It’s Christmas Eve, and the exquisite voice of a solo chorister sings the opening lines of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ in the candlelit chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. For millions of people all over the globe, Radio 4’s much loved broadcast ‘Nine Lessons and Carols’ heralds the start of Christmas.
Never before has the story of carols, and their festive performance at King’s, been told. From ‘Silent Night’ to ‘In Dulci Jubilo’, here are the stories behind the best-loved carols. For example, how exactly did three ships manage to sail into the land-locked town of Bethlehem? And what was the partridge doing in the pear tree?
Some carols date back centuries and predate even the building of King’s College Chapel, like ‘The Coventry Carol’, while others, such as the American ‘Jingle Bells’, are more recent additions. But all are an essential part of our Christmas tradition.
Carols from King’s is the perfect companion to the nation’s best-loved Christmas broadcast and our most popular tradition.
Alexandra Coghlan is a music journalist and critic. She has written for publications including the Spectator, New Statesman, the Independent, Gramophone and Opera magazines, and for ensembles including the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, The Academy of Ancient Music and The Sixteen. Alexandra was a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was during her time there that she first discovered the beauty of King’s College Chapel and the unique sound of the King’s College Choir.
For John Nourse
by Stephen Cleobury
My first awareness of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols arose when, as a chorister at Worcester Cathedral in the early 1960s, I heard the late Sir David Willcocks being interviewed on the radio about this service. I never heard it in its entirety then as the cathedral choir had its own duties on Christmas Eve. A number of the points David made about choir training have remained in my mind and been immensely useful to me ever since. But all those years ago I could never have imagined that one day I would assume the responsibility of being the guardian of the great tradition of the King’s service. Still less can I have thought that I would have the privilege of being involved with it for over 30 years.
I remember Christmas Eve 1982, my first at King’s, vividly. I entered the chapel at about 2.30 in the afternoon to prepare myself for the start at three o’clock. Those who had patiently queued from early in the morning were by then seated and listening to the organ music which the organ scholars play before the service begins. I was struck by the wonderfully calm atmosphere and the sense of waiting and anticipation among those present. The idea of ‘waiting’ is one of the themes of Advent, the season in the Church’s year which precedes Christmas and properly finishes on Christmas Eve. Waiting and anticipation are not often available to us in our busy modern lives, nor even in church, to the regret of many of us.
Perhaps the defining moment of the service comes at the start, when one of the choristers starts to sing ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. Millions listening around the world to BBC World Service and in the UK on Radio 4 wait for this moment. This is, for many of those who write to me, the ‘beginning’ of Christmas. I often feel that the familiarity of this hymn and its association with a young child singing the solo prevents me from appreciating properly the poetry of Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander. Here is a simple and moving statement about the journey of life: God, in the person of Jesus Christ, ‘came down to earth from heaven’ to be among us, to feel and share the sadness and the gladness in our lives, and to guide us, in the end, to ‘the place where he is gone’. This is the traditional Christian understanding and the service speaks directly and powerfully to those who associate themselves with this. I think that its breadth of appeal, however, is wider. Those who have been nurtured in this tradition but who have in one way or another departed from it tell me that they can respond at this special time of year to the retelling of the Christmas story which follows in all manner of deeply fulfilling ways. I know, also from my correspondence, that many who have no faith or who come from other religious traditions can be deeply moved by the combination of words and music, which, at the simplest level, tell the human story of the birth of a young child.
As well as preparing the choir for the Christmas Eve service, a process which takes place following the Procession for Advent some four weeks before, I need to have chosen the repertoire well in advance. In this, it is the combination of words and music which is of utmost importance. I aim to find a judicious mixture of old and new, the text of each carol chosen needs to reflect some aspect of the preceding reading and the whole has to form a satisfying musical sequence. Only the second of these criteria can be judged objectively. It is part of the pleasure of my work to receive comments on the first and third. While I naturally enjoy the appreciative comments more than the critical, the latter are, however, extremely important in making me think carefully the following year.
In each of the years I have been at King’s, except in my first when there was not time to set things up, I have commissioned a new carol (sometimes the chosen composer has also commissioned new words). I feel strongly that such a great tradition needs to have ‘new blood’. Initially, some were not so appreciative of the new pieces, though among the earlier ones both John Rutter’s ‘What Sweeter Music’ and Judith Weir’s ‘Illuminare, Jerusalem’ have achieved considerable popularity. As time went on, however, I found myself increasingly being asked ‘Who is writing the new carol this year?’ I have been very fortunate in that no composer I have approached has refused the commission. A number of those who have written are not primarily known for writing sacred choral works, but it is important to me to show that Church music does not inhabit a backwater unconnected with the mainstream of musical expression in the opera house and the concert hall.
