TO LOVERS of English music, there is a huge gap in the roster of great composers between the Tudor William Byrd (1540-1623) and the late-Stuart Henry Purcell (1659-95). Innovation was elsewhere, as Monteverdi and his fellow Italians invented a new musical style.
Enter George Jeffreys (1610-85), whose recently rediscovered compositions survive in manuscript in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, and were recorded in 2024 on two CDs by the vocal group Solomon’s Knot. Jeffreys’s moment of glory came when he was organist to King Charles I during his time in Oxford in 1643, but, for most of his life, he served as steward to Christopher Hatton at Kirby Hall, in Northamptonshire. Hatton had a huge library, now also in Christ Church, of the latest music by Italians such as Grandi, Rossi, Nenna, and Carissimi. As Jeffreys copied parts, he assimilated and imitated their modern style.
In a very interesting Wigmore Hall entertainment devised by the writer and director Federay Holmes, the actors James Garnon and Helen Schlesinger took us through the life of Jeffreys as the composer and Lady Hatton, who was left behind during her husband’s exile in France. The soundtrack was Jeffreys’s sung compositions, bookended by Byrd’s “Bow thine eare, O Lord” and Purcell’s Sonata in Three Parts No. 1, beautifully voiced by six members of Solomon’s Knot, accompanied by a quintet of violin, viols, and a “great dooble bass”, with Francesco Zoccali, on theorbo, and the organist William Whitehead.
We don’t know who provided the devotional words, or for whom Jeffreys intended the settings, but we can see that he was writing for trained singers of some experience, among whom was an unusually agile bass. “How wretched is the state” (1642) clearly showed the influence of the Italian madrigal tradition. O quam jucundum a 4 (1651), “Whisper it easily” (Passiontide), “The Lord in thy adversity” (1636), a paraphrase by George Sandys of Psalm 20, and “Look up, all eyes (Ascension) display Italianate expressive dissonance and chromaticism with contrasting sections of homophony and polyphony, virtuosic vocal writing — done full justice here — declamatory passages, and unexpected harmonic progressions.
Jeffreys had a flair for word-painting. In “A music strange”, voices and organ wallow in the dissonances on these opening words, staggering rapid downward scales underline “It is some drunkard’s strain”, and the florid writing for nightingales at “Hark, ’tis ravishing” brings the birds to life.
So, why is the composer not better known? He was the victim of circumstances: first the Interregnum, when church music more or less ceased, and then Lord Hatton’s fall from royal favour limited his exposure in his own time. It is a pity. On this showing, and that of Solomon Knot’s recording, he deserves better.
