Thomas Merritt‘s lost Sacred Cantata.
A few days before Malcolme Arnold premiered his “Salute to Thomas Merritt” at Truro Cathedral in 1968 he was contacted by Jack Hill of Penzance to say that he had possesssion of the score for a Cantata by Merritt that was previously thought to have been lost: “The Shepherd of Israel”. Malcolme Arnold met with Jack Hill and shown the score. He was suitably impressed and advised that it should be revived but this was never followed up. WIth the support of the Cornish Music Guild, Jory Bennett followed this up in 1985 and eventually tracked down the lost cantata at Methodist Church in St Just. The Cornish Music Guild subsequently published the Cantata in 1988 as part of the 80th anniversary celebrations of Merritt held at Illogan.
Open downloadable pdf of the music score
Introduction to” Shepherd of Israel” by Jory Bennett:
“In addition to the Carols, Merritt composed many other pieces . . . ‘ ‘ 1 In 1968, the 60th anniversary of Thomas Merritt’s death, a memorial concert was performed in Truro Cathedral. It was conducted by the contemporary composer Malcolm Arnold. The concert included a number of Merritt works which had not been performed for many years. In spite of the popular success of this event, interest in the wider conspectus of Merritt’s music has not been sustained these past 20 years nor has the stature of the composer ever been satisfactorily assessed. Our conventional knowledge of Thomas Merritt derives almost entirely from a pamphlet published by the former Camborne-Redruth Urban District Council 2 which, for biographical information, adheres closely to Merritt’s obituary in The Cornish Post & Mining News.3 Our appreciation of the music is scanty and rarely extends beyond a familiarity with the two sets of Christmas carols. Merritt’s hundred or so other works, having failed to win permanent affection, are now extremely scarce or lost altogether. It was against this somewhat unpromising background that The Shepherd of Israel, the largest composition by Merritt now extant, came to light.
Malcolm Arnold, who carried out an intensive search for Merritt scores with the help of the Cornwall Rural Music School, had concluded in his anniversary programme note: ‘It seems to me to be a tragedy that the sacred cantata which he wrote appears to have been lost’. 4 However only days before his concert, this comment was rendered obsolete by reports of the work’s extraordinary reappearance. Local newspapers confirm that Jack Hill, a retired gas company workman, of Treneere, Penzance, had written to Dr. Arnold to tell him he owned a copy of the ‘lost’ cantata. Mr. Hill, like Merritt, had been a tin miner in his younger days and had actually studied organ under the composer’s tuition. Dr. Arnold arranged to meet him after the anniversary concert and on seeing the score said that he thought it should be revived: ‘It looked very good to me. [It] had some of the beauty of the carols in it.’ 5 Regrettably, this suggestion was not followed up and neither was a copy of the score deposited with the County Music Librarian. The Shepherd of Israel slipped back into obscurity.
The next part of this account must be, necessarily, autobiographical. I cannot pinpoint when I first learnt about Thomas Merritt and heard his famous carols, but my concern for his neglected works began in 1985. Prompted by references to Merritt pieces which were unfamiliar to me and by local memories of the anniversary concert (which I was too young to attend) I decided to investigate whether, even at this late stage, it would be possible to locate missing scores: Ihe Shepherd of Israel especially. Dr. Arnold encouraged me but thought it was impossible to research Merritt when away from Cornwall. With the foolhardiness of youth I though otherwise. Now I am not so sure. Retracing his steps a little, I discovered that the number of Merritt works in the British Library was indeed disappointingly small and this was true of several other major library sources. I next wrote to Cornish newspapers asking for assistance with my research. No replies were forthcoming. Just as my quest began to seem hopeless, copies of miscellaneous press coverage relating to Merritt and his pupils provided fresh clues. These cuttings were supplied from the files of the Institute of Cornish Studies at Pool.6 It transpired that Malcolm Arnold’s correspondent in 1968 had obtained his vocal score of the cantata at the time the work was sung to mark the amalgamation of the Parade-Street and Richmond Methodist Chapel choirs in Penzance in the 1930s. There was also a reference, perhaps to a subsequent occasion, when, again at Parade-Street, Mr. W.G. Osborne had conducted what was believed to have been the last performance of the work, just before the second world war. Following the closure of the chapel, copies of the cantata were transferred to the Methodist Church at St. Just-in-Penwith. Were they still there by any chance, I wondered? What condition would they be in? I wrote at once to the minister at St. Just, The Reverend Philip Williams, and waited anxiously for a reply.
