King's College Chapel 1515-2015: Eds Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman.

Drury, John

King's College Chapel 1515-2015

Eds Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman

Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2014

ISBN 978 1909400214,422pp, h/b, 75 [euro]

In 1515 the Provost and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge ceased to pay the stonemasons at work on their new chapel, 69 years after Henry VI had laid its foundation stone. It would be another 22 years before the collapse of the old chapel to the north forced the college to take possession of its glorious new temple (the word they often used for it), glazed and furnished. To mark the 500th anniversary of paying off the masons, two Fellows of the College, Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman have edited a collection of essays, profusely illustrated, gathered under three topics: Fabric and Furnishings, Life and Visiting, Music and Performance. Like its subject the book is spectacular, dignified and interesting from a great many points of view. I had just one complaint: the index is inadequate.

Jeremy Musson, as architectural historian, begins the first section with a review of responses to the building, inside and out. Henry VI's legacy was on an enormous scale: a chapel like the Sainte Chapelle in Paris where he had been crowned King of France, but far bigger; and a large expanse of land made vacant by demolishing houses in the centre of the town. The college, and his school at Eton, were his pious obsession. So it came about that Cambridge was long dominated by a building site: the great hulk of the chapel, some 70 years under construction, and a large empty space. Meanwhile the College went about its business, huddled in the modest buildings to the north.

There are two essays on the magnificent glass, by James Simpson on its traditionally medieval typological programme, albeit at the very threshold of protestant reformations, and by Stephen Clare explaining the techniques of its making and restoration with expertise and dramatic photographs. The glass is a wonderful survival, its sheer extent apparently defying Dowsing and his puritan iconoclasts. The earliest windows of 1515, here ascribed to Barnard Flower, kept design within the bounds of the mullions. The second from the west is rightly called a masterpiece. Later masters transgressed the mullions with mannerist abandon and violent colour: histrionic figures, lavishly costumed, muscular and snarling everywhere. Only in the great east window, worthy of more attention than it gets here, does this style achieve perfect integration, with Christ's tall central cross rising into blue sky.

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Nicola Pickering's essay on Provost Hacumblen fills a gap. Hacumblen has not previously been given his due as the man in charge of the College from 1509 to 1528. He has it now. His superb brass lectern is still in use and his chantry chapel in the south range survives: not complete, but well enough for Pickering to deduce his piety, like Henry VI's focussed on Christ's five wounds. These, which Henry VI had had painted on a tablet (disturbingly) to contemplate while eating, are in the glass of the chantry and in Hacumblen's brass on the floor (Pickering is surely right that the figure of Hacumblen there is a relatively recent recut both colour and condition are different from the original work).

The altarpieces in the chapel, all four of them, fall to Jean Michel Massing, art historian and Fellow of the College, who knows them better than anybody. We have probably not missed much by the non-realisation of Romney's sketches for a Mater dolorosa above the high altar, noble though one of them is. Anyhow, it could hardly compete with Rubens, whose superb and autograph Adoration of the Magi arrived in 1961. Its installation involved a good deal of expense, anger and grief and it is certainly not a good companion to the east window above it. But on winter evensongs it is a glowing focus of warmth and humanity in a dark place such as none of its predecessors in the sanctuary could ever have achieved. Is it true, as Michael Jaffe asserted, that the prioress of the Louvain convent for which it was painted (in eight days!) was Rubens's aunt? Or that it came to King's largely through the good offices of Tim Munby, the college's librarian, who used to shoot duck with its donor, Major Allnatt? The most recent arrival is another Adoration by another Antwerp master which matches the windows in date and lavishness of ornament while conveying a quieter poetry. The lovely little Madonna and Child in the Whichcote chapel is now convincingly attributed by Massing and a colleague (independently) to Maratta rather than Mengs. It seems to be a good copy or version of a painting by Maratta in the Hermitage, duller in colour than the King's one.

The relations between the college and the chapel are well examined by Peter Murray Jones, the college's librarian, whose library was once housed in the northern side chapels. He traces the gradual passing of compulsory chapel attendance in the later 19th Century, first by the option of instead signing in at the Porter's Lodge at eight o'clock, which was in turn abolished in 1912.

