London’s Westminster Cathedral stands as England’s foremost Catholic church. Benedictine monks, builders and owners of Westminster Abbey, first drained a section of the surrounding Westminster marsh. Across subsequent centuries that ground served many purposes. The same monks ran both a market and fairgrounds on the site. Following the Protestant Reformation in England the area functioned successively as a maze, a pleasure garden, and a bull-baiting arena.
Westminster Abbey, by then an establishment of the Church of England, later sold the parcel for conversion into a prison. When that institution closed near the end of the eighteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church purchased the land in 1884 to erect a major new cathedral. The resulting edifice ranks among the youngest of London’s principal churches. Architect John Francis Bentley modeled its early-Christian Byzantine style and added an exceptionally lofty bell tower. The foundation stone was placed in 1895; the cathedral was consecrated in 1910. Its interior decoration remains unfinished.
Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, from the moment he conceived the cathedral, assigned music a central role in its life. He drew inspiration from Solesmes Abbey’s restoration of Gregorian chant and from the choral achievements of the Anglican Church. Music constitutes the cathedral’s single largest budgetary expenditure. It maintains a full-time choral school for its choristers and remains the only church worldwide that offers a completely sung Mass each day.
The Westminster Cathedral Choir numbers among the handful of ensembles that may justly claim to be Europe’s finest. Sir Richard Terry, its first Master of Music, devoted himself to pre-Baroque polyphony and restored to performance Tudor-era masterpieces by English composers and their Continental peers. He also promoted contemporary works with equal energy. Composers of the stature of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lennox Berkeley, Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, Herbert Howells, William Mathias, and David Sanger have all written for the choir.
The ensemble produced one of the earliest British choral recordings, an acoustic disc made in 1908. In the compact-disc era it has issued a widely praised series on the Hyperion label embracing repertory from Renaissance polyphony to scores by Britten, Poulenc, Langlais, and Stravinsky. As cathedral duties allow, the singers present concerts, undertake tours, and broadcast regularly. In 1992 they joined the Choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral to inaugurate that building’s newly restored organ.
