Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote two pieces for Christmas, one rather short, the other (at the end of his life) much longer and more complex. I thought you might like to be introduced to both of them at this season of joy.
The first piece, his Fantasia on Christmas Carols, is short and uncomplicated. Let's listen to it before proceeding further.
The Telegraph offers this summation of Vaughan Williams' Christmas music (article may be paywalled).
The Christmas carol perhaps exemplifies the power of music to conjure time and landscape better than anything else. These songs evoke darkness and chill, the full harshness of the British winter. Most of the tunes date from a time before electric light and central heating, when households crowded round open fires (if they could afford the fuel) and contemplated a festive season that for many was a rare escape from privation and soullessness.
I have never thought this was captured better than in the opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols, perhaps the only piece of music a civilised human being needs at this time of year. So many Christmas carols, mainly for ease of singing by those not used to the activity, are little more than dreary dirges ... Vaughan Williams, by contrast, cleverly chose three beautiful tunes, of varying moods, for his Fantasia, with perhaps two of them unfamiliar to his audience. He also slipped in short references to and quotations from other carols. The melodic quality of the finished work is not least why it is so loved and often heard in this season, and at 12 or 13 minutes long, there is no danger of anyone’s becoming bored.
Vaughan Williams wrote the work in 1912, and it was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival of that year at Hereford, perhaps somewhat inappropriately in early September. It has a solo part for baritone, and although he has plenty of opportunity to display his talents, it packs its punch using an orchestra and chorus. Vaughan Williams had for the previous nine years been collecting folk tunes from the countryside, sensing (quite correctly) that the tradition of their being passed down from one generation to the next was dying out because of industrialisation and mechanisation, and the movement of younger men from agricultural work to the factories and mills of nearby cities. The three main tunes he collected for his work were all from the southern counties.
The work opens with that mournful evocation of the bleakness of winter, using the carol The Truth Sent from Above, which begins with the baritone’s singing accompanied by low strings and, eventually, a wordless chorus. The words evoke Christian charity, and the antiquity of the Christmas message, but the folk tune pronounces an intense, unmistakeable and indefinable Englishness, a sense the composer would elaborate 20 years later in his essay “National Music”. After this the mood is lifted by the far more festive Come All You Worthy Gentlemen, an ancestor of the more familiar carol God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. In this part of the work, Christmas has overcome its bleak, dark, cold context and become about “tidings of comfort and joy”, and hope.
Then the baritone solo returns with the even more joyous On Christmas Night, the tune that will have been most familiar to those who heard the work for the first time more than a century ago. The composer’s careful writing for the chorus, notably for the trebles and altos, again elevates the mood, as does his orchestration of this third old English tune, which he develops into a soaring climax, complete with bells and chimes. The Fantasia may have begun in darkness, but it ends in light, happiness and serenity, and looking forward to “a happy new year”: as the ideal Christmas should.
Half a lifetime later, in 1953-54, Vaughan Williams drew on his experience to write a much longer, and more innovative, festive work, Hodie, which he called a “Christmas Cantata”. It has (as do several works of his later period) occasional quotations of some of his other works, and especially in its opening sequence is strongly reminiscent of his Five Tudor Portraits of 1936. His most recent symphony, Sinfonia Antartica, is evoked; but also some of the purely devotional music in the work seems to echo the style of his friend, pupil and dedicatee, Herbert Howells.
Hodie is much less often performed in the popular repertoire, which is a pity. It contains a great deal of musical richness in its own right. It contains 16 individual pieces, all of which can be heard on YouTube in this 1965 performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir David Willcocks. Choirs are the Bach Choir of London and the Choir of Guildford Cathedral. Here's the Prologue, "Nowell! Nowell!"
The remaining pieces in the cantata may be heard at this playlist, either letting them play in order or selecting the ones you want to hear from the sidebar. Inspiring and recommended listening.
It remains only for me to wish all of my friends and readers a happy, holy and blessed Christmas. May we never lose sight of the reason for the season, and not allow that to be washed away in a wave of commercialism and secularism.
Peter
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