A contemporary survey of carols from King’s would not be complete without reference to the television programme of that name which, although it began in 1954 on an irregular basis, has been an annual broadcast since the early 1990s. This retains most of the elements of the traditional Radio 4 radio broadcast, most particularly in that it begins with ‘Once in Royal’, but with the help of successive deans and chaplains, and an excellent working relationship with the producers, it intersperses poetry and prose within a sequence of familiar biblical readings. (More recently still, there has been a television broadcast Easter from King’s, which presents the events of Holy Week and Easter in a similar format.) This has been widely welcomed. The broadening of the scope of the readings has enabled a particular focus to be placed each year on a different aspect of the Christmas story. This in turn has given me new opportunities for repertoire selection.
I count myself extremely fortunate to have been able to play a part in the maintenance and development of this wonderful tradition.
Once in royal David’s city,
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby,
In a manger for His bed
(Mrs C.F. Alexander, 1818–95)
It’s 3pm on Christmas Eve. The last of the light catches the greens, golds and deep reds of the stained-glass windows of Cambridge’s King’s College Chapel, scattering their colours like precious gems across the stone floor below. Caught in this half-light, animated by the flickering candle flames, the fan-vaulted ceiling seems liquid, dripping down the walls in magnificent stone icicles.
The organ plays, softly, but above the music rises a hum of voices. The chapel is full, packed from the top of the chancel, watched over by Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi, to the West End. Everyone waits for the arrival of the choir. Only the microphones slung low from the roof bear witness to the millions of others who also listen and wait. They might be in Yorkshire making mince pies or in New York wrapping Christmas presents, but with the radio switched on, they too are here in King’s Chapel.
Suddenly the organ stops, and the only sound is the slight rustling of surplices and robes – heard, or perhaps only imagined. The choir, bright in red and white, are in place, grouped close together under the Tudor carvings of the West End. The director of music stands in front of them, waiting. At last he raises his arms, points to one chorister. The boy steps forwards and starts to sing: ‘Once in royal David’s city, / Stood a lowly cattle shed,…’
Christmas has begun.
What’s most striking about this scene – the chapel, the choristers, the candles – is its timelessness. We could be in any decade of almost any century, celebrating a ritual that seems as old as the chapel itself – maybe even older. At least, that’s the impression we get.
What’s really astonishing about the service of Nine Lessons and Carols is just how recent a phenomenon it actually is. A service that seems so ancient, so embedded in the history and identity of this chapel, this college community, was in fact only celebrated here for the first time in 1918. And it wasn’t a revival of a historic tradition, a return to an immemorial model. Nine Lessons and Carols was the creation of just two men: Edward Benson, Bishop of Truro, and Eric Milner-White, the young dean of King’s.
In less than a hundred years, Nine Lessons and Carols has become a touchstone of Christmas, celebrated not only in churches and cathedrals across the UK but right around the world. But what is it about this service, this particular combination of words, music, light and architecture that has so captured the public imagination?
For many it’s the moment of pause it offers – stillness at a time of year filled with noise and chaos, a meditation by any other name. For others it’s the sudden shock of beauty. Whether you’re hearing the service for the first time or the fiftieth, the effect is always the same; emotions aren’t so much stirred as seized, shaken out of you by a ritual that assaults all of your senses. It’s also a rare service that reaches beyond a Christian community, speaking potently to those of different faiths or even no faith at all with the unusual, unmediated directness of its readings and music.
More potent even than the service’s imagined history is its real genesis. Fresh from the horror of the First World War, faced with a disillusioned, broken community and a college and a nation that could no longer find consolation in the formal liturgy of the Anglican Church, Eric Milner-White brought Bishop Benson’s Nine Lessons and Carols to King’s, reshaping it into the service we know today. The service is simple – just ‘nine carols and nine tiny lessons’ – and it’s precisely this simplicity, this directness, that is its strength and power. It’s a service that excludes no one and welcomes everyone, from 8-year-old choristers to their 80-year-old grandparents.
But if Nine Lessons and Carols is an invented tradition, then so are the carols that form such a big part of it. Their roots might stretch all the way back to the medieval period, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that they became the popular, sacred songs we’d recognise today – played or sung in every home, church, school and shopping centre each December.
Thanks to the wide reach of its radio, and later television, broadcasts, King’s service of Nine Lessons and Carols has played a huge part in bringing carols back into the mainstream during our own century. Hard though it is to believe now, there was a time when even the best-loved favourites – ‘While Shepherds Watched’, ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’, ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ – were in danger of being forgotten, something for specialists to study rather than people to sing.
This book explores the history both of King’s service of Nine Lessons and Carols and the carols that feature in it. Along the way we’ll encounter Romans and reindeer, kings and choristers, pagans and Puritans, and discover the stories and secrets behind some much-loved pieces of music.
