Howells and his family went on holiday to Gloucestershire in early September 1935, in a break from his work at the Royal College of Music and as a music examiner. One morning his nine-year-old son, Michael, woke up feeling unwell. By the next evening he was dead, of spinal meningitis. This would have been a devastating blow in any circumstances; for Howells it had the additional effect of silencing him as a composer. The block lasted for nearly three years, until his daughter Ursula — who would later become one of our most celebrated actresses — urged him to get the grief out of his system by writing a piece of music about it. That was the genesis of the Hymnus Paradisi, a work in six parts that, as well as conveying a shattering sense of loss, also has the theme of light — lux perpetua — running through it.

The composer was an agnostic, or possibly even an atheist, yet the words he set are sacred. And although the work has moments of blinding light within it, articulated by the soprano not least in a great climax in the second movement, it ends on the same phrase of deepest sadness with which it opens. It is a work that serves as a constant reminder of mortality but, beyond that, of the fear that, in death, there may after all be no consolation, just resignation. It is a peculiarly English articulation of loss.

When Howells completed the work in 1938 he put it in his drawer, deeming it too personal to be performed. In 1949 he was asked by Herbert Sumsion, the organiser of the Three Choirs Festival, to provide something for the 1950 season at Gloucester. Having shown Sumsion the score of the Hymnus, with a view to offering it, he changed his mind. But Sumsion called in Gerald Finzi and Vaughan Williams to twist Howells's arm, and he conducted it at Gloucester very close to the 15th anniversary of Michael's death, in September 1950. A process of mourning was complete, and music had acquired another work of genius.