Today, 22 November, is the nineteenth anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s death. It is also, as our musical readers will not have to be reminded, St Cecilia’s Day (St Cecilia being the patron saint of music).

For several years in the early 1970s, Burgess had an apartment on the Piazza Santa Cecilia in the Trastevere district of Rome, opposite the church of St Cecilia, where the saint is believed to have been murdered. According to the composer Michael Lewis, who knew Burgess and worked with him on the Broadway musical Cyrano, Burgess had a key to the church, and would often let himself in after hours to play the organ.

When Burgess came to write his novel Beard’s Roman Women in 1976, he used his own apartment in Rome as one of the locations. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist Ronald Beard attempts to commit suicide by running up and down the staircase in his apartment building, hoping to provoke a fatal heart attack. He fails to kill himself, but he is consoled when he hears a piece of choral music being played on a hi-fi system. Burgess provides the song’s lyrics, which are taken from John Dryden’s famous seventeenth-century poem, ‘A Song for St Cecilia’s Day’. Dryden’s text was originally set by Henry Purcell:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
‘Arise, ye more than dead!’
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music’s power obey.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.

A couple of years later, in July 1978, Burgess composed his own ‘Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day’, a cantata in eight movements which re-deploys Dryden’s text. The song was first performed in 2002. Here is a recording of the first movement, which bears many musical similarities to William Walton’s mid-century oratorio, Belshazzar’s Feast.

[jwplayer config=”iabf-audio” mediaid=”2791″]

Andrew Biswell

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