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Among the music choices for the royal wedding, one in particular was a stroke of genius
Each element in a royal occasion like yesterday's wedding in Westminster Abbey is iconic. The music is chosen with particular care from the varied treasures of Anglican tradition to express the characters involved, their faith, and their place in the national drama.
When I worked there and we came to review the funeral service for the Queen Mother, we knew we must represent the fortitude of this remarkable Queen consort through the war. So we inserted into the prayers an ancient text to music by Sir William Harris. "Holy is the true light … lending radiance to them that endured in the heat of the conflict."
For the coronation's 50th anniversary we needed to capture the Queen's sense of self-sacrificial calling. We asked Jonathan Harvey to set the prayer "Remember, O Lord, what thou hast wrought in us and not what we deserve: and as thou hast called us to thy service, make us worthy of our calling …" His music embodied the monarch's aspiration to kingly, priestly service.
The choices yesterday were made with care and imagination.
The always accessible and tuneful John Rutter, in characteristically luscious vein – This is the day that the Lord hath made – certainly represented the couple's reflectively down-to-earth and easy-going style. The young composer Paul Mealor was a nod to Wales – he lives near the couple on Anglesey – and to St Andrews, where it was first performed and the couple first met. Its style – architecturally serene – will no doubt have pleased a royal father for whom music and architecture go hand in hand. Mealor's text, Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est (Where there is love and loving-kindness, God is there) – usually sung during the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday – was very apt. It doubtless resonated for the Queen with her visit to the abbey – a week previously – to distribute Maundy money to citizens whose selflessness transforms communities. It was also a strong reminder of the service that will increasingly be asked of bride and groom – future King and Queen – as equally it celebrated the way their love already reveals the sacrificial nature of all true love.
It was surely, however, the unexpected inclusion of Hubert Parry's setting of Blest pair of sirens that was the stroke of pure genius.
John Milton's ode is of course among the finest in the English language. Its choice – like the music before and after the service – made a strong statement about the depth of the national tradition of which the couple are the youngest icons. Equally its threefold exploration of heaven's concordant life, the often discordant nature of sinful humanity and the possibility for a new marriage of earth and heaven both witnessed to the promise at the heart of the Christian story and to the newlyweds' own sense of their spiritual union.
But herein also lay the reality of another union through the bonds of death, which inevitably pressed in on the joy of the wedding. For as the choir implored listeners to "keep in tune with heav'n, till God ere long / To his celestial consort us unite, / To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light," many will have shed a tear for the mother already on another shore and in a greater light.
"Pray, love, remember" suggests Ophelia. As Shakespeare's bust gazed expectantly from Poets' Corner, and chorister voices soared, the happy couple – briefly enjoying the intimacy of a saint's shrine – were themselves reconnecting all three for us in a reflective moment of renewal and hope.