The piece recorded here, published in volume 2 of John Stainer's anthology, The Village Organist, of 1897, is both easy to play and easy on the ear. You can let yourself be enveloped by its pleasant sounds without ever noticing its clever compositional technique, hinted at by its title: each phrase played by the right hand is immediately copied by the left, while the right hand already plays the next phrase.
Walter Battison Haynes was born at Kempsey near Worcester. He became a chorister at Malvern Priory, where his uncle was organist. In 1878 that uncle sent him to study music at the famous Leipzig conservatory. Recipient of a scholarship, Haynes in Leipzig played public concerts as a pianist as well as composing (among other things an organ sonata, a symphony, chamber and piano music, and songs). After his return he became organist of St Philip Neri Church in Upper Sydenham in 1884 -- by the sound of it a Roman Catholic church. Presumably though, Haynes was Anglican -- or he could hardly have been a chorister at Malvern, nor become, in 1891, organist of the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy.
This late medieval building, now dwarfed by the eponymous hotel, takes its name from the old Savoy palace. It is in fact a remnant of the Hospital of St John, founded by Henry VIII on the site of the former palace, closed in 1702, and demolished a century later. The chapel is a royal peculiar, meaning that it is under the direct jurisdiction of the monarch rather than the diocesan bishop. At the Savoy Chapel Haynes played a two-manual organ by "Father" Henry Willis -- built in 1864, enlarged ten years later, and thrown out in 1939 when Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, d. 2002) decided the chapel (not a large building by any means) needed more space. The instrument was replaced by a Hammond electronic organ, causing something of a scandal in the organ world -- harbinger of many, many similar events to come. The organ was sold to Fressingham parish church, where it still is, though missing its original case. (When the good people of Fressingham, in 2013, belatedly attempted to get hold of the case too, no trace of it could be found.)
The 1896 photograph of the chapel shows it as it was during Haynes's tenure -- a probably somewhat dark space with sumptuous Victorian decoration, of which the Willis organ formed part: the chapel had to be restored after a fire in 1864. In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (1946) Julia Flyte complains about her wedding to Rex Mottram, describing it as "squalid" and explaining that "[t]he Savoy Chapel was the place where divorced couples got married in those days -- a poky little place not at all what Rex had intended." But another source (Ben Weinreb et al., The London Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. 2008) says that in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign the chapel was in fact "as fashionable as St George, Hanover Square, for upper class weddings" -- perhaps because it had electric lighting from an unusually early date for a church: 1890. The interior was modified in 1939-40 and again in 1956-57 and is now rather less dark. The stencilled decoration of the walls has been replaced by simple whitewash, and much of the Victorian stained glass was blown out in 1940 or 1941. The Hammond organ was, in its turn, replaced by another pipe organ, a three(!)-manual instrument by Walker & Sons presented by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965 and housed in one of the plainest and ugliest organ cases I have ever seen.
The Savoy Chapel has a choral foundation (six adult singers plus boy choristers) so the services accompanied by Haynes would have been sung by the choir.
Haynes was also, from 1890 (the year before his appointment to the Savoy Chapel), professor of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. At an unspecified time he also became director of music of Borough Polytechnic (founded 1892), though apparently he no longer held that post at the time of his death.
The biographical information about Haynes comes from an obituary published in vol. 41 of the Musical Times (no. 685 of 1 March, 1900). This says that he was laid to rest in Malvern Cemetery on 8 February but not why he died so young (he had only recently turned 40), nor have I been able to find any clue to this elsewhere.
More Victorian organ music on this channel: • Victorian and Edwardian Organ Music
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