I did not wait long. Replying return-of-post from Wesley Manse, South Place, St. Just, he corroborated my sources of information by saying that the chapel still retained a set of Merritt cantata copies and they were in good order. He kindly agreed to place one of them on loan. In the preparation of this new edition of the original printed vocal score this generous gesture is gratefully acknowledged.
Meanwhile, some of the biographical ground was being cleared. As a schoolboy in Truro I remember my organ teacher Donald Little saying that he had taught a ‘descendant’ of Thomas Merritt. A letter to him elicited the address of Margaret Philp, a great-niece of the composer. She in turn introduced me to her brother and sister-in-law, Gerald and Hazel Luke of Redruth (a great-nephew and great-neice by marriage respectively). The Lukes told me that the present family possessed no ready archive of Merritt memorabilia but Mr. Luke, who turned out to be something of a local-history sleuth, kindly offered to make a search of the local studies centre. His investigation bore priceless fruit in the form of a newspaper interview given by Merritt in 1907 it adds significantly to all previous biographical outlines. “Music is meat and drink to me: and whatever I have done has been mainly by patient study and hard work. When a boy I used to delight in whistling airs of my own composition, and at nine years of age I sang in a choir; and I am indebted to one or two friends for the foundation upon which I have built.” 8 This was how the composer summed up his outlook and career.
Thomas Merritt’s life was a triumph of success over adversity, a story given added poignancy by physical frailty and social deprivation. He was born on 26th October 1863 at Broad Lane in the West Cornwall parish of Illogan, one of five surviving children of Thomas Merritt (1837 -75) and Mary his wife (nee Buddie). Both sides of the family were long-domiciled in Illogan and, like many Cornish families, were intensely music-loving though musically illiterate. Thomas Merritt Senior was a tributor at Carn Brea copper mine, ‘one of the late Captain Teague’s best miners’. 9 The composer’s formal education was more limited than was usual for a miner’s son. He enrolled at Pool Board School as a child but at the age of 11, on the sudden death of his father, Thomas was forced to leave and go to work to support the family (his mother was expecting the birth of her last baby at the time). In the steps of his father, Merritt began work at Carn Brea Mine; thereafter he was employed at the Tolvaddon Tin Streaming Works. It is alleged that he never complained of this arduous physical labour as a boy and in later years was never ashamed to acknowledge these connections with mining. IO
It has often been asserted that Merritt was a self-taught musician, his only formal training amounting to about six months of lessons at the age of 18 or 19 from a local ‘professor’ Humphry Broad of Redruth. In essence this statement is true. But what of the ‘one or two friends’ to whom Merritt attributed so much of his success? After referring to Broad who gave him ‘his first few lessons’ II Merritt’s interviewer provides this further insight: “… the greater assistance and encouragement he received, was from Mr. W.H. Trelease (himself a composer) who now holds a profitable position as a mine manager in Italy; and he was also benefited by hints and advice from Mr. W.G. Trevethan (now of Liskeard) whose many-sided mental qualities were not fully developed, though known to those who, like myself, worked with him and knew him intimately for years.” 12
