Beside the death-bed of his brother, one of England’s foremost composers made a second attempt at setting some words of poet Adelaide Procter. Arthur Sullivan’s setting of The Lost Chord became one of the most famous parlour ballads of its time and afterwards; a version of it was one of the very first recordings of music on for Eddison’s phonograph.

The music – less rumbustious than expected by those who only know Sullivan’s operettas – is gently chromatic (occasionally modal) and dynamically and emotionally varied. Though the text is essentially strophic, the song is through composed, but musically coherent. The sense of religious reverence is reinforced by its being unafraid to dwell on intonation of the tonic, subdominant and dominant notes in the melody, while the accompaniment adds the motion that keeps the song moving forward. The same sustaining of notes may be part of the painting of text about the organ in a texture written for voice and piano.

The text describes a musician who, while playing the organ, found a chord which somehow resonated very strongly in the soul: it linked all perplexed meanings into one perfect peace| and trembled away into silence, as if it were loth to cease. Yet cease it did, and the narrator was unable to recreate the sound, that magic moment of stark realisation, and can only project onto the future moment of either death or heaven the possibility that it might be heard once more.

Is this ‘chord of music‘ somehow an analogy for aspects of our religious consciousness? That the divine is beyond our comprehension we well know; but that God reveals Godself we trust, but it is often in moments and flashes and brief encounters that such revelation strikes us, and to the memory of those moments that we cling when things seem more ordinary. It is in this that I find myself inverting the cliché that some of my friends who don’t share my faith use, claiming to be ‘spiritual but not religious’; I often wonder whether I am religious but no (or at least insufficiently) spiritual. And yet this song of Sullivan’s which I learned as a young person sticks with me and reminds me that the points of awareness I have had can continue to inform my attitude towards life even long after they occurred – and they may even turn out to have been proleptic of heaven.