What was the partridge doing in the pear tree? Was good King Wenceslas really all that good? And how exactly did three ships manage to sail into the landlocked town of Bethlehem? All these questions and more will be answered and the history behind favourite festive traditions including Christmas cards, trees and carol-singing explained.
We’ll also take a look behind the scenes at King’s itself, hearing from the choristers, composers and the directors of music who have shaped the service of Nine Lessons and Carols, and learning just a little more about Eric Milner-White, the man whose imagination, vision and humanity started it all.
Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand’ring
So fair to be seen.
(Anonymous, seventeenth century)
What’s the first image that comes into your head when someone mentions Christmas carols? Small choirboys in red robes and white ruffs? Or perhaps a country church, stained-glass windows brightly illuminated, spilling the sound of congregation and organ out into a cold night? What about Victorian carol-singers, lantern aloft, hark-the-heralding on the village green, or Tudor feasts – all candles, mistletoe and music? School concerts with cardboard donkeys and tea towel-wearing Wise Men? No? Then maybe it’s the endless, purgatorial loop of tunes piped through department stores each December?
All of these images are part of the carol’s history – important parts – but none of them quite captures where it all began. Not in church, at court or even in the home, but in fields, woods and streets. And it wasn’t choirboys, vicars or polite congregations singing these first experimental, exploratory carols, it was peasants – ordinary people singing and dancing in joyful celebration. Because carols haven’t always been precious and sacred. In their earliest form they were muddy, rough-spoken and sometimes even rather rude – subversive songs that spoke louder of pagan feasts and festivals than they did of Christian miracles.
To understand what Christmas carols really are (as opposed to what the Victorians have brainwashed us into believing they are) we have to scrub them clean of the layers of paint and gloss that have obscured their original, rough-hewn forms. We have to leave the ordered beauty of King’s College Chapel and travel back in time, trace Christmas itself back to its origins – a journey more unexpected, more exotic than anything undertaken by Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghostly guides.
It’s a journey that will take us from debauchery in the Roman Empire to folklore and fertility rituals in pre-Christian Scandinavia before we can return safely to England, Cambridge and the Christmas that we all know and love.
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS CAROL
Carols have been around since the moment of Christ’s birth and the first one even makes it into the Bible. The angels appear to the shepherds, telling them of the birth of Jesus. Then, according to St Luke’s Gospel: ‘Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ This angel chorus cuts to the heart of what Christmas carols are all about. These aren’t sophisticated anthems, they are simple, joyous songs capable of capturing just a little of that angelic wonder and communicating it to us all in words and music we not only understand but can share in.
Picture the scene: it’s December, normal work has been cast aside and people exchange work and study for celebration and relaxation. Children, freed from the schoolroom, run and play in streets lit by hundreds of burning torches and candles, while in the town squares food and flagons of wine are laid out on long tables – a feast for all, noble and peasant alike. People drink and eat, dance and sing, and drunkenness is all but obligatory. Friends and families exchange presents, sometimes perfume and clothes, sometimes books and even animals.
It’s a set of traditions that sounds very familiar – eating, drinking, singing, giving gifts. But this isn’t Christmas. In fact, it’s probably all taking place before the birth of Christ. Welcome to Saturnalia – the Roman festival of the god Saturn and a feast far wilder than even the most uproarious family Christmas today.
Roman mythology celebrated Saturn as the ruler of the Golden Age – a mythical time of plentiful harvests and eternal summer, a time before wars and conflicts, hierarchies and labour, when man and nature lived in happy harmony. Once a year, each December, the Romans would attempt to recreate this blissful state for a period of one week, hoping to please the god into delivering them from winter barrenness and restoring warmth and crops.
During this time everything was turned upside down: cross-dressing was popular, with some people going one step further and dressing up as animals, work was exchanged for play and children (normally silent and very much at the margins) took centre stage in the festivities. Most importantly, masters and their slaves swapped places; the masters would wait on their slaves, while the slaves in turn would criticise them freely and even give orders, in a complete reversal of everyday life.
Leading the revelry, and driving it on to ever-greater extremes, was the Saturnalicus Princeps – the king of Saturnalia. Each household or town would draw lots and whoever won would take command for the duration of festivities, issuing orders (the ruder or more ludicrous the better) which had to be obeyed, taking charge of gambling and stirring up a gleeful chaos without consequence or punishment. Whether you were commanded to strip naked and run through the streets or impersonate a bear, you did it – no questions asked.
DID YOU KNOW?
Saturnalia wasn’t all fun and games. Sometimes the Roman festivities took a decidedly dark turn. One particular group of Roman soldiers, based in what is now Austria, celebrated the festival each year in a rather unusual way. Thirty days before Saturnalia they would choose a young, handsome man from among their group to act as Saturn himself. During those 30 days he would indulge in every possible pleasure – however sinful. But when the festival arrived the young man would have to go to the altar of Saturn. There he would cut his own throat – an offering and penance to the god he had impersonated.
