Each note a thing of brilliance
Benjamin Britten composed the exquisite A Ceremony of Carols while cooped up, bored, on a ship crossing the Atlantic and a nation has been everlastingly grateful, says Ysenda Maxtone-graham
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols
ONe had to alleviate the boredom,’ Benjamin Britten wrote to a friend in 1942, explaining why he’d written his A Ceremony of Carols. Never have we been more thankful for someone’s boredom needing to be alleviated. Bring on boredom, if it gives a composer the urge to create such a magical work!
Just thinking about A Ceremony of Carols, with its wintry harp sounds and thrilling
It’s been described as “the hurly-burly of a playground” and “a dormitory pillow fight”
three-part treble choir, sends shivers up and down the spines of all of us for whom the piece is the quintessence of beauty, expressing the mystery of the Christmas story like no other piece of music.
It happened like this. After three years in the USA, the homesick Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, decided to return to wartime Britain in the spring of 1942. They sailed in convoy on a Swedish ship, the Axel Johnson, which stopped off at various ports before setting off across the Atlantic. Going for a stroll in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Britten happened to wander into a second-hand bookshop where he bought a book of medieval English verse.
Cooped up on the ship for the following weeks as it zig-zagged across the Atlantic avoiding U-boats, in a cabin facing the ship’s refrigerator, which gave off noxious smells, Britten composed not just one but two masterpieces: Ode to St Cecilia and (using some of the medieval verse from that book as his text) A Ceremony of Carols, scored for trebles and harp.
This is the cussedness of the creative process: in the wrong place at the right time, inspiration can suddenly strike. In the unpromising surroundings of that swaying ship, Britten burst out of the creative block that had imprisoned him for months.
One of the longest queues I have ever been in was for an unticketed performance of A Ceremony of Carols at Westminster Abbey in December 2016. It was longer than the queue for the Tutankhamun exhibition of 1972. This was the moment when I realised that the piece had taken its place in the nation’s hearts: we love it, we need it, we crave it.
Many cathedral choirs now perform it every December as a staple of the build-up to Christmas. Andrew Lumsden, director of music at Winchester Cathedral, says: ‘When we first started performing it annually, 12 years ago, I remember thinking “We’ll be lucky if we get 100 in the audience”. Actually, we got 350 the first time and, nowadays, we fill the cathedral.’
Note ‘audience’ rather than ‘congregation’. This piece is usually a cassocks-withoutsurplices job: performed as a concert, but it feels more numinous than do many services. As with Bach’s Magnificat or Handel’s
Dixit Dominus, it manages to embrace the whole spectrum of human experience in a short space of time.
It begins with a ‘processional’ sung to Gregorian chant. The choir processes in from the distant end of wherever it’s being sung—you can hardly hear it when it starts —and the sound gradually grows. Being the longest medieval cathedral in Europe, Winchester is particularly suited to this phenomenon. I like to think of Britten envisaging this in his cramped ship’s cabin.
Then come six exquisite short carols, including the wistful lullaby Balulalow, in that delicious medieval mixture of English and Latin, followed by a beautiful harp interlude, three more carols and a ‘recessional’, during which the choir processes out, again singing plainsong.
Its first performance was by the women of the Fleet Street Choir, but Britten soon decided that boy-treble voices better conveyed the innocent, pure effect he wanted —the final version was first performed by the Morriston Boys’ Choir at Wigmore Hall in December 1943 (their recording is available on the Pearl label).
Children adore singing the piece; one of the reasons for its magical effect is that their enjoyment is infectious—britten was superb at composing for children. In alleviating boredom, he managed to write not a single boring note.
Robert Quinney, who directs the New College, Oxford performance on December 22 (see box), explains: ‘Britten understood the combination, in children, of their innocence and vulnerability on one side and also their latent wildness. He finds a tap for that—there’s an aggressive energy in some of the movements.’
Trying to put this into words, writers have variously described A Ceremony of Carols as being like ‘the hurly-burly of a school playground’, ‘an obstacle course on sports day’ and ‘a dormitory pillow fight’. Mr Quinney describes the thrilling, racing three-part canon of my favourite movement, ‘This little babe’, as ‘like arrows flying about’. It’s extraordinary, exhilarating to sing—and all over in one minute and 20 seconds.
Harpists treasure and revere Ceremony. I spoke to Oliver Wass, who will play for the New College performance, and to Anne Denholm, Official Harpist to The Prince of Wales, who’s playing it in Winchester and Ely Cathedrals. Both say it’s one of the best and most challenging pieces ever written for their instrument, each movement having its own distinct character.
‘Britten is renowned for his unique style of writing for the harp,’ adds Miss Denholm. ‘He brings out its colours and textures like no other composer, pushing the harp to the edge of what’s possible.’ Mr Wass draws my attention to the ‘whole page of harmonics’ during the harp interlude, which gives it ‘a bell-like sonority’.
Ironically, for a harp part that expresses the essence of icy, wintry coldness, it’s important for the harpist to have warm hands. ‘I like a church or cathedral that has a kettle in the vestry,’ Miss Denholm explains, ‘so I can have a hot-water bottle near my hands until the very last moment.’