Composition
Herbert Howells (1892-1983) composed Hymnus Paradisi privately and in grief after the death of his nine-year-old son Michael from meningitis in 1935. He kept the work secret for fifteen years, performing it only once privately for his close friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, before its premiere at the Three Choirs Festival in 1950. The long delay reflects the work's origin as private mourning rather than public composition: Howells needed to distance himself from the grief before he could share the music with the world.
Biblical Text
Psalm 23 - "The LORD is my shepherd" - is set in the third movement as the work's emotional center. Howells's setting of "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me" is shaped entirely by his knowledge that his nine-year-old son had walked that valley. The pastoral imagery of the psalm - green pastures, quiet waters, the restored soul - is set with a tenderness that carries personal weight beyond any abstract theological statement.
Psalm 121:1 - "I lift up my eyes to the mountains - where does my help come from?" - opens the work with a question that the rest of the composition attempts to answer. Revelation 21:23 - "The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp" - provides the eschatological vision that the finale reaches toward.
Creator and Legacy
Howells's Hymnus Paradisi is widely considered one of the finest large-scale sacred choral works of the 20th century, comparable to Britten's War Requiem and Tippett's A Child of Our Time in its combination of personal genesis and public reach. Its setting of Psalm 23 is the most profoundly personal treatment of that psalm in the choral tradition - a father's meditation on his dead child's passage through the dark valley, set by a composer who had been there with him in imagination if not in reality. The work's combination of Anglican choral tradition, Howells's characteristic harmonic language (influenced by Ravel and Vaughan Williams), and the weight of private grief gives it a quality of authentic testimony that distinguishes it from more formally crafted requiems.