A Christmas Miracle in Music!

Christmas is a wonderful time of year for musicians and music lovers.  So much beautiful music has been written around the Christmas story at so many periods that it's hard to know where to start.  And of course, much of it is choral.  For many people, Christmas is a time to burst out in mass song with groups of others -- and so it's not surprising that the # 1 perennial Christmastime musical favourite is Handel's oratorio Messiah.  We'll pass lightly over the fact the Handel wrote Messiah for, and always performed Messiah at, Eastertime -- not Christmas.

Another favourite Christmas treasure of mine is Bach's beautiful Christmas Oratorio, and if you know and love Messiah and are wondering where to branch out, this is a good place to start.

But all that was written over two centuries ago (closer to three centuries now).  What about in our own times?  Well, that's where I'm coming to the real theme of this post, a piece composed in the 1950s which truly carries the banner forward from the great Baroque works mentioned above.

Imagine a composer who is into his eighties, who has seen Christmases coming and going throughout his long and fulfilling life.  He's lived for most of his life immersed in the great traditions of Christmas music of the past, whether composed for the church, the concert hall, or simply arising out of the traditions of the people.  As a master orchestrator and composer of music to be sung, he could truly be said to be born for this particular assignment.  Because of his age he can impart great wisdom and power to his music, yet he remains youthful in spirit so he can still write with tremendous drive and energy.  Most of all, he can still be drawn into a childlike spirit of wonder at the beauty of language in the traditional Christmas story, and at the miraculous events described there.  And all these aspects of his personality are going to be clearly heard in the Christmas cantata he is going to compose.

The man (surprise, surprise to my regular followers) is Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the work is Hodie (This Day), which was premiered in 1954. 

Like most of Vaughan Williams, the music is predominantly tonal and lyrical, yet there is also tremendous power here.  Take the long opening sequence: the rumbustious opening chorus, the mysterious wind chords of the narration (given by a children's choir), the huge outburst of sound and glory at the words "Emmanuel, Emmanuel, God with us!", and the following long, lyrical aria for soprano solo setting words from Milton.  What a tremendous variety, and all in ten minutes of music.

More riches abound throughout the score.  The narrative passages from St. Luke's Gospel all start from a similar melodic figure, and then wander off in different directions.  Truly, Vaughan Williams has evolved a workable twentieth-century descendant of Baroque recitative in this piece.  The use of children's choir and chamber organ for this specific purpose works like a charm.

Between the narrations unfold a series of arias setting texts from various English poets through the centuries, and this I feel is the most successful and unified of the composer's numerous "anthology" works of this type.  The showpiece of the lot is the tenor's "Bright portals of the sky" which calls for a powerful voice to overcome the rich orchestration.

The most powerful poem of the collection is "The March of the Three Kings" which was written by the composer's wife, Ursula, specifically for this work (one of two poems so composed).  I find it impossible not to be swept off my feet by the composer's heaven-storming choral/orchestral setting, with solo voices crowning the ensemble, of these lines:

Crowning the skies
The star of morning, star of dayspring calls,
Clear on the hilltop its sharp radiance falls,
Lighting the stable and the broken walls
Where the prince lies.
 

 The mystical conclusion, setting words of St. John's Gospel, and followed by three more verses of Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, is a true culmination -- not least because it draws in so many musical threads from earlier sections of the work.  The final Milton setting takes the music of that first soprano aria and works it into a conclusion of triumphant grandeur.  And the whole work is, as always with a truly great piece, far too short!

Hodie has been recorded several times, but for me the original recording from 1965 reigns supreme.  The conductor was David Willcocks, the leading British choral conductor of his day.  His trio of soloists were Janet Baker, Richard Lewis, and John Shirley-Quirk, all ideally in tune with the musical sound-world of the composer.  Remastered for CD, and joined by a good account of the earlier Fantasia on Christmas Carols (a great representation of the composer's love for folk carols), it's the recording to go for if you can get it.