Thomas Weelkes (1575-1623) had a vivid imagination and love of experiment, and died prematurely at the peak of his creative powers, but not before he had composed a very large amount of music. Nowhere are Weelkes' outstanding musical abilities more evident than in his four sets of madrigals, which appeared between 1597 and 1608, and his splendidly sonorous full anthems.
Probably the son of a Sussex clergyman, Weelkes was appointed organist of Winchester College in 1598. There he composed some of his finest madrigals, which appeared in two volumes published in 1598 and 1600. In July 1602 he received the degree Bachelor of Music from New College, Oxford; and some time between October 1601 and October 1602 he was appointed organist and master of the choristers at Chichester Cathedral, where he ended his days, dismissed from his post on grounds of his being a habitual common drunkard and a notorious swearer and blasphemer, a tragic end for the successful young madrigal composer of the 1590s, who had evidently aspired to higher things: several of his anthems and services were written not with Chichester in mind but for the more sumptuous services and ceremonies of the Chapel Royal, with which he evidently had some informal contact. He never, however, consolidated the London connectionto the extent that he could leave provincial Chichester. We can only speculate whether the debuached habits were the cause of the stagnation in his career or the effect if it.
Weelkes' madrigals are adventurous yet possess strong links with English musical tradition. He pushed the use of musical imagery to its limits and often attained a magnificent sonority in his writing. Weelkes had the most restless, exploring musical imagination of any, achieving greater extremes of expression within the compass of one madrigal, as well as width of human experience, from care-free drinking or tobacco songs to care-laden masterpieces, like 'O care, thou wilt dispatch me.' With him one is relieved from the Petrarchan obsession with the love of women. There is a whole spectrum instead, from the Cries of London, 'New Walfleet oysters', or 'The ape, the monkey and baboon', through the bell-like gaiety of 'On the plains', to the most astonishing of madrigals, 'Thule, the period of cosmography', and 'The Andalusian merchant'. These last, with their fantastic descriptiveness, the musical leaps from Hecla's fire to 'frozen climes', the references to cochineal and china dishes and 'how strangely Fogo burns', throw the mind back to the world of the Madre de Dios with its cargo of cochineal, the Chinese Ming porcelain that came into Burlegh's possession and, tricked out in Elizabethan silver garnishing, is to be seen now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is not fanciful to see the physical expansion of their world reflected in the explorations and discoveries of their minds.
Weelkes was familiar with the chromatic expressionism of the Italians, but it corresponded with his own emotional needs and trials. In his finest madrigals in this vein, 'Hence, care, thou art too cruel', and 'Cease sorrows now', one hears the autobiographical inspiration. He wrote more madrigals than any, except Morley, but, with his intensity of temperament, crammed the bulk of his work into four early years. He was about twenty-two when he produced his first set in 1597: 'unripe in regard of time', he said in dedicating 'the first fruits of my barren ground' to a Hampshire gentleman who had been good to him. From the time of the severe Bishop Horne there had been no organ in Winchester College. Not until Weelkes' appointment in 1598-9 was the organ restored to chapel services. In 1598 Weelkes followed Morley with a set of Ballets--these delightful compositions are always distinguished by fa-la refrains. He displayed a wider range than most in his choice of words, in this volume drawing upon Barnabe Barnes as in the former from Barnfield's poems in The Passionate Pilgrim.
Midway between the printed madrigals and the church music stand two sacred madrigals, the laments O Jonathan and When David heard/O my son Absalom. Both are richly scored for six voices, and the latter is one of the finest pieces in the repertory. Here, once again, Weelkes explores the depths of grief, and the music is outstanding for its striking textural contrasts, its wealth of ideas, its excellent contrapuntal technique, and its sheer expressive power. (This work even influenced later madrigal composers, such as John Ward and Thomas Tomkins, who both refer to Weelkes' final section in their own compositions.)
After 1608 Weelkes published no more madrigals. Instead, well versed in the polyphonic techniques of William Byrd, he apparently devoted his creative energies to the production of a large quantity of church music, probably for use at Chichester Cathedral. Unfortunately, the composer's relationship with the ecclesiastical authorities was not a happy one and from 1609 onwards he was often in trouble. At first negligence and absenteeism were the main problem. But by 1616 he was 'noted and famed for a common drunkard and notorious swearer and blasphemer'; and in 1619 he had 'Very often come so disguised eyther from the Taverne or Ale house into the quire as is much to be lamented, for in these humoures he will bothe curse and sweare most dreadfully'.
Weelkes' enormous talent rose above his daily personal difficulties, however, and he managed to produce a stream of sacred compositions in a wide range of styles. Three brilliant full-textured anthems, Hosanna to the son of David, Alleluia, I heard a voice, and Gloria in excelsis Deo, use recurring musical and verbal material to unify them, a device which the composer had earlier developed in his madrigals. All three are dramatic works which combine fluent polyphonic technique with church anthem, Gloria exploits madrigalian chromaticism and the words 'tune thy heart'; and Alleluia is the only anthem in the repertory to exist in both 'Verse' and 'full' forms, and may have been influential, as the later madrigalist and composer of sacred music, John Ward, clearly modelled his own setting on it.
Weelkes is certainly the most paradoxical figure among the English madrigalists and one of the most interesting and talented English composers of his time.
