Music
A CENTURY OF NINE LESSONS AND CAROLS
Hugh Walpole’s father, Somerset Walpole, a curate in the newly created diocese of Truro, suggested to Bishop Edward Benson that the cathedral might consider offering competition to the alehouses on Christmas Eve with a bespoke service of readings and carols.
The year was 1880 and, since the old church of St Mary’s had been demolished and work had only recently started on the cathedral that would be J L Pearson’s multi-vistaed masterpiece, the service was held in a large wooden shed.
The tradition of seasonal readings goes back to the medieval age but it is to that Truro service that the King’s College, Cambridge, world-renowned yet quintessentially Anglican festival of nine lessons and carols owes its origin.
The Cambridge service, first heard on Christmas Eve 1918, was devised by the 34-year-old dean, Eric Milner-white, a Kingsman recently returned from service as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War.
He never spoke of his experiences, though there can be little doubt that the matchless bidding prayer which he wrote distilled feelings felt then, and in later times, in language worthy of Cranmer or Newman. ‘Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us but, upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.’
There have been just four directors of music at King’s during the century that has passed, of whom two, Boris Ord and David Willcocks, both served in the Second World War; Ord in the RAF, Willcocks in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, where his actions during the Normandy landings in 1944 earned him the Military Cross.
There’s a fine chapter on Willcocks in Timothy Day’s new book about King’s and an English singing style, I Saw Eternity the Other Night (Allen Lane), in which he attributes Willcocks’s success at King’s, not only to his fabled ear and superb musicianship but to his command of the position itself.
It was a brand of leadership – one of the unlooked-for benefits of that later war – which was widely manifested in post-war Britain, not least among Willcocks’s opposite numbers, the cadre of young headmasters who transformed English private education in the 1950s and 1960s.
Because King’s, unlike its sister foundation in Eton, had to wait the best part of 80 years for its chapel to be completed, it missed out on the first golden age of English music in the 1400s. Indeed, complaints about the tatterdemalion state of the King’s choir persisted until the 1870s, when the college statutes were
redrawn and Arthur ‘Daddy’ Mann was appointed organist and choirmaster. Such was Mann’s longevity, he died in office only months after the first BBC broadcast of the Christmas Eve service in December 1928.
Mann was a formidable musician, though not everyone was enamoured of his high-victorian style of music-making.
‘I simply hated the juicy way in which the organ notes oozed round inside the roof, sapped your vitals and made you want to cry about nothing at all’ was the starchy response of the aggressively unmusical Gwen Raverat in her Cambridge classic Period Piece. A C Benson, the bishop’s son, was similarly disapproving, complaining, somewhat bewilderingly, of sounds like ‘streams of strawberry jam’.
What Mann began, his successor Boris Ord distilled into what a perfumier might call ‘Essence of King’s’: that pure, ethereal beauty of sound – of the boys’ voices in particular – which precisely matches the building and its remarkable acoustic.
Like many acoustically fine buildings (most typically the Golden Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein) the shape of King’s Chapel is that of a large shoebox. (Cromwell’s troops used it as a drill hall.) There are no side aisles to detain or distract the sound, and the famous fan vaulting is sufficiently high to gather and disperse the music with mystic ease.
Wordsworth, an alumnus of nearby St John’s College,described the King’s sound as ‘wandering on as if loth to die’, ‘Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof/that they were born for immortality’.
This Christmas Eve will be Stephen Cleobury’s last as director of music. So stands King’s where it did? Surely so. It’s a journey that’s partly mapped by an absorbing 2CD set 100 Years of Nine Lessons & Carols, jointly produced by King’s and the BBC. The first disc draws on music from Christmas Eve broadcasts between 1958 and 2017. The second is a newly made anthology that marries old favourites with further examples of the small but discriminating legacy of new music – neither dispiritingly demotic nor wilfully obscure – whose commissioning has been one of the distinguishing features of Cleobury’s 34 years at the helm.