The Song of Saint Francis

First Performance: Sussex Chorus and orchestra conducted by Neil Jenkins, St George’s Kemp Town Brighton, October 2003.

In the early seventies composer Howard Blake was living in mid-Sussex and was approached by The Ditchling Choral  Society to compose a work to be performed at St. Francis Hospital in Haywards Heath. No text or details were discussed since he was just leaving for a tour of Christian sites in The Holy Land. He found much of the country just as it had been in the time of Christ, with fishermen plying boats on the Sea of Galilee and nomadic Arabs living in tents in the desert. A palpable ‘presence’ manifested itself one day when he was suddenly transfixed to the very spot in Jerusalem where Christ was said to have been condemned to death. The next day, high up above Qumran on the Dead Sea, with the sun beating down at 124F, there came an intense realisation of the all-vital power of the elements and a sudden remembrance of the ‘Canticle of the Sun’ by St Francis, which so wonderfully praises God as revealed in nature. Returning to London he went to the Franciscan library, finding ‘Il Cantico del Sole’ in its original early Italian, which he set to music. The first performance was with piano only but the choral society was so delighted with ‘The Song of Saint Francis’ that a second performance took place shortly afterwards alongside Mozart’s Requiem in Worth Abbey using the same instrumentation as Mozart’s. The piece so impressed the Abbot of Worth that he requested the composition of  a work to celebrate the 1500th anniversary of Saint Benedict in 1980. This was the dramatic oratorio ‘Benedictus’.