Music starts around 10:2​5​​ service will start at 10:30​​​​​.

Celebrant: The Revd Liz Hassall, Priest in Charge

You can access the service sheet - http://bit.ly/ServiceSheet-20210328

Be sure to have your own bread as you are invited to break and share it as a gesture of fellowship and agape.

Previous services and the service sheets are available on the Church website www.stolaveschurch.org.uk

Music before the service

Valet will ich dir geben (BWV 736) by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) - played by Keith Wright

Music during the service

Hymn - Ride on, ride on in majesty!

O Gott, du frommer Gott by Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) - played by Keith Wright

Music after the service

Herr, ich habe missgehandelt by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-1795) - played by Max Elliott

Notes on the Music

As we have now completed one annual cycle of online services, we are covering some ground for a second time, and the question arises: do we repeat what was done last year, or do we explore alternatives?

In the case of Palm Sunday, there are elements of the liturgy and music which are so familiar to us that it would be a brave musician who suggested abandoning ‘the usual’ in favour of new and different options. The traditional Palm Sunday processional hymn ‘All glory, laud and honour’ is a case in point, and today we will hear (as we do most years) one of Bach’s two glorious preludes based on the melody. Curiously, the text with which the melody is associated in the Lutheran tradition – ‘Valet will ich dir geben’ - is a Passiontide hymn, rather than a Palm Sunday hymn, and its third verse, ‘In meines Herzen Grunde’ appears in part two of the St John Passion. The organ piece however serves our purposes wonderfully well: the dashing triplet accompaniment reflects the atmosphere of a busy, noisy, pressing crowd, with the melody thundering through the texture in the bass.

We heard one of Ethel Smyth’s chorale-preludes last week, and in the middle of the service today comes a second. Smyth studied in Leipzig in a period when a large-scale re-evaluation of Bach’s work was taking place: a society had been formed to gather together Bach’s music and publish it in a systematic way, and composers were copying, developing and paying homage to the Bach style in their new works. It is therefore not surprising that Smyth should employ Lutheran melodies and write in a romanticised version of the Bach style. The melody here is ‘O Gott, du frommer Gott’ (literally ‘O God, thou pious God’), which we hear in the treble and - in canon - in the bass. Smyth’s organ pieces were written in the 1880s but not published until 1913, after she had become a reasonably well-known name. In 1912 Smyth had been due to be a guest at the International Women’s Exhibition in Berlin but she gave up the engagement – a great honour – to take part in a mass demonstration with the Women’s Social and Political Union. She joined hundreds of women who deliberately broke windows in protest at the lack of progress on votes for women, and was sentenced to two months in Holloway for breaking a window in the Colonial Secretary’s home in Berkeley Square. While serving her sentence she received a visit from the conductor, Thomas Beecham, who found her using a toothbrush to conduct an impromptu performance of ‘The March of the Women’ from her cell window. Beecham had conducted the first British performance of her opera ‘The Wreckers’ in 1909.

- Kate and Keith Wright

Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718-1795) was an influential German music critic and music theorist whose collected literary works comprise some thirteen volumes (nearly six thousand pages of text!). Many of Marpurg’s substantial academic treatises, including ‘Kunst das Clavier zu spielen’ (1750) and ‘Adhandlung von der Fuge’ (1753), were well-received by contemporaries, but some of his contributions to musical periodicals courted controversy. Marpurg is said to have been a man of short temper who was not afraid to publish polemics or engage in heated public debate with leading figures such as Leopold Mozart, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Nichelmann, Georg Anton Benda, Johann Friedrich Agricola, Johann Mattheson, Johann Philipp Kirnberger and others. In addition to his sometimes divisive literary output, Marpurg composed several vocal, harpsichord and organ pieces. Marpurg’s ‘boundless admiration for J. S. Bach’ can easily be detected in the ‘Versuch in figurierter Chorälen’ that he published around 1790, but his treatment of the chorale ‘Herr, ich habe missgehandelt’ (Lord, I have misbehaved) is no mere pastiche. Although I first became acquainted with this particular chorale through the settings of Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Johann Ludwig Krebs, Gottlieb Sigmund Binder and Georg Friedrich Kauffmann, most people will probably associate it with Bach’s lost ‘Markus-Passion’ (BWV 247), so it seems a particularly appropriate choice for our service today.

- Max Elliott