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When King James I of England and VI of Scotland commissioned a new translation of the Bible at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 it was with the goal of uniting a divided Church behind a single Bible that all people \u2013 Puritans and Anglicans alike \u2013 could call their own. <\/strong><\/p>\n But his objectives were not as quickly realised as the more straightforward linguistic aims of the translators. They strove to produce a text which placed clarity, cadence and colour ahead of slavish word-for-word translation \u2013 a language written to resonate from the pulpit; a language ripe with musical possibilities.<\/p>\n AT first musicians were unimpressed. William Byrd<\/a> <\/strong>(c1540-1623), England\u2019s leading composer, didn\u2019t lift his pen to set even a single word of it to music. It wasn\u2019t because he was Catholic, nor did he necessarily sympathise with prickly biblical scholars such as Hugh Broughton who\u2019d rather have been \u2018torn in pieces by wild horses\u2019 than use the new translation. No, just as we cherish the familiar phraseology of the King James Version (KJV) today, so Byrd and his contemporaries continued to make use of the words they knew and loved from the Geneva Bible (1560), Bishops\u2019 Bible (1568) and above all Myles Coverdale\u2019s psalter (1535) which remained the professional composer\u2019s first choice for anthem texts for centuries to come.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until 1660 that things finally began to change. As the Commonwealth crumbled there was a triple Restoration: King Charles II to his throne, the KJV to the lectern, and music, once again, to England\u2019s great cathedrals and churches. Composers schooled in the expressive new Baroque style (Locke, Humphrey, Blow and Purcell<\/a><\/strong>) now began to explore the laments, prophecies and dramatic texts of the Old Testament to bring added emotion and drama to their anthems. Though Coverdale\u2019s translations of the psalms continued to predominate, Pelham Humphrey\u2019s choice of a text rich in rhetorical dialogue from Isaiah<\/i> 1 (Hear, O heav\u2019ns<\/i>) was typical of the more adventurous spirit of the 1670s.<\/span><\/p>\n What the King James translation offered composers was strongly verbal language whose rhythms tripped off the tongue and whose vocabulary was clear, colourful and majestic. The solos of Purcell\u2019s verse anthems in the 17th century, William Boyce\u2019s in the 18th, and SS Wesley\u2019s (grandson of Charles Wesley<\/a><\/strong>) in the 19th, owe their power to the directness of this language that, from the start, was designed to be spoken aloud. It was also, on occasion, a subtly sensual language, as Purcell discovered in My beloved spake<\/i> whose honeyed invitation to \u2018Rise my love, my fair one and come away\u2019 was drawn from the voluptuous Song of Solomon<\/i>. Patrick Hadley revisited these words in 1938, but the most popular of KJV texts in recent times has been \u2018Let us now praise famous men\u2019 (Sirach<\/i> 44), inspiring SS Wesley, Ralph Vaughan Williams<\/a><\/strong>, Gerald Finzi<\/a><\/strong>, Cyril Scott<\/a> <\/strong>and John Joubert to uplifting thoughts.<\/span><\/p>\n These days, the King James Version is best-known through Handel\u2019s oratorios. Although most of them were based on epic stories from the Old Testament, only two \u2013 Israel in Egypt<\/i> <\/p><\/div> <\/section> For Handel, setting verses raw and unaltered from the Bible played to his strengths. In Israel in Egypt<\/i>\u2004the pictorial imagery and energy of the texts spurred him on to find graphic musical equivalents, as in the galloping fugue and desperate shouts to the words \u2018The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea\u2019 (Exodus<\/i> 15). In the choruses of Israel in Egypt<\/i> he never tired of finding new textures and effects with which to dramatise the biblical verses in the imaginary theatre of the mind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The elegance and rhythm of the King James Version has less to do with regular poetic metre than with larger rhetorical structures involving balancing phrases and sentences. Biblical verses were often divided into parallel halves, comprising complementary or opposed sentiments: <\/span><\/p>\n \u2018Since by man came death; by man came also the resurrection of the dead. <\/span>For as in Adam all die; even sonin Christ shall all be made alive.\u2019 (I Corinthians <\/i>15: 21-22).<\/span><\/p>\n Handel\u2019s exploitation of these divisions runs like a thread through Messiah<\/i>. In choruses (\u2018Since by man came death\u2019) and arias (\u2018But who may abide\u2019) he used vividly contrasting music to distinguish between each half of the verse, thus introducing an element of drama that was otherwise missing from a libretto without characters or action. Surprisingly, he wasn\u2019t always as meticulous about textual accentuation, leaving quite awkward stresses on \u2018For unto us a child is born<\/a><\/strong>\u2019, and \u2018the dead shall be raised incorruptible\u2019. But on a larger scale he instinctively grasped the importance of equating the most passionate and majestic biblical language with his most extrovert and hedonistic style. The success of the \u2018Hallelujah\u2019 chorus (Revelation<\/i> 19) owes everything to this exuberant fusion of the sacred and secular, as the fervour of the King James is matched by pure Georgian pomp.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhen did the King James Bible start influencing <\/strong>composers?<\/h2>\n