Count me one of the estimated two billion British royal wedding watchers. Sleeping in, I was content to view BBC America’s first rebroadcast of the event. A dedicated Anglophile and long-time admirer of the late, revered and lamented Princess Diana, I needed to see her son Prince William marry the amazingly fortunate commoner Kate Middleton. Guided by television’s vicarious eye and ears, I enjoyed imagining a stroll through Westminster Abbey and wallowed in the sumptuous tones of Anglican church and British classical music—Parry’s “Jerusalem” (lyrics by poet William Blake) anyone?—that punctuated the ceremony. Did I mention my addictions to British composers and poets?
The highlight for me was the choir’s performance of Paul Mealor’s motet “Ubi Caritas et Amor.” If you skipped the wedding but appreciate beautiful choral music, please listen.
Because I have forgotten much of the musicology I studied decades ago, I cannot tell you in technical terms why this composition so affects me. I cannot hear clearly all the words; I know just enough Latin to read “Where Charity and Love Are” in the title. Aside from reflecting upon these words’ allusion to that biblical staple of Christian weddings, I Corinthians 13, my emotions are manipulated by the chord progressions, the creation and release of tension that oscillates through the choir’s interplay of voices. Thanks to whoever uploaded the file and to YouTube for including a “replay” button, I have tried to overdose on Mealor’s motet, but the effect of the 20th hearing remains as tearfully visceral as the first.
Good—dare I say “great”—music is supposed to inspire and transport its listeners. We need not question why. Yet I am a curious creature, and so I embarked on a quest to discover what makes this composition so affect me. While I did not find the answer to that question, what I did learn reveals something delightfully human and slyly witty about the newlywed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. If you are curious, too, please follow me.
“Ubi Caritas et Amor” began as a Gregorian chant that may have originally sounded like this. Twentieth-century French composer Maurice Duruflé gave the Gregorian melody a choral setting that sounds like this as performed by the Cambridge Singers. The Taizé religious community in France has its own version of the chant, a composition attributed to another 20th-century French composer, Jacques Berthier. Other composers—Douglas Brooks-Davies, Morten Lauridsen, and Joseph Gentry Stephens—have also taken their turns working with this 10th-century chant. Paul Mealor, a Welsh composer from Anglesey—the Duke and Duchess’s once and future home, too—reset the chant yet again for the special occasion of the royal wedding. Curiously, the YouTube clip I provided above gives Mealor’s “Ubi Caritas et Amor” an alternate title: “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal.” What is this flower reference all about?
To create his wedding composition, Mealor set “Ubi Caritas et Amor” words to music he first composed as part of his Rose Cycle, which debuted at the John Armitage Memorial Trust’s Scottish Tour in Edinburgh, October 2010:
“Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” is a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, first published in 1847, that Mealor set to music. Of course, he is not the first composer to transform Tennyson’s poem into song; his effort follows those by Gustav Holst, Roger Quilter and others. Mychael Danna’s version is featured in the soundtrack to the 2004 movie Vanity Fair, where it is sung by Reese Witherspoon playing Becky Sharp. Haunting though Danna’s score may be—and resonant though Custer LaRue’s vocals may be on the soundtrack album—Mealor’s music appeals more to my taste. Mealor evokes green England for me in the way that Vaughan Williams’ orchestral pieces—"Lark Ascending” and “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,” for example—do. The discovery that Mealor answered his commission by recycling his “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” score as the music for his “Ubi Caritas et Amor” motet begs a series of “Why?” questions. Why not simply perform the Rose Cycle movement with its Tennyson lyrics? From another angle, why not compose for “Ubi Caritas et Amor” new music altogether? If circumstances dictated setting the “Ubi Caritas et Amor” chant to already available Mealor music, why choose the score for “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”?
The answers, I believe, uncover an "Easter egg," a private game and, in this case, special lover’s gift secreted into the fabric of the wedding ceremony. Although Associated Press columnist Robert Barr reports that Prince Charles guided Kate Middleton’s musical selections, Telegraph writer Morwenna Ferrier quotes Mealor as saying Prince William had requested his music for the wedding. Ironically, it is widely but inaccurately reported that Mealor’s “Ubi Caritas” premiered at last fall’s JAM Scottish Tour at St. Andrews University, the royal couple’s alma mater, when, in fact, “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” was the piece performed. Arguably, then, it was this secular composition that prompted the royal bridegroom’s request. Reflecting upon its performance as "Ubi Caritas et Amor" at the wedding, Telegraph opera critic Rupert Christiansen bucks the popularity building around Mealor as “a new romanticist of classical music” (Ferrier) to opine that the “well-crafted motet” was “Pleasant enough, I thought, but not memorable.” Little does he know.
Using the score of “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” for the “Ubi Caritas et Amor” motet, Mealor makes a musical allusion to the eroticism of Tennyson’s poem, the music’s original lyric.
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The firefly wakens, waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts, in me.
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
Within the hallowed halls of Westminster Abbey, beneath the gaze of invited guests and a world of onlookers, it would lack decorum to sing of lovers waking together, of hearts nakedly opened one to the other, of a beloved embraced and absorbed in the lover. No, better it would be to sublimate such passion, to give earthy love spiritual dimension and divine invention by singing of God’s presence wherever selfless and personal forms of love exist. Certainly, Mealor’s creative genius could have set “Ubi Caritas et Amor” in new music composed just for the royal wedding, but then there would be no secret pun, no hidden declaration of a prince's passion for his English rose, no playful inside joke to share to make the most publicly exposed occasion on the planet privately, intimately memorable.
When Mealor told reporter Ferrier he could not tell even his family of his involvement in the royal wedding ceremony, he revealed that he excels at keeping secrets. Thus, I expect no confirmation from him, or anyone else, of the veracity of my interpretive claims; I believe no one outside the musical conspiracy will ever know how much credit belongs to each conspirator—Prince William, Mealor, and possibly Middleton, too—in carrying out the plan. This is no state secret; its existence or revelation causes no national crisis. Its public importance, if it has any at all, is the glimpse it gives into a British monarchy still evolving under Princess Diana's influence. Her marriage was arranged; her son's is not. A loveless union with her inspired her ex-husband to marry the woman of his dreams; the son follows the father's belated example. In crafting their nuptials, however, this Prince William and his bride have displayed uncommon skill at manipulating the expectations placed upon them to create the life they want. Whatever the future holds for the royal family as a political institution, these kids will be all right.
To them, I extend my hearty congratulations and best wishes.