One hundred years on, the King’s carols reach millions
Timothy Day reveals why the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has a huge worldwide audience
This summer, after a reign of 37 years, Sir Stephen Cleobury stepped down as director of the choir at King’s College, Cambridge. It was immensely sad that, barely two months after his official retirement, he died in the closing hours of the feast day of St Cecilia, music’s patron saint.
The new man at King’s is Daniel Hyde, who comes from St Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York. Hyde was a chorister at Durham Cathedral, an organ scholar at King’s between 2000 and 2003, and director of the choir for seven years at Magdalen College, Oxford, so he knows a thing or two about the timeless style of English cathedral and college choirs.
For many, it is with the sound of a solo treble singing Once in Royal David’s City that Christmas truly begins. Yet, though it may seem as if this style is as ancient as the stonework of the chapel, it was a 20th-century invention.
In the middle of the 19th century, educated Englishmen did not sing; the singers in the choir at King’s were all from poor families in the city of Cambridge – some college servants, some their sons. “Boys’ voices,” a musician declared in 1852, “are like cats’ voices.”
Then, in the 1870s, King’s opened a boarding school for boys from all over England and in 1881 created the first choral scholar. These scholars, undergraduates reading for a degree, ree, were gradually substituted for the old singing men, the lay clerks – the last of whom died in office in 1928, just before the first Christmas Eve wireless broadcast. Except for 1930 (for reasons unknown), it has been transmitted every year since. It quickly captured the nation’s imagination: most of the carols so familiar, and yet in the stupendous acoustic of King’s Chapel sounding magically remote, at once homely and transcendent – as Walford Davies put it in an article in 1928’s Christmas Radio Times.
As for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols itself, it was drawn up in 1918 by Eric Milner-White, newly appointed Dean of King’s, in the tradition of the greatest feasts in the Middle Ages. Milner-White contemplated the disillusion of the young men returning from the war and was determined to add “colour, warmth and deligh delight” wherever he could to the yearly round of the church’s ceremonies. And who could resist carols? This service was not designed primarily for the students, for so few of them would be around on Christmas Eve. But Milner-White was convinced the architecture of the chapel and its musical resources gave it the potential to be much more than a college chap chapel. At that time of darkness and of chaos, but also of hope, King’s should reach out to the city of Cambridge and beyond. It was an extraordinary vision: within a few years the service was famous not just in Britain but all over the world.
Last year’s service marked not only the last directed by Sir Stephen, but the centenary of the very first. Today’s singers are certainly more expert musicians than their predecessors in 1918, when their only duties were to sing the chapel services. Today, they sing in concerts all over the world and have frequent recording sessions.
This year, the live service will be listened to by 180million people. What do they make of these sounds, Christians, Jews, Muslims, those of no faith and those unsure of anything?
Just as in 1918, the men and boys at King’s this Christmas Eve will not be standing up there on a platform, striving to impress an audience.
They will be half hidden in the choir stalls, attempting to voice the hopes and fears of an international community of listeners, losing themselves and sometimes, perhaps, finding themselves, in music-making of unforgettable beauty.
Timothy Day is the author of ‘I saw Eternity the other night: King’s College Choir, the Nine Lessons and Carols, and an English Singing Style’ (Penguin)
The Dean wanted to add colour, warmth and delight