King’s College’s Stephen Cleobury
The 100th anniversary of King’s College, Cambridge’s Nine Lessons and Carols will also be music director Stephen Cleobury’s last in post. Richard Morrison explores the service’s now legendary status – and bids Cleobury himself a fond farewell
Most ‘ancient’ Christmas traditions turn out to be not much older than your granny. The Festival of
Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, is no exception.
True, King’s pinched the basic format – nine biblical readings interspersed with carols for choir and congregation – from a service devised in Victorian times at Truro Cathedral. But the Cambridge version, prefaced by that sonorous bidding prayer exhorting us to remember those ‘who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light’ – dates only from 1918.
And how poignantly those words must have sounded in that particular year, echoing through the wintry twilight of the candlelit chapel. Like every other town, village and city in Europe, Cambridge must have been a desolate place 100 years ago, haunted by the ghosts of students who had never returned from Flanders and were indeed ‘on another shore and in a greater light’.
Last month I asked a group of presentday King’s choristers, most of them 11 or 12 years old, if they had any idea why King’s had inaugurated its Nine Lessons just a few weeks after the 1918 Armistice. ‘I think they did the service to cheer people up after the war,’ one replied. ‘Yes,’ said another, ‘England was completely torn apart by the war. This reminded people
of the happier side to life.’ A third added: ‘The service gave people the chance to reflect on what had happened, and how God brings light into darkness.’
Thoughtful words, and probably exactly right. Certainly Stephen Cleobury who, as director of music at King’s, will conduct the Nine Lessons service for the 37th and final time this Christmas Eve, would not disagree with his young charges. ‘Increasingly as the years have passed,’ he says, ‘I have come to feel that the worldwide appeal and enduring power of this service is partly about the way it connects people back to things they were familiar with in their childhood, or things they’ve lost touch with in their lives generally.’
Like Christian faith? ‘Well, in essence it tells the story of the birth of a child, and that reaches out to everyone whatever your religious viewpoint. And the tradition of starting with a solo boy singing the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City also touches something deep inside people.
I’m not surprised. I recently sat down and re-read the text of that hymn, just as poetry. It’s a wonderful journey through a whole spectrum of emotions.’
Yet in the interests of historical accuracy we have to point out that, back in 1918 at King’s College’s first Nine Lessons and Carols, the service actually didn’t begin that way. ‘No, we still have the service sheet,’ Cleobury says. ‘It began with Up! Good Christian Folk and Listen. You know, the carol that starts ‘ding dong ding, dinga-dong-a-ding’. But they did Once in Royal straight after that, and it’s been sung first every year since 1919.’
And has it always been performed with a solo treble? ‘Actually no,’ Cleobury says. ‘There are early recordings in which all the trebles sing the first verse – and even with organ accompaniment!’
That sacrilege won’t be happening this year, even though Cleobury’s choice of music will reflect the history of the
Nine Lessons in other ways. ‘First, I have chosen half-a-dozen carols that we know were done in 1918,’ he says. Not hard, one imagines. His second plan, however, is more intriguing – to include a carol written by each of the people who directed the choir at King’s during the past 100 years (see box, p37). There have been only six of them, but they are a disparate bunch. ‘Arthur Mann was the first, and he’s well known for his harmonisation of Once in Royal, which of course we sing. Then came Boris Ord and Harold Darke, who filled in during the Second World War when Ord was away. So we will include their classic settings of Adam Lay Ybounden and In the Bleak Midwinter respectively. After that came David Willcocks, Philip Ledger and me – and you’ll hear the odd piece by each of us as well.’
Just to keep the entire 2018 service ‘in house’, this year’s specially commissioned carol, O Mercy Divine, setting a text by Charles Wesley, will be composed by a distinguished graduate of King’s College, Judith Weir, now the Master of the Queen’s Music. What’s more, it will feature a solo cello part played by Guy Johnston, who
was himself a King’s chorister in the early Cleobury era.
Ask Cleobury to name his biggest innovation and he will point to these specially commissioned carols. They have certainly engaged an eclectic range of composers. One of the best was an earlier effort by Weir, called Illuminare Jerusalem, that is now a fixture in the Christmas repertoire of many choirs.
But its popularity pales beside another Cleobury commission: John Rutter’s What Sweeter Music (‘beautifully crafted as always,’ Cleobury says).
Then there was the year that he bravely commissioned contemporary composer Harrison Birtwistle. Alarm bells started ringing a couple of months before the service, when the uncompromising modernist phoned Cleobury to ask if he could include a passage where the boy trebles stamped their feet and shouted – not exactly standard practice in the hallowed choir stalls of King’s. ‘I replied, “yes, if that’s what you want to do”,’ Cleobury recalls. ‘And of course the children in the choir loved it, because after singing four or five pages of Birtwistle’s very demanding music, they got to let off steam.’
Well, that’s how Cleobury recollects it now. But one can imagine that at the time this most dedicated of choir directors must have seethed inwardly about the possible harm to his choristers’ precious larynxes. The present-day choristers are certainly in no doubt about his feelings on that matter. ‘Once we were playing a game called German Spotlight, where you have to run across a dark area without being caught by people pointing torches,’ one recalls. ‘It usually has a lot of shouting and screaming. Well, the next morning in corry practice Mr Cleobury really got mad at us for ruining our voices. But I think we all realise that we have to take care of our voices, because if you don’t they will break quicker and then you leave the choir earlier. And I think all of us want to stay in the choir for a long time.’
The life of a boy chorister at King’s is structured with military discipline.