Such was Merritt’s dedication to music that at about the age of 20 he was able to leave the employment of the tin streams and earn a living as a musician. Untill his final illness Merritt’s adult life seems to have been a constant whirr of musical activities; doubtless, like many a practical musician, in the daily round of teaching, playing and conducting he found his feet as a composer more or less out of necessity. During the week he journeyed many miles in the Redruth-Camborne area mainly teaching children the piano in their own homes on their return from school. (He was a gentle person but his lessons were strict.) On Saturdays he taught in the old Merritt-family home in Broad Lane where, cared for by his mother, he lived throughout his life. On Sundays he presided at the organ in chapel. He held a number of local organ posts in succession: his first appointment was at the Illogan Bible Christian Chapel in Chilli Road (now demolished) when 22 years old; in 1889 he moved to Illogan United Methodist Free Church, Illogan Highway (bears plaque); and latterly, from 1901, he was organist at Illogan Wesleyan Church. In addition, on many Sunay afternoons, he conducted a small orchestra at Voguebeloth Wesleyan Sunday School where there was no organ. 13 The demands of such an itinerary on someone whose health was so poor can be readily imagined. Furthermore, it can only be assumed that much burning of midnight oil went into maintaining his growing reputation as a composer. Although his music was written in the course of a hectic career it appears not ill-considered: ‘He does all his compositions on paper after committing the words to memory and studying light and shade, feeling and metaphors, in the verses’. 14 As Leonard Truran has eloquently portrayed: “By candelight in his cottage he began to compose: and the music poured forth – oratorios, anthems, a sacred cantata, carols and hymns. Soon in the mines, on the surface and underground, his vigorous and joyful music swelled: the dark, dingy world of the underground levels, the warm, consoling atmosphere of the inns, and the fervent, religious air of the chapels, rang and resounded with his stirring compositions. 15
These spirited performances were much curtailed, of course, with the onset of the tin-slump in the 1890s and the consequent mass exodus of Cornish mining families abroad (Merritt’s lost song ‘Goodbye to the Cornish Miners’ was surely a product of this period) 16 But overseas, Cornish men and women never forgot Merritt’s music. To this day the far-flung Cornish outposts of the Grass Valley, California, the Rand, South Africa and the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, still sing his Christmas carols. 17
Commercial viability was undoubtedly a factor in Merritt’s creative output and the terms under which copies of his works were issued present a varied and complicated picture. His earliest pices, dating from the 1880s, were printed at his own expense but once established as a composer the travellers for various different music firms sought him out. Messrs Doremi and Company were one of the first and they were sold percentage rights on the first set of carols, some anthems and his lost sacred song ‘Rock of Ages’ (presumably a setting of AM Toplady’s words). 18 Smaller pieces tended to be purchased outright but with larger (choral) works, which had the possibility of greatness about them, the composer retained royalties. Some measure of his commercial viability can be gauged by the fact that 4000 copies of the first set of carols were sold during the Christmas season of 1899 alone, and 600 copies of the second which had only just been issued. 19 How many of Merritt’s London-based composer colleagues, I wonder, equalled his commercial success? It is ironic that Merritt’s music made little progress along the paths of the musical establishment in Victorian England, though Dr. Holloway of the Royal Academy of Music did accept ten of his hymn tunes for publication in The Sacred Melodist.20
Latterly Merritt forged a stable business relationship with the Glasgow music publishers Bayley and Ferguson; they gradually took over the rights on much of his existing output and commissioned from him a number of anthems and harmonium pieces destined for publishers’ series. Amongst his later works only the Coronation March of 1902 was a conspicuously private publication. Was there no room in Messrs Bayley and Ferguson’s predominantly religious catalogue for such an overtly temporal work? It is not inconsequntial. In his middle years Merritt’s compositions were becoming larger and more daring. He was encouraged in new directions by the dedicatee of The Shepherd of Israel, The Reverend Harry Oxland, !Hogan’s rector for half a century.
