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ANTONIO VIVALDI (1678-1741) was an Italian Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, and Roman Catholic priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, he is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe. Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni Battista, who in 1685 was admitted as a violinist to the orchestra of the San Marco Basilica in Venice. Vivaldi composed many instrumental concertos for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as numerous sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons. Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children. He worked there as a Catholic priest and teacher from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi (who earned the nickname “The Red Priest”, due to his distinctive reddish hair) also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, he moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi’s arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.

SAMUEL WEBBE SR. (1740-1816) was an English composer and organist. His father died shortly after Samuel was born, and as a young child, his mother apprenticed him at the age of eleven to be a cabinet maker. However, Webbe was determined to study other disciplines, and taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and Italian, while working on his apprenticeship. He wrote about three hundred glees, canons and part-songs – and upon which his fame mainly rests. His hymn tune Melcombe, heard today in the Opening Hymn, appears in many hymn books, of many denominations.

JOHN MASON NEALE (1818-1866) was an English priest and scholar, best known as a hymn writer and translator, having enriched English hymnody with many ancient and medieval hymns translated from Latin and Greek. He studied at Cambridge, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1842. He was offered a parish, but chronic ill health, which was to continue throughout his life, prevented him from taking it. In 1854 Neale co-founded the Sisterhood of St. Margaret, an order of women in the Anglican Church dedicated to nursing the sick. Many Anglicans in his day, however, were very suspicious of anything suggestive of Roman Catholicism. Once Neale was attacked and mauled at a funeral of one of the sisters. From time to time unruly crowds threatened to stone him or to burn his house. He received no honour or preferment in England, and his doctorate was bestowed by an American college (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut). However, his basic goodness eventually won the confidence of many who had fiercely opposed him, and the Sisterhood of St. Margaret survived and prospered.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847) composed his first oratorio St. Paul (Paulus in German) under the impression of his own 1829 revival of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He integrated chorale settings into St. Paul, for which he was accused by some of his contemporaries of making a stylistic break, using an element unsuitable to church music. In spite of these reservations, St. Paul was one of his most popular works, and it received numerous performances during his lifetime, both in Europe and the United States. The Canadian premiere was presented by the Toronto Philharmonic Society in 1876.

WILLIAM H. WALTER (1825-1893) was an American organist, choir director, and composer. He served as organist and choir director at St. John’s Chapel and St. Paul’s Church (both in New York City), in succession, from 1847-1856. In 1856, he was hired as the music director and organist for Trinity Church and Trinity Chapel, where he remained until his retirement in 1869. A recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Music degree from Columbia University in 1864, the majority of Walter’s compositions were hymns, canticles, and other forms of church service music.

PAUL GERHARDT (1607-1676) was a German theologian, Lutheran minister and hymnodist. Considered to be one of Germany’s greatest hymn writers, he has been called the Wesley of the Fatherland; not for the number of hymns he penned, but for their quality. Of Gerhardt’s one hundred and twenty-three hymns, all show the mark of true genius, and nearly forty are still in common use. He entered the University of Wittenberg in 1628, however, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) seems to have arrested not only German life generally, but Gerhardt’s life specifically. He was still at Wittenberg in 1642 when he was thirty-five; though he preached in Berlin before then, he was not ordained until 1651 when, at the age of forty-four, he became the pastor of a church in Mittenwalde in the vicinity of Berlin. Pulled into the theological squabbles of the times, his conscience would not allow him to accede to the Calvinist demands of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm, and he was removed from his parish in 1666. Three years later Gerhardt was installed at a church in Lübben an der Spree where he remained among less than supportive people until his death.

JOHN WESLEY (1703-1791) was a Church of England cleric and Christian theologian. He is largely credited, along with his brother Charles, as being a founder of the Methodist Church. He was also a life-long opponent of slavery and the slave trade. This opposition began long before the issue had received widespread attention, and was sustained throughout his life. In 1736/37, Wesley visited the then British colony of Georgia in North America. In his journal, he records meeting with people involved in the slave trade, including the slave-ship captain John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace”. Newton’s conversion to Christianity was later followed by a conversion to anti-slavery, but it is not recorded if he and Wesley discussed the issue. One of Wesley’s most famous quotes is, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” For an insight (and perhaps a chuckle or two!) into his opinions on hymn singing, please see page 720 in Voices United for his “Directions for Singing”.

WILLIAM H. HARRIS (1883-1973) was an English organist, composer and choral trainer, affectionately nicknamed “Doc H” by his choristers. From 1923 to 1953, he served as a professor of organ and harmony at the Royal College of Music, and was also president of the Royal College of Organists (1946-1948), and director of musical studies at the Royal School of Church Music (1956-1961). Although he wrote cantatas and organ pieces, Harris is best remembered today for his church music, though during his lifetime he was mainly known for his achievements as a choir-trainer.

JOHN DONNE (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier, member of Parliament, and cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was also Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death. Considered to be the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets, his works include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, sermons, Latin translations, elegies, songs, and satires. Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on his wealthy friends. In 1615, he was ordained deacon and then Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Holy Orders, and only did so because the king (James I) ordered it.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958) was an English composer and some-time organist and choir director. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century. Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believing in making music as available as possible to everybody, he wrote many works for amateur and student performance. Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and both small and large-scale choral pieces. Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams’ personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman (Ursula Wood), who, by all accounts, seems to have been adopted by his wife Adeline in the most amicable way, to be her successor, and who did indeed become his second wife when Adeline passed away at the age of eighty. Vaughan Williams composed his last symphony just months before his death at the age of eighty-five.

FRANCIS BLAND TUCKER (1895-1984) was an American Bible scholar, priest and hymn composer. During the Civil Rights controversies relatively early in his ministry as Rector of Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia, Reverend Tucker refused to condone the practice of white churches excluding people at services for fear of “kneel-ins.” The first kneel-ins (which were visits by small groups of Black activists, often accompanied by white allies to prominent white churches in towns and cities across the South) took place in Atlanta in August 1960, and they spread throughout the region over the next six years. They were not staged to protest unjust laws, but to test white churches’ tolerance for integrated worship. They were intended to illuminate the moral dimensions of segregation by creating compelling spectacles of exclusion or embrace. Reverend Tucker’s retort to this practice was, “I would not presume to speculate as to why my own parishioners come to church, much less someone I do not know,” so Christ Church’s doors remained open to any who wished to enter, both during his official ministry that ended in 1967, and up to the present day. In his later years, Tucker served on commissions that revised hymnals of the Episcopal church, wrote numerous hymns, and translated hymns from Greek.