“Michael! Michael!”
The opening choral blast of Herbert Howells’s 1961 choral masterpiece A Sequence for St Michael hits the listener like a thunderbolt. Lured into a sense of security within mid-century Anglican choral music by the organ introduction – a mere four seconds or so – the listener is shot down by the choir’s discordant cry to the heavens. The background to the composition would, prima facie, also seem to be very straightforward: it was commissioned to mark the 450th anniversary of the founding of St John’s, Cambridge, as a grand anthem to add to the college’s Anglican liturgical repertoire – and composed by arguably the finest living composer of Anglican church music. What lies behind this is an intense grief and pain that Howells bore for much of his life following the death of his son, Michael, at the age of nine from polio in 1935. The result is a deeply Catholic understanding of spiritual warfare, purgatory and redemption, and prayer for intercession from the archangels, from a thoroughly agnostic composer.