Historically the village of Illogan lying inland nestling between Redruth and Camborne, two principal Cornish towns, has been a significant nursery for music. It can claim with some justification to be the birthplace of the Cornish carol (pronounced to rhyme with girl). 21 Illogan has spawned a prodigious number of composers, keyboard-players, singers and bandsmen who have contributed substantially to Cornish music over several generations. Arriving as curate in 1879, Oxland, an accomplished amateur musician, fostered and indulged musical attainment to to the full.22 This included founding the Illogan Reed and Brass Band in 188623 which as well as local engagements, took part in the Crystal Palace contests of 1909, 1910 and 1911; and conducting the Illogan Highway Choral Society. It was through the auspices of the choir that The Shepherd of Israel was first performed (a fact deduced from the dedication). Given the differences between Church and Chapel the fruitful collaboration of Anglican rector and Nonconformist organist must have been quite unusual even for a community accustomed to the parson’s eccentricities24 and familiar with the traditional allegiance of some Cornish families to both denominations. Merritt once conducted Illogan Parish Church choir in a work of his own composition,25 possibly the lost oratorio The Christian Soldier, his last completed score.26
Certainly the oratorio was his swan-song for he was not destined for a ripe old age. There has been much fond speculation about the direction Merritt’s music might have taken. It should be said, however, that Merritt’s music never completed the kind of long provincial germination that Elgar’s did at the turn of the century. Merritt’s music, one suspects, was too narrow, too entrenched and too reconciled to the environment in which it was nurtured to rise above it.
In 1907 Merritt was diagnosed as suffering from consumption. He was forced to resign his last organ post and restrict pupils to those willing to attend lessons at his house. He deteriorated rapidly and for the last two months of his life was confined to bed unable to work. He died on Good Friday (17th April) 1908 at the age of 46. None of his music was performed at the funeral service held in Illogan Parish Church but in his address Parson Oxland spoke of the composer’s ‘really striking gifts in the way of music’ .27 Merritt’s body was received into church to the accompaniment of Mendelssohn’s ‘0 rest in the Lord’ and afterwards conveyed to the family grave in the churchyard to the strains of the Dead March from Saul.28 This was an apt choice of music considering the parameters of Merritt’s own musical style, as I shall argue below.
The occasion revealed that Thomas Merritt was not a musical genius in the accepted sense of the word, but he was clearly a man dedicated to his mission and who saw his role as a composer was to provide music which people could sing and enjoy – bright, simple music which spoke eloquently and fell easily on the ears.29
So wrote Geoffrey Baggs after the 60th anniversary concert. Perhaps the most striking thing about The Shepherd of Israel is the way Merritt capitalizes upon his carol-writing experience. In spite of his use of simple contrapuntal devices such as pedal-points, imitation and occasional antiphonal effects, there is very little independent treatment of the voices. Indeed, his music is almost invariably four-part homophonic. By disposition Merritt was a miniaturist who wrote in a conservative Germanic style based largely on Handel and Mendelssohn’s contemporaries in Britain not Mendelssohn himself, a point I shall return to). The weaknesses of nineteenth-century choral music are all too apparent but even SS Wesley and Sterndale Bennett, two of our best Victorian composers, were unable to avoid these: squareness of phrase, over-use of harmonic cliche and lack of fresh dramatic conception. At a time when Continental influences were absorbed uncritically, Merritt’s indigenous Cornish love of hymnody saves him from prolixity and turgidness, arguably the worst faults of all. Scored for conventional forces, the series of short, succinct numbers are models of economy and together form a convincing whole. The contrast between sections is also effective. This is achieved largely by subtle changes of tempo and style in which ‘con Devozione’ becomes as characteristic an indication of mood for Merritt as was Elgar’s use of ‘Nobilmente’.
