Once again, however, he became restless, quarrelled with his employer, and, having given the opening recital on a new organ in Tavistock Parish Church, toyed with the idea of moving there, tempted again no doubt by the fishing prospects. This proved to be only a brief flirtation and Yorkshire after all was not without attractive rivers. It was while alone on a day’s fishing in the North Riding in December 1847 that he had a serious accident in which he sustained a compound fracture of his left leg. The combination of shock and infection endangered his life for a time and he had to be nursed in The Black Swan at Helmsley for almost six months. During this time he composed his masterpiece miniature anthem ‘Cast me not away’, which included the Psalmist’s plea ‘That the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice’, and started to write his A Few Words ... He was left permanently lame, although his organ pedal work was not hampered.
It was about this time that he applied for the professorship of music at Oxford but, as with some other attempts to obtain a university chair, was passed over. Instead, he accepted in 1849 an invitation to become organist of Winchester Cathedral, aware that the Itchen was one of England’s premier trout streams and that Winchester College would provide an education for his sons. The dean and chapter were pleased to engage him but they were somewhat wary, as his reputation had gone before him, and on his arrival he was summoned to a chapter meeting at which those parts of the Statutes which referred to the duties of the organist were read to him. More than this would be needed, however, to keep him in order and maintain the peace.
There was ample scope for the employment of Wesley’s gifts and reforming zeal since the Winchester music was in a sorry state. But although he was able to negotiate a good salary (augmented by appointment also as organist of the college, then as the first Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music), and although the dean and chapter found £2,500 to purchase the organ built for the 1851 Great Exhibition, his behaviour was erratic. He was not respectful and often downright discourteous to the canons. Moreover, the choir’s performance was not improving and, in 1857, the chapter ordered an enquiry into the reasons for this. These were not difficult to find: of the 780 choral services held during the previous year, he had been present at only 397. He was now a prima donna who needed a national stage and, when not away from Winchester, was often to be found casting a fly on the Itchen. The organ was left in the hands of a 14-year-old pupil and, through lack of training, the choristers were well below an acceptable standard. Some of the lay clerks were drunkards, others were insolent and rude and sometimes deliberately sang wrong notes. Wesley was admonished for neglect of duty, but this made little difference and further censure was required two years later.
More constructively, his 16-year-long stay at Winchester was marked by the composition of some good anthems. ‘Ascribe unto the Lord’ (1853), ‘Praise the Lord my soul’ (1861), ‘Give the King Thy judgement, O God’ (for the wedding of the future King Edward VII in 1863) and most notably by the publication of his Twelve Anthems (1853) dedicated to the dean, Thomas Garnier, and considered by many to be the outstanding collection of nineteenth-century church music. ‘Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace’ and ‘Wash me throughly’ are still in constant use – and deservedly, since they have deep spiritual power. Always suspicious of music publishers, whom he believed to cheat him of his dues, Wesley recruited a long list of subscribers. This included most of the eminent names in church music at that time and more or less covered the cost of the many plates required for the printing. Thereafter his creative power declined.
In 1865 Wesley was asked to serve as an assessor for the appointment of a new organist for Gloucester Cathedral and, at the end of the interviews, startled the dean and chapter with the announcement, ‘Gentlemen, I have decided to accept the post myself.’ The dean explained to a former lay clerk afterwards: ‘Dr. Wesley is fond of fishing and he hears that there is some good fishing to be had about here.’ Another attraction was the Three Choirs Festival and, since this was due to be held at Gloucester that year, he was immediately appointed conductor. This involved responsibility for the organizing of the programme (which he did for another two Festivals held at Gloucester), but he lacked the flair of an impresario and his choice of anthems and oratorios was sometimes too ambitious for the resources at his disposal. Moreover, his conducting was not always at an acceptable standard, but there were occasions when his own organ playing was a Festival highlight, and the performance for the first time in 1871 of Bach’s St Matthew Passion was considered a triumph, even though the audience for it was disappointingly poor. At this Festival Wesley displayed his versatility and the catholicity of his taste by conducting at an evening concert music from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The publication in 1872 of The European Psalmist, a compilation of 615 hymn tunes, including 143 of his own, was a remarkable achievement though it proved to be a quarry of material from which other church musicians could mine, rather than a working hymn book.
Wesley’s final years, spent at Gloucester, were comparatively tranquil. As he grew older his proposals for cathedral reform became ever more radical and he proposed to a distinguished music critic of the time, Joseph Bennett, the possibility of conducting a campaign to abolish all cathedral chapters and precentors and replace them with a small staff of what he pointedly called ‘working clergymen’. organists should be given sole responsibility for the music, and the capitular funds should be directed to a central fund to be allocated to cathedrals according to need. In common with many of his musician colleagues, he had evidently heard too many poor sermons because he also proposed the setting up of a London-based College of Preachers, from which every cathedral would be supplied with a monthly preacher in residence who would have something worthwhile to say and the skill to communicate it. The campaign never got beyond the ideas stage and would have been quickly rejected if it had. He seems to have given up hope of raising the standard of his own choir.
With advancing years Wesley’s health gradually deteriorated and he became increasingly eccentric, not least in an obsessive concern about his diet. But he continued to derive great pleasure from angling and shooting. He was distraught when his adored bull terrier Rob died, and he conducted a solemn funeral for the animal in his garden, which many called Dr Wesley’s Wilderness. On Christmas Day 1875 he played the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah after the blessing at Evensong – a departure from his usual practice of playing or extemporizing one of Bach’s organ fugues – and this proved to be the last time he played the cathedral organ. He died in April of the following year and, after a simple funeral service in Gloucester Cathedral, was buried in the old cemetery at Exeter, next to the grave of his only daughter Mary, who had died when only nine weeks old.
5. Nineteenth-Century Hymn Writers and Composers
There was little hymn singing in the Church of England before about 1820. An edition of Tate and Brady’s late seventeenth-century versification of the psalms included some to secular folk tunes but this was not sufficient to relieve the general austerity of Sunday worship. The explanation of this lack of hymnody lies in the fact that at the Reformation the Church of England was influenced by the theology of John Calvin, rather than that of Martin Luther. This was so tied to the Bible that it became possible to use only biblical material for worship purposes. Thus Bible readings, psalms, biblical canticles and prayers echoing the biblical themes formed the staple provided by the Book of Common Prayer. Anthems, when used, consisted of aspirations or affirmations drawn from the Bible. This was in marked contrast to the situation in those parts of Europe, most notably Germany, where the embracing of Lutheranism, whose handling of the Bible was less rigid, allowed the flowering of what became a great tradition of mighty hymns, including some written by Luther himself. These would eventually enrich the worship and devotion of Christians everywhere. Bach’s Passions and his Christmas Oratorio have many Arias with non-scriptural words.
The breakthrough in England was created by the Methodists who abandoned Calvinist theology and came to regard music as well as preaching as a major weapon in their campaign to evangelize the English people and to rescue the Church of England from the pit of formality and complacency into which it had descended. Hymns, in common with worship as a whole, were seen as ‘a converting ordinance’ and the sight of huge congregations,