Page 27 - Church Music Quarterly March 2018

in art and music, as indeed he did in regular holidays in the South of France; but cathedral worshippers and his artistic collaborators have spoken of his gift for friendship.
There is a fund of affectionate stories; about
his domestic helplessness: unless he was provided with hospitality (which fortunately he frequently was) he would burn fish fingers and sausages as his staple diet; his abject terror of spiders in the bath; his inability to perform the simplest household tasks. His meanness with the sherry is also a matter of record. At a party for the great and the good of Sussex in the deanery garden, he issued
a strict instruction to his secretary about a particular Deputy Lieutenant: ‘He’ll drink the
lot if you let him. Remember, two small glasses and then make an excuse.’
He covered his shyness with an appearance of flamboyance: the big hat, the coat, the gestures. He would run for the station, as one friend has put it, ‘parting the people of Chichester like the waters of the Red Sea, with cries of “Out of my way!” But the same informant declares that
he was not really flamboyant at all.
It was the turn of Chichester to host the
Southern Cathedrals’ Festival in 1964. Together with the Cathedral organist, John Birch, Hussey determined to secure a major new commission as the climax to the Festival. He contacted Leonard Bernstein, adding, ‘I would be delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about it.’ There was! Bernstein incorporated material he had rejected for that work, along with quotations from other musicals, in Chichester Psalms. The choral parts in what Bernstein described as ‘perhaps the most tonal score I have ever written’, together with the Psalm texts in Hebrew, challenged the choirs of Chichester, Salisbury and Winchester. They gave the first performance in England in Chichester Cathedral on 15 July 1965, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by John Birch.
It is said that no mention had been made
of a commissioning fee, and that when Hussey raised the subject just before the final rehearsal, Bernstein replied, ‘Don’t bother me with that now, Walter,’ after which a delighted Hussey gave him an inscribed fountain pen! Be that as it may, Hussey must have regretted not asking for the royalties on what has remained a popular and much-performed work.
Window by Marc Chagall in Chichester Cathedral.
Walter Hussey was an unusual and complex man, but a supremely gifted one, and it is those gifts that should most ensure his lasting remembrance, and the gratitude of the Church. We would have cause enough to remember him as a connoisseur of fine art, with an unerring instinct for quality; but he also bequeathed his personal art collection to Chichester District Council, ensuring the restoration of the magnificent Pallant House, near the Cathedral, and its establishment as one of the finest galleries in the country.
In the Cathedral that he served for an unusually long period as Dean – 22 years – the centenary
of his birth in 2009 gave an opportunity to give
WALTER HUSSEY 27
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