The fugal expositions of nos 10, 17, 19 and 26 come closest to the carol workings-out; elsewhere the influence of hymnody is less tangible but more acute. Merritt’s desideratum of one note-per-syllable gives the work impressive solemnity though the resultant plodding pace negates the possibility of heightened musical climaxes. Particularly characteristic, instead, is his use of walking-bass in nos 8, 17 and 26: a technique borrowed from hymn-playing where the bass line of a final (unison) verse of a hymn is freely elaborated by the organist in faster note values. Other examples of this occur in his anthems and organ pieces. The effect of the work’s overall structure is essentially accumulative; it aspires to epic. Given the sentimentality of the Victorians it is surprising that on one occasion only can a little of Merritt’s personal anguish be sensed: the soprano solo ‘I do not ask, 0 Lord, that life may be a pleasant road’ (no. 9). Equally noticeable is the fact that stylistic influences are almost entirely derived second-hand, indicating a broad familiarity with the music of Barnby, Macfarren, Stainer and Sullivan. Mendelssohn is only a generic resonance of period and genre, as can be seen in the solo and chorus ‘Thou preparest a table’ (no. 3). Here, at the entry of the tenor soloist, the accompaniment becomes highly Mendelssohnian but is more immediately indebted to SS Wesley,30 as a comparison with the ‘Love one another’ section of Wesley’s anthem Blessed by the God and Father (in the same key) clearly indicates. Handel’s influence, however, is more forthright. Merritt, like Handel, was able to obtain very impressive effect from extremely modest material. The choruses of The Shepherd of Israel flourish with a jubilant vigour worthy of the master himself and must constitute some of the last vestiges of Handelian aftermath in British music. Inevitably there are concordances with Messiah (compare, for instance, the two soprano settings of ‘He shall feed his flock’ and the two bass recitatives, Handel’s ‘Thus saith the Lord’ and Merritt’s ‘Behold, I am against the Shepherds’).
The influence of Merritt’s near-contemporaries was not so well digested or so beneficial. Fortunately the weakest part of the cantata is the first section: after such an insipid introduction the work proper can only improve. This prelude is every bit a miscalculation as the lengthy organ introduction to ‘Fling wide the gates!’ in Stainer’s Crucifixion. And this is not the only similarity The Shepherd of Israel bears to Stainer’s classic Passiontide cantata. At best, it provides the model for cyclic recapitulation of a theme (compare Merritt nos. 7 and 25 with Stainer nos. 16 and 19). At worst, there are two harmonic cribs: the underlay at the words’… which are broken’ in the recitative and chorus ‘And the word of the Lord’, which opens part two, is practically identical to a moment in The Crucifixion’s ‘King ever Glorious’ (the other harmonic borrowing will be returned to).
The one exception to the Handelian vigour and glutenous Stainerisms is ‘Gracious Saviour, gentle Shepherd’ (no. 23) which, in an unguarded moment, dispels the Victorian stained-glass severity. It conjures-up the recent ghost of Sullivan and with it the song ‘I am a courtier brave and serious’ from The Gondoliers. The gavotte’s skittish gait is impeded by starting on the first beat of the bar but the impulse manages to get stronger until the hymn’s fifth phrase practically reveals all.
The final chorus ‘Now the God of Peace’ is a coup de grace of context and style. Nowhere else do so many of Merritt’s stylistic traits come together so effectively. The formal context is Handelian (the introduction shares the rhythm of ‘Lift up your heads’) but after the fugal exposition there is also a walking bass and the second harmonic reference to The Crucifixion (compare the underlay of ‘ … that which is well pleasing in his sight’ to the third phrase of Stainer’s hymn ‘Holy Jesu, by Thy passion’). With their obvious folk-fiddling connotations, the only hint that Merritt may have absorbed secular influences close to home comes from the jig figuration in the last bars of the finale and a similar passage in part one (reprise of ‘Thou that dwellest between the Cherubims’).
