The Britten celebrations on 22 November 1963, marked by a concert performance of Gloriana at the Royal Festival Hall, were overshadowed by news from over the Atlantic. Britten made little or no comment about the assassination. Indeed, the assassination is but a fleeting remark in Carpenter and Kildea's biographies. Though Britten was often troubled by world events, it was the considerably less fêted Herbert Howells who marked Kennedy's death, composing Take him, earth, for cherishing the following year.
The events of the early 60s – the testing of nuclear weapons, the Cuban missile crisis and the events in Dallas – had, as Christopher Palmer has noted, taken their toll on Howells, whose Stabat Mater of the time is riven with harmonic anguish. A year after Kennedy's death, Howells was asked to write an a capella motet for a dual American-Canadian Memorial Service to be held in Washington. The choice of text was down to Howells.
Pondering the commission, he turned to a familiar friend, Helen Waddell's translation of a hymn by Prudentius. He had written about the poem in his diary in 1958. 'Rain and Gloom. But the rain turned away with a sheer beauty of light. Prudentius’ ‘Hymnus Circa Exsequias Defuncti’ kept my mind in safe refuge—as once it did in Sept. 1935 for love of Michael.' Having first thought about the text for Hymnus Paradisi, written in memory of his son, it came to suit the Kennedy memorial perfectly. Both deaths were, to Howells's mind, examples of hope cut down in its prime. Strange, then, that Britten, to whom the 'ceremony of innocence' would remain a crutch, did not respond to Kennedy's death.
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