In choosing 'In the Deep Midwinter' as the best Christmas carol, choirmasters give the game away. They don't like the rest of us, the congregation - and can you blame them? We are truly awful but awfully game. We sing too low, we sing around rather than in tune, we slow down and speed up unwarrantedly, we wobble off - the brave or conceited among us - into descants that fall to earth defeated, we divide words wrongly and hang on to notes that we happen to hit squarely for far too long; if divided into male and female choirs, we compete, the women singing of the Virgin and her feelings for the Christ child out-shrieking the men being angels telling the good news like a roar of battle against the skirted congregation.
'In the Deep Midwinter' trembles in its icy perfection, its keatsian imagery, its trebles soaring where we cannot go, and dare not try, lest all should collapse beneath our everyday weight.
Beautiful? Oh yes. But give me that moment when the organ speaks to summon the rest of us, when the choir has laid the ground and the pitch upon which we all will play:
O come, O come, Emmanuel!
Redeem thy captive Israel,
That into exile drear is gone
Far from the face of God's dear Son.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, thou Branch of Jesse! draw
The quarry from the lion's claw;
From the dread caverns of the grave,
From nether hell thy people save.
O come, O come, thou Dayspring bright!
Pour on our souls thy healing light;
Dispel the long night's lingering gloom,
And pierce the shadows of the tomb.
O come, thou Lord of David's Key!
The royal door fling wide and free;
Safeguard for us the heavenward road,
And bar the way to death's abode.
O come, O come, Adonaï,
Who in thy glorious majesty
From that high mountain clothed with awe
Gavest thy folk the elder law.
And then the choristers show us how to fly a descant. Rejoice, rejoice.
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9 comments:
Yes, Emanuel is, I think, my favourite, and obviously designed for the ordinary voice.
And on Christmas Day itself, S, there is the Holly and the Ivy. But they don't let us sing that, not the choirmasters with a decent choir, dancing along above us all on tiptoes.
Another aspect of life reified. Let's take it back.
Some things can't be taken back:
instant recall, reified and taken away by Google
Jam making taken over by eastern European ex kolkhozy
Mind you, I'd rather some skills, like mounting Ikea furniture, were reified and removed to specialists.
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
Surely your favourite carol has to be Hark the Herald Angels etc...?
Our theme tune is 'Let the Bright Seraphim', Nomad, but Hark the Herald is sung enthusiastically.
Shelley has not been attractive to composers, has he ND, I wonder why? I'd have thought those sad, strange, haunty Britten sounds would have done well with Shelley. But he goes for earlier - Blake, Jonson
Do you mean the Holst bleak midwinter or the Harold Darke one?
I don't really see the objection to either but the Harold Darke tune is surely one of the most beautiful, and the Holst has special merit by virtue of its tune-name (Thaxted) which is a fine old town in God's own county - as indeed is Hatfield when one considers it properly as a forest.
Happy Christmas!
Darke, 12.52. Thank you for the Christmas greetings, warmly returned.
As for the forest, it's a different Hatfield. I was taught that Hatfield is a way of spelling Heath -field. Nice that, very ambivalent place, the heath.
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