But then Christianity arrived. Out went Saturn and his fellow gods, replaced by just a single god – one who didn’t smile upon the deviance and debauchery of his predecessors. Roman citizens were, understandably, reluctant to give up their celebrations and abandon their traditions, and so an uneasy alliance was born between pagan and Christian customs.
In the fourth century AD celebrations of Christ’s birth – initially commemorated on 6 January – were moved to 25 December, to coincide with Saturnalia. It was a strategic compromise; the people could once more keep their favourite holiday traditions, simply transferring their enthusiasm from Saturn to Christ – from sun to son – a simple substitution that harnessed all the energy of the pagan festival, but channelling and redirecting it to new Christian ends.
Saturnalia is the mischievous grandfather of one set of Christmas traditions – presents, party games, overindulging – but in order to find others – the Yule log, Father Christmas, bright lights around the home – we now have to don furs and gloves and travel many miles, to the north of Europe. Here, in countries starved of the sun, plunged into almost total darkness for many months each year, the winter solstice was something worth celebrating. Once this shortest day (and longest night) of the year was past, things would only improve. The festival was one of hope, of anticipation of better things to come.
Just as Saturnalia had its candles, so the Scandinavian festival of Yule had its fires and torches. Not only were these symbols of the much-wished-for sun, but also weapons against the forces of darkness – demons, both mythological and rather closer to home. In many ways this feast was a celebration of pragmatism. With days so short, so little light and no farming to be done on the frozen ground, the chances of despondency and depression setting in were high. Add in the need for a little extra food to help people survive the winter and you have the roots of a midwinter festival that sustained Northern Europe for centuries, eventually crossing over to England with the Vikings who ensured that the early Anglo-Saxon Christians celebrated their Christmas with a healthy sprinkling of pagan traditions.
One of these traditions – Father Christmas – has had a particularly long journey from his earliest days to today’s familiar figure, with his twinkling smile and long white beard. One of the principal gods of Old Norse mythology, Odin (known to the Anglo-Saxons as Woden) was a particularly important part of a Scandinavian Yule. This magical figure, with his long beard and cloak, would travel through the skies on an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir, leaving gifts in the shoes of any children who had been thoughtful enough to leave food for his horse. Today’s Father Christmas might no longer have an eight-legged horse, but he does have eight reindeer instead.
And then there’s the Yule log – another pagan custom the Christians retrospectively claimed as their own. A symbol of the sun in the darkest winter months, the log was traditionally large enough to burn from Christmas Eve all the way through to Twelfth Night. Originally a piece of oak, chosen to honour Norse god Thor, when the custom arrived in England it was decreed that ash should be used instead, as ash was said to be the wood used to heat the water to wash the infant Jesus after his birth.
Whatever the wood, however, the tradition remained the same. The log must burn for the full span of the festive season. If it went out for any reason, it was an omen of bad luck for the year ahead. Each year as the log burned down to its final few hours some of the wood would be saved in order to light the following year’s fire – a sign of the eternal light of heaven. Ashes from the log were said to have magical properties and were scattered into wells to keep the water pure and around the base of trees to promote a good harvest.
And so Christmas arrived in England – a mongrel festival, incorporating customs and myths not only from Ancient Rome and Scandinavia but also Persia, India, Germany, Greece and Egypt. It’s only fitting that a festival such as this, assembled piecemeal from so many different parts, should have a soundtrack of a similar kind – music that has passed through many pairs of hands, each leaving their own distinctive imprints on it.
‘THE HOLLY AND THE IVY’
Although this charming carol, based on an English folk tune, probably dates from the seventeenth century, its symbolism is far older. Both the festivals of Saturnalia and Yule placed great emphasis on evergreens. The Romans would exchange boughs of holly and ivy with their friends during the festival, while both the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxon pagans would decorate their homes with the evergreens they saw as symbols of eternal life. So try as Christian carol writers might to impose their own symbols on the plants – the red holly berry as Jesus’s blood, the white holly flower his shroud – they have to work hard to displace earlier layers of meaning. Some think there’s a further secret layer of meaning to the carol. Is the holly, with its phallic prickles, a symbol of the masculine, and the clinging ivy of the feminine? English courtiers were fond of such hidden language and holly-and-ivy carols could have formed the basis of courting games.
True Christmas carols are like myths or legends, they’ve always existed, but they come from nowhere. Nobody wrote the words or sat down with pen and paper to compose the tune, but somehow they just are, part of the pool of collective memory that we all share – touchstones of tradition.
But this isn’t a book about ‘true’ carols. If we stuck closely to the strictest of definitions then neither ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ nor ‘Away in a Manger’, nor even ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ would qualify, leaving our festive celebrations rather sad and tuneless. So instead of worrying too much about the technical details, which carols qualify and which don’t, I propose a rather simpler criterion.
‘Merry