Contributions
Probably born in Sussex, Weelkes was organist of Winchester College from 1598, then of Chichester Cathedral from around 1602, where he was also master of the choristers; he took the Bachelor of Music degree at Oxford. Between 1597 and 1608 he published four collections that placed him in the front rank of English madrigalists, alongside Wilbye. His art is marked there by an extraordinary harmonic daring: bold chromaticism, expressive dissonance, spectacular word-painting in which the music clings to the word. "Thule, the period of cosmography" paints volcanoes and prodigies through dizzying harmonies; "O Care, thou wilt despatch me" embraces grief; "As Vesta was from Latmos hill descending," his contribution to The Triumphes of Oriana, sends the voices down and up at the bidding of the text. But Weelkes was also a great church composer: his services and above all his anthems — "Hosanna to the Son of David," "When David heard," "Gloria in excelsis Deo" — are among the most powerful of the early English Baroque.
Significance
Weelkes possessed the most adventurous harmonic imagination of the entire English madrigal school. Where Morley sought grace and lightness, Weelkes dared colour, collision, the extreme: he pushed the English madrigal to its expressive limits, making dissonance and chromaticism instruments of meaning in the service of often startling musical painting. His importance reaches beyond the secular genre: his anthems, full or verse, are among the most ambitious and moving of their time — "When David heard," a king's lament over the death of his son, is a summit of English pathos. Yet his fate carries a real shadow. A musician of dazzling gift, Weelkes sank into excess: the visitation records of Chichester Cathedral denounce him from the 1610s as a public drunkard, swearing and blaspheming even during services. Dismissed from his organist's post for these outbursts, then reinstated, he kept his link with the cathedral until his death, but the man ruined himself where the composer touched the sublime. What remains is a body of work of a force few have equalled.
Influence
His daring madrigals and powerful anthems left their mark on the English repertory of the early seventeenth century; "When David heard" opened a vein of lament taken up by his contemporaries, and his anthem "O Lord, grant the King a long life" has enjoyed an afterlife down to modern coronations. He acknowledged Thomas Morley, pioneer of the English madrigal, whose art he extended and radicalised, and absorbed the expressiveness of the Italian madrigal — chromaticism and word-painting — together with the Anglican anthem tradition inherited from Byrd and the preceding generation.
Anecdote
Weelkes's gift was matched only by his downfall. Around 1616 the authorities at Chichester reported him as "noted and famed for a common drunkard… and notorious swearer and blasphemer" — profaning even divine service in his drunken outbursts. He was driven from the organ, taken back, and driven out again; he died in London in 1623, far from the cathedral he had made sing. One of the greatest English madrigalists had lost himself in drink, leaving behind a music that nothing had been able to spoil.