Sovereign rulers
Their names would have made their contemporaries tremble: fates and lives were in their hands… Music by those who had the power of life and death: Henry VIII and Ivan the Terrible within the programme of the organ project “The Music of the Great”.
Henry VIII
Among the numerous compositions by Tudor King Henry VIII there is a graceful trio that might seem somewhat unexpected for the ruthless ruler. It proved easy to adapt it for the organ: the organ high registers sound very much like flutes the tune was originally meant for.
A good match to that is his song “Though some saith that youth ruleth me,/I trust in age to tarry./ God and my right and my duty, /From them I shall never vary”. Though organ composition is withot words, there is a perfect imitation of wind instruments of the time (with penetrating nasal tone, the predecessors of oboes) providing an opportunity to grasp the atmosphere of the epoch and the author’s sentiment.
John IV the Terrible
Quite different from the mood of the British King’s compositions is the Stichera by the Russian Tsar John IV the Terrible: bass voices, deep and quiet, start – and then the melody grows stronger and rises to higher pitches resembling a deacon’s reading in church.
In continuation of the theme we hear Sergey Prokofiev’s music for the famous film “Ivan the Terrible” shot by the genius of cinematography S. Eisenstein: a kind of retrospection of the restless tsar’s life episodes unveils itself in the divine chords of the organ.