William Harris: Faire is the Heaven

Like most of his successful contemporaries, Harris (1883 – 1973) took the Oxbridge / RCM career path. It is well documented that the state of English cathedral music in the Victorian period was very poor, and it was in the financially well-endowed, and well appointed Oxbridge college chapels that church music thrived, and to which the best musicians were, and largely still are, drawn. The chapels of King’s, St John’s, and Trinity in Cambridge, and Magdalen, Christ Church and New College in Oxford, are still home to some of the finest musical establishments in the UK.

Harris was a pupil of Wood at the RCM whilst being assistant organist of the Temple Church. Organist’s posts at Lichfield, New College and Christ Church followed before he returned to the RCM in 1923 as a lecturer in composition numbering Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten amongst his pupils. He was conductor of the London Bach Choir from 1926 – 33 and, knighted in 1954, ended his career as organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Compositions include several commissions from the Three Choirs Festival, as well as music, which he also conducted, for the coronations of 1937 and 1953.

Faire is the Heaven, perhaps his most enduring and best-loved piece, is a spacious and expansive piece for double choir, which exploits and challenges the pitch range of the human voice. The words are taken from a much longer poem by Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599), A Hymne of Heavenly Beautie. The setting of Spenser’s glorious words is sublime – managing to be colourful, calm, deeply reflective, reverent and hugely exciting all at once. Harris’s management of tonality, the frequent but subtle changes from major to minor and back, the skilful modulations and the slow harmonic pulse, allowing each new tonality to establish itself, all serve to encapsulate the joyous yet profound meaning of the text.

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins
Which all with golden wings are overdight.
And those eternall burning Seraphins
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright
Be the Angels and Archangels
Which attend on God's owne person without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

Notes by Peter Parfitt
©2011 Aberdeen Bach Choir