Rise at 7am, washed and dressed by 7.10, breakfasted by 7.40, then 30 minutes of instrumental practice before ‘corry practice’ at 8.10 with Cleobury or one of the King’s organ scholars. Then into a full school day (the choristers are just 18 pupils out of 420 boys and girls, aged 4 to 13, at King’s College School) before, most days, a full rehearsal with the choral scholars (male undergraduates singing alto, tenor and bass), and evensong. It’s a punishing schedule. Yet all the boys I spoke to loved it, and considered it a privilege to be there.
Even more striking, however, is their regard for Cleobury. To the outside world, the veteran choir director may seem reserved, cerebral and emotionally buttoned-up. Not to his choristers. ‘You have to be in partnership with him to see an entirely different world of emotions revealed,’ one 12-year old told me. ‘Yes,’ another observes, ‘he tries to stay fierce and almost metallic when he’s training us, but deep down he’s a really emotional man. This year, because it’s his last year, he sometimes cries after we sing anthems that really affect him.’
What they all particularly remember is what happened after Cleobury had an accident in Cambridge last March – a collision with a bike that left him with serious injuries.’ When he came out of Addenbrookes [Cambridge’s hospital] he came straight to us, his choristers, before he went anywhere else,’ one boy says.
It even seems that Cleobury’s sense of humour – again, not always apparent to the outside world – is robust enough to tolerate practical jokes in the choir. ‘One year, as an April Fool, the altos took helium before the service,’ one chorister recalls. Well, why not? People frequently talk about the King’s College Choir reaching ‘celestial heights’.
How does Cleobury himself deal with the strain and stress of leading the Nine Lessons and Carols? After all, the event is broadcast live to millions, and this global audience includes hundreds of thousands of choir directors and singers listening intently for the tiniest flaw in the famously pristine King’s sound. ‘A really important part of my job, in terms of preparing the choir, is not to communicate any of that strain and stress to them,’ he replies. ‘I don’t like to start conversations with “are you going to be nervous?” I think if they are really well prepared, and if I maintain a calm demeanour, the choristers and the choral scholars can deal with the whole experience with equanimity.’ Yet there’s one moment, just before the service
‘The service tells about the birth of a child, and that reaches out to everyone’
starts, when that mantra of ‘preparation makes for perfection’ is cast aside, and it’s a paradox that’s not lost on the choristers. ‘For the solo at the start of Once in Royal, Mr Cleobury selects four people in rehearsal prior to the service, then at the very last moment he points to the person he has decided will do it,’ one chorister explains. ‘It’s so unlike him. Normally he likes to be so organised, but right before this big service he decides completely on the spur of the moment. I expect it’s to stop us being nervous and getting competitive about it.’
To mark the centenary of the Nine Lessons at King’s, the choir’s own record label has issued a double-album featuring historic recordings going back to 1958 (though, sadly, none from the Boris Ord or Arthur Mann eras) alongside new carol
‘Spoken English has become much lazier over the past decades’
recordings by the present choir. Inevitably, it prompts the question of how much the sound has changed over the decades, and especially while Cleobury has been in charge of it. ‘The latter is hard for me to judge,’ Cleobury replies. ‘I certainly didn’t come in with the intention of making it “my” sound. But the historic recordings do show how much vowel sounds have changed since the days when the choir used to sing “I was gled” at the start of Parry’s anthem. And I seem to spend proportionately more of my time now ensuring that the children pronounce all the consonants, because spoken English has become much lazier over the decades.’
In essence, however, the sound that King’s has produced under Cleobury is recognisably derived from what Willcocks nurtured in the 1960s. The big question is what happens next. When Cleobury retires next summer his successor will be (as predicted by BBC Music Magazine last year) the young, ambitious Daniel Hyde
– a former King’s organ scholar who
has bagged four increasingly prestigious appointments in quick successor (at Jesus College Cambridge, Magdalen College Oxford, St Thomas’s Church in New York and now King’s). And Hyde, it seems, is determined to shake up the sound. In an interview in The New Yorker two years ago he made not exactly supportive comments about ‘the traditional very polite English cathedral choir sound, where one is never louder than lovely, and it’s all very nicely packaged, and all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed’, and gave the interviewer the impression that he ‘sometimes found the King’s College Choir stifled by the weight that rested on such a storied ensemble’ – whatever that means. Whether he will have the nerve to change the King’s sound radically when he runs the show remains to be seen.
And there’s another contentious issue to be tackled. With many cathedrals now running girls’ choirs alongside the boys, the all-male formation of the King’s choir (along with those at Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral) looks increasingly anachronistic, not to say indefensible. Even insiders at King’s admit this. ‘I can definitely see a day when there will be some kind of change,’ says Yvette Day, who is both head teacher at King’s College School and holder of the historic title Master Over the Choristers. ‘Everyone here is conscious that there needs to be the same kind of opportunity for girls.
But what the opportunity ends up being, I wouldn’t like to say. No girl wants to be in a second-best choir, so this move requires wisdom and creativity. There are lots of conversations to be had. Stephen Cleobury would be having them now if he weren’t retiring, but I know we will have them with Daniel Hyde when he takes over.’
But that cataclysmic change lies in the future. This year it’s all about Cleobury, who will conduct his final evensong on 8 July next year, then embark on his last tour with the choir – fittingly to Australia, the location of his first tour back in 1983. ‘Yes, it really has come full circle,’ he says. What will be his feelings at the end? ‘Mixed,’ he replies. ‘King’s has been my life for 37 years, but there is a world outside.’
And after his last Nine Lessons is over, where will he actually spend Christmas and celebrate his 70th birthday on New Year’s Eve? ‘We will head straight to York, where we’ve bought a house. And where my youngest daughter has just become a chorister at the Minster. So she will be singing there on Christmas morning.’ This year’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day on Radio 3 (with full organ voluntaries)