and he easily fell into that Welsh ‘hwyl’ tone of voice (catching the wind of the Spirit, as a ship’s sail catches the wind), so he was thrilled to get a taste of it in this great festival. Hugh was ‘between stations’, on his way to a new appointment in Brighton, leaving Dover behind, where he had been lodging in the home of none other than my friend John Richardson, recently released from Norwich Castle Debtors Goal!

What a counterpoint of family connections was this!  I could almost hear the harmony yet to be expressed and sounded.

During the interval, Hugh Price Hughes overheard John’s nephew (Samuel Richardson) speaking to a young couple (George & Eliza Pratt) in a strong Norfolk accent. They sounded just like his landlord and landlady in Dover. ‘Why, to be sure’, said Samuel, ‘John’s my uncle. He came here with Christopher and me,years back.  He’s a fiddler. He’d have loved this!’   ‘And look down there!’, he went on, pointing to me ‘Isn’t that uncle John’s fiddle? The one he played in our chapels back home? It’s the same dark wood.  Looks like it’s the same bad neck too!’

At a much later period in the 1960s & 70s, when Harvey Richardson (John’s great-grandson) was playing me well, I could detect in my body sounds and voices that had reached me from across the Crystal Palace grand auditorium a whole century earlier.  The distinctive sounds from these family conversations had reverberated and ‘gone out’ towards me, and somehow they later resonated powerfully in my frame while I was being handled and played sensitively by one of their descendants.  There was such a ‘family likeness’ there, which some people might describe as ‘inherited musicality’. Is that a kind of spirituality too?

(Roberts Caradog)

I picked up other musical accents at this historic festival. There is no doubt that, although the South Wales Choral Union sang magnificently under the direction of Roberts Caradog, the instruments of the orchestra accompanying (myself included) did not come across well.  I have often wondered why.  I now know that the Welsh ‘sound’ and the Welsh way of musical expression differs from the traditional Germanic manner adopted when playing Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, or even Wagner & Brahms.  A different approach is needed, and we instruments have not always been sensitive to it.

During the interval Samuel Richardson spotted that my ‘owner’ was a young woman, and it had been to her I was now ‘on loan’ from August Manns.  Annabelle Lightfoot had been a star pupil at the Royal Academy of Music, and was now leading the Second Violins in the Crystal Palace Orchestra.

(J B Lightfoot)

But most interesting to me, Annabelle was the niece of Professor J B Lightfoot, the Hulsean Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, later Bishop of Durham. If I’m not mistaken, I detected in her approach to playing something of the struggles and conflicts in theology tackled by her famous uncle.   

All this reverberates with my persistent feeling that theological issues are reflected in the way we play our music, and especially by the different ways by which we are heard and received.  As I have already noted, there has been, and still is, deep suspicion and defensiveness in the English voice which can be detected when traditional understanding is challenged, especially if that challenge emanates from Germany.

It is interesting that Mrs Humphrey Ward’s popular novel ‘Robert Elsmere’, much loved by Revd Hugh Price Hughes, about a young clergyman with radical views, also portrays a young woman sensitive to modern theological developments, who happens to be a violinist.  It could easily be my Annabelle.

If this English antipathy towards both German music and German theological ideas rings true, is it not possible that the power of the Welsh ‘hywl’ with its rich music-making at the Crystal Palace in 1872 was also something of a threat to the ‘respectable’ English traditionalism which permeated the London music ‘scene’ of the day?  I know that the liberal-minded Connop Thirwall, the Bishop of St David’s, was in the audience at Crystal Palace, enthusiastically supporting the South Wales Choral Union.

And then, in 1880, things changed dramatically for us both and we set off on yet another unexpected, and a wholly different, adventure – across the Atlantic to America!.