I have mixed feelings about this one, actually, because while I think it is heart-stoppingly beautiful, for most of us it’s one to admire, rather than to join in with. We had our usual family carols yesterday and attempted several numbers that I’d never heard before, or at least never paid attention to, and I realised anew that it is not possible to read music and words at the same time and get both right. So listening to this now is making me feel a bit anxious.
This is, of course, because it’s a twentieth-century carol – dating from around 1919 – and they’re often a little tricksier than their older relatives. Stick with it, though, for a cameo from a baritone whom you’ll recognise as our solo Balthazar back on December 12th. I wonder what he’s doing now?
In The Bleak Midwinter is maybe the prettiest tune of all, as long as you make sure to listen to the Gustav Holst setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem rather than the less lovely tune by Harold Darke, which dates from 1911 rather than Holst’s 1906 and therefore is definitely a pale imitation of the original. Sorry, Harold Darke, but there it is.
Actually tomorrow’s carol might be the prettiest of all. I’ll let you make your own mind up.
The thing about The First Nowell is that is essentially the same musical phrase sung over and over for four and a half minutes, which is why it’s impressive that this arrangement by David Willcocks (who, incidentally, arranged about half of the carols we’ve heard so far, and who died in September this year aged 95 after a quite extraordinary life) manages to dart around, giving the tune to different sections at different times, introducing a descant line early on and then reverting to the main tune and generally showing off what a few dozen voices and an organ are capable of.
Whereas many of our favourite carols date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, there is a core of traditional carols that are much earlier and this is one, dating certainly from the sixteenth century but quite possibly as early as thirteenth century in its original form. So join in and enjoy the fact that you’re carrying on a Christmas tradition that’s at least as old as Elizabeth I.
My favourite anecdote about Christmas carols is one I heard on Radio Four one Christmas and I can’t remember whether I’ve told it here before, but in case I haven’t, and even if I have, here it is.
As you may know, the first verse is usually sung unaccompanied by a soloist, as it is here. At our family carols we used to rotate this role, with varyingly amusing results, until my cousin married a professional mezzo soprano, at which point it became clear nobody else was in the running any more (she usually tries to get out of it, but we never let her).
Anyway, the story told by a man on the radio who was probably, but not definitely, a choirmaster, was of a female soprano who was tasked with the solo, and who made the unfortunate mistake of starting off to the tune of Hark The Herald Angels Sing, which is similar enough to the tune of Once In Royal David’s City that she was able to stick with it, all unknowing, until she got to the line
Mary was that mother mild Jesus Christ her little child
which she sang to the tune of
With th’angelic host proclaim: “Christ is born in Bethlehem”
With the result that the only way out was to get to the end of the verse by singing
La la la la la la la La la la la la la la
To the tune of
Hark the herald angels sing “Glory to the new-born King!”
(It’s funnier if you sing it, which he did.)
Apparently the choir had spotted the error and gamely jumped in and sang the second verse to the correct tune, and all was well.
So I will always be fond of Once In Royal David’s City for that reason, and because it’s always been (at least, since 1919) the song that starts the Christmas Eve service from King’s, so it’s special, and because it was originally written for children to sing, so it’s also sweet and comprehensible. It dates from the mid-19th century and is the work of Cecil Alexander (a woman, and I’ve always liked Cecil as a woman’s name too, if I had a baby girl she might be a Cecil) who is also known for All Things Bright And Beautiful, but you can’t have it all.
I said before I started this year’s advent calendar that I wasn’t going to do it this year because I was too busy, and I was right; which is why there hasn’t been a song since Wednesday. But fear not! Because today I will bring you three – one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner – and bring us back up to date.
We’ve had December 17th’s song before in its original Basque form, but the much better-known version sung in English dates from the late nineteenth-century and is notable for having just about the prettiest tune ever. The words are lifted from the book of Luke and tell the story of the annunciation, so really we should have had it much sooner, but I was saving the best ones for last.
This carol has everything – a jaunty organ part (complete with jaunty organist); a cheery tune; an arrangement of such devilish complexity that I don’t think a single bar is repeated; a startling high note in the refrain and a sweeping descant to round off the final verse. The main tune is a traditional one, but the lyrics and that lively refrain are the work of our old friend George Ratliffe Woodward, whom I can’t however love wholeheartedly because he also gave us Ding Dong Merrily and you know how I feel about that one. This one, though, I love wholeheartedly.
Is it bad that everything about this carol makes me laugh? From the exclamation mark in its title through the endlessly silly “Ding dong ding” refrain (and the way at slows at the end, presumably to give more import to the dinga-donga-dings) to the charming “will this do?”-ness of the lyric
In a stable
(‘Tis no fable)
And all of that is before you notice that it careens into Latin in the final verse for no discernible reason except possibly because it fits the tune better. This estimable series of decisions was made by George Ratcliffe Woodward, a(nother) nineteenth-century Anglican priest who set his lyrics to a tune from the Piae Cantiones, composed in 1582 by a Finnish Catholic and published the same year by a Swedish Lutheran, making this quite possibly the most ecumenical of our carols so far. It’s still silly, though.
We’ve had this one before, back when we were doing carols from around the world, but the version that has made it into the King’s College choir repertoire is less jolly, sweeter and quite spectacularly beautiful. Listen in particular to all the vocal parts which aren’t the tune, each of which does its own thing and meanders around something only vaguely connected to what everyone else is singing, and yet the whole thing together sounds perfect. If you are a choir looking for something to learn and sing this Christmas, learn and sing this (as long as you have some confident sopranos somewhere in the mix).
Another nineteenth-century carol today, this time from France, although I’ve heard so many easy-listening renderings of it that if you’d asked me a week ago I would probably have guessed it was a mid-twentieth century American number. This recording is taken from the same performance, on Christmas Eve 2009, as yesterday’s version of We Three Kings, for which I make no apology because it is, once again, perfection. If you heard an actual choir of real angels, it would sound like this.
(Well, OK, actually there is a very slight wobble on the top note towards the end, but since the singers are humans and not angels, and since the sopranos are mostly very little boys, I forgive them completely.)
The most exciting thing to happen at my annual school carol service at St Paul’s church in Locksbottom came when I finally got to the fifth year, because we always used to have the first and second-years sing Gaspar (Gold), the third and fourth-years sing Balthazar (Frankincense) and the fifth-years and sixth-formers sing Melchior (Myrrh), which meant that in 1992, 1993 and 1994 I got to sing what must be the hair-standing-on-end-est lyric in any carol anywhere:
Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume Breathes a life of gathering gloom Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying Sealed in a stone-cold tomb*
People reading in a hurry would often confuse the word order in the last line and sing “sealed in a cold stone tomb”, which illustrates nicely how perfect and poetic the correct line is. And the words start good and stay good – I still shiver in a good way at Heaven sings ‘Alleluia’ – ‘Alleluia’ the Earth replies.
Anyway, it turns out that John Henry Hopkins, Jr, the Pennsylvanian rector who wrote We Three Kings (shout out once again to the nineteenth-century clergy, source of so much carolling goodness), intended that the three middle verses should be sing by three soloists, and that is how King’s College choir perform it here, and what’s more they clearly also know that the third verse is the money shot. Watch and you’ll see what I mean. And keep watching until the final note, which is a proper fist-pump moment. And watch in full-screen with the sound turned up high, because everything about this video is brilliant.
Glad All Over 