The man behind the music — A hymn reflection

A few days late, but a great history from Matthew Larkin, with thanks

And today, I’m thinking of this guy, who died 150 years ago this date (January 22). John Bacchus Dykes: priest, organist, composer, tractarian: a composer of well over 250 hymn tunes, and an avid and determined ritualist who stood tall against his bishop, and those who tilted the C of E heavily toward evangelical forms of expression during the mid-Victorian period.

Among his esteemed colleagues (Stainer, Barnby, Sullivan, and others), his work stands out as the most enduring testament to the old tradition of hymn singing which he did so much to restore. Upon rehearsing “Dominus regit me” as a choirboy, we were told by the choirmaster at the time that Dykes “wrote about a hundred tunes, of which three are good.” How untrue this turned out to be, because while many have fallen into disuse or forgotten, so many more endure and are sung somewhere on any given Sunday. Of these, Nicaea is surely the best known, but there are so many other beautiful and well-loved examples (Gerontius, Strength and Stay, Melita, and Keble, to name just a few).

Some have dismissively characterized his music as stodgy, sentimentalized, overtly chromatic, and even (my favourite) “dramatic”! I think it’s easy to forget just how important it was that someone with a gift both for music and parish ministry would add so generously to the small repertoire of hymn melodies sung regularly in churches at that time. As a musician, he was well acquainted with (and much inspired by) Schubert, Schumann, and others, and some of the musical/harmonic gestures and colours so enduringly found in classical composition at the time can be keenly heard among his influences. In this regard, what he offered was a new music: fresh in these influences, and vivid in its integrity. Nearly all of the tunes he wrote were either requests or commissions, which speaks brilliantly to the affection people had both for the man and his music.

The last years of his life were not happy: the loss of his young daughter to scarlet fever; and his own struggles with physical and mental health. Tensions with the structures and politics of church life caused him to take leave of his parish charge at age 51, and he died shortly afterward while trying to rest and recover at a guest house adjacent to an asylum in East Sussex. His last days were spent alone, deprived of the companionship and comfort of friends. And so on the 22nd of January, he slipped away, aged 52.

I have no doubt that he was welcomed shortly thereafter into the gates of heaven. From there, I’m sure he hears his music still being sung from down here, and that all of this greatly pleases God.

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