Merritt was both the product and the victim of his environment. Although it can be said that The Shepherd of Israel, like Stainer’s Crucifixion, loses its thread before the end by becoming embroiled in an uneccessary duet (no. 24), nevertheless it is concision which holds the work together. The awkwardnesses and infelicities of the text jar the ea 1 but, whatever the shortcomings, the music serves its purpose and for sheer accessibility to amateur performers its hymn-like simplicity is second-to-none. It should be judged by its appropriateness. Merritt, unlike many of his more famous stylistic counterparts, is never guilty of pretention. In this, he perhaps has more in common with the practical economy of a late-eighteenth century American composer, William Billings (his music grew out of psalmody and he experienced similar conditions of cultural isolation). But, curiously, what looks simple and even commonplace on the page has an effect in performance out of all proportion to one’s expectations. As Thomas Armstrong has written of Stainer’s Crucifixion: ‘This is, in effect, one of the signs of good music – to sound better than it looks: and the quality is by no means a common one since we all know plenty of pretentious music that looks good to the eye and sounds awful when you try to perform it . . . . ”32
Finally, we may conclude that spiritual belief was the root of Merritt’s success: for however much his life and music is scrutinized the abiding mystery of the man remains how, in the words of Malcolm Arnold, ‘Thomas Merritt was able to overcome such wretched material circumstances and give us some of the most vigorous and joyous music it has been my pleasure to hear’.33 Above all, The Shepherd of Israel is a testimony to Merritt’s religious fervour, a practical outcome of profound Evangelical faith. The same power which brought it into being had enjoined John Wesley to preach and Billy Bray34 to dance.35
NOTES
- WG Donnithorne: The /llogan Musician: Thomas Merritt (Carn Brea, 1966)
- ibid.
- ‘Death of an Illogan Composer’ April 23rd 1908: 5
- ‘Introduction’ (to) Tribute to Thomas Merritt March 16th 1968
- Letter to the author. undated (postmarked 24/2/86)
- I would like to thank Dr. Myrna Combellack Harris, the Institute’s academic secretary, and Mrs. Pat Johnstone.
- ‘Mr. Thomas Merritt of Illogan: successful composer of carols, anthems and songs’, The Cornish Post and Mining News January 25th 1900
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ‘Death of a Cornish Composer’ The Cornubian obit. April 23rd 1908: 4
- op. cit.
- ibid.
- Donnithorne: op. cit.
- The Cornish Post and Mining News January 25th 1900
- LH Truran: ‘Thomas Merritt – Cornish Composer’ introduction to Twelve Cornish Carols (Padstow, 1976)
- 230,000 people (a third of Cornwall’s population) by 1900, including Merritt’s three brothers
- Merritt’s carols have come full circle with modern technology: the BBC broadcast an American cartoon adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas
Carol Sporting a soundtrack of ‘Hark the Glad Sound! the Saviour Comes’.
- The Cornish Post and Mining News January 25th 1900
- ibid.
- ibid.
21 . Thomas Broad (c 1790- 1848) was the unwitting father
- I am indebted to Illogan historian Michael Tangye for the bulk of my information on Oxland
- Like Henry Tonking’s Grand Festival March ‘lllogan’ (1896), Merritt’s Coronation March (1902) was almost certainly written for this band
- op. cit.
- Donnithorne: op. cit.
- the Cornish Post and Mining News obit. april 23rd 1908: 5
- ibid.
- ibid.; Handel also died on a Good Friday
- ‘Truro tribute to Cornish Musician’, Western Morning News March 18th 1968
- SS Wesley, a great-nephew of the evangelist, has a Cornish connection in that he was organist at Exeter Cathedral from 1835 to 1841, a time when the Exeter Diocese included Cornwall.
- See no. 25 for the worst moment: ‘… not for filthy lucre’
- Cited in P Charlton: John Stainer (Newton Abbot 1984): 174
- M. Arnold: ‘Introduction’ (to) Tribute to Thomas Merritt March 16th 1968
- Cornish evangelist (1974-1868)
- With the exception of the carols, I would be pleased to hear from anyone who has copies of Merritt’s music: pieces which remain undiscovered include the oratorio The Christian Soldier, his songs and hymn tunes 15