At the same time as college attendance dwindled and declined, public attendance grew with the increasing reputation of the choir under Arthur Henry Mann, Boris Ord and David Willcocks. In general terms this can be seen as part of a sea-change at the heart of the Church of England's religious sensibility from orthodoxy to aesthetics. This is discernible in the sonnet written by Wordsworth in his Anglican phase 'Inside of King's College Chapel, Cambridge'. Having mused on the excessive size of the structure 'for a scanty band / Of white robed scholars only' he turns to admiration of its Founder's reckless generosity ... who fashioned for the sense These lofty pillars--spread that branching roof Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die, Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.

Architecture 'for the sense' and music sublimely combined were religiously persuasive, their 'lingering' an intimation of immortality: that famous echo described exactly by Gerald Finley from experience in the choir:

For a soloist, the sound ventures away, carried into the grand chasm, and the performer really only hears the results after the whole phrase is over, a bit late to fix it if it's wrong.

Eric Milner-White, reporting from the front in 1916 in answer to Provost M.R. James's request for advice about the future of the chapel, recommended 'occasional services' other than the regular ones as A field which can be richly sown, and over which I think no battle is likely to rage. Colour, warmth and delight can be added to our yearly round in many ways.

Returned from the battlefield and installed as Dean, Milner White's aesthetic genius for 'colour warmth and delight' resulted--and what a result! in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. The haunting phrase in its Bidding Prayer about those who 'rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light' is his own pure poetry, leaving scepticism dumb-founded.

This collection does full justice in its third and final section to the chapel's music, not least the carol service, its familiar story enriched by Nicholas Nash with a sympathetic portrait of Milner-White and a narrative of the sustained success, if that's the word, of its continuation: needing no interference from any subsequent Dean but relying on a succession of Directors of Music from A H Mann to Stephen Cleobury via Ord, Willcocks and Ledger. Nicholas Nash was a radio broadcaster, so can be excused from going into the pressure from BBC Television to televise the service. The lighting required would have spoiled the all-important atmosphere of candle light, so a simulacrum is televised, on one memorable occasion including a magnificently exuberant reading by George (Dadie) Rylands of the Cratchits' Christmas dinner from Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Roger Bowers, the musicologist, contributes a detailed and definitive history of 'Chapel and Choir, Liturgy and Music' in an essay marked by exact scholarship. It will hold its own for a long time. It is a startling fact that it was for a mere decade (1537-1547) that the chapel resounded to the liturgical music for which it was built before the reformation of Edward VI put paid to it all. Not until the long reign of 'Daddy' Mann (1876-1929), most enjoyably narrated by Nicholas Marston, did the music fully revive and the repertoire begin to expand. Mann, as his nickname suggests, was an amiably sentimental musician who cultivated a style which 'many people found rather too luscious' (the judgement of his colleague, the musicologist Edward J. Dent). They included Gwen Raverat who complained of 'the unfair, juicy way in which the organ notes oozed round inside the roof.' I remember an evensong when the Bach expert John Butt, then Organ Scholar, revived the Mann era for a moment by playing us out with 'In a Monastery Garden'. Butt himself contributes a characteristically lively history of the organ and its growth from modest beginnings to its present immense sonority, achieved by Harrison in 1934 under Boris Ord.

Some particularly interesting essays do not fall easily into the three sections of the book. Nicolette Zeeman, one of its editors, fascinatingly likens the shape of the Chapel to that of one of the 'Christ's cribs' so popular in late medieval piety. Iain Fenlon is a musicologist and more, his essay on the huge Cadiz choirbook belonging to the College ('totally unremarkable in both contents and appearance' as he says) radiates into renaissance cultural and political history with admirable scope. Ross Harrison, former Provost deals with the evangelical hero Charles Simeon, converted in the Chapel and buried in it, but between those two definitive events more given to preaching in Holy Trinity and holding religious tea parties in his rooms than to the chapel. His portrait by Northcote shows a powerful, confrontational man.

If ever an historian comes to write a monograph on the Chapel, this book will be the major resource. It treats its extraordinary subject, one of the wonders of the world, with the scholarship and interdisciplinary scope to be expected of the College. Like all masterpieces, King's College Chapel is inexhaustible. Every time you enter it you feel that, in Gurnemanz's words to Parsifal as they enter the Temple of the Grail together, 'zum Raum wird hier die Zeit', here time becomes space. And then, the music.

John Drury is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and former Dean of King's College Chapel