Jacques Offenbach, composer of comic operas

Jacques Offenbach was born on 20^th June 1819 in Cologne, Germany. He was originally given the names Jacob Levy, and his family name had been changed by his father from Eberst because he had moved from the town of Offenbach am Main and thenceforward had been known by everyone as “Der Offenbacher”.

The Offenbach family was Jewish and Offenbach senior had moved to become cantor at the local synagogue, as well as giving violin lessons. Jacques joined the musical endeavours of the large family (he was the seventh child) and gave his first concert, as a cellist, when he was 12.

Jacques moved to Paris when he was accepted to study cello at the Conservatoire in November 1833. However, he did not distinguish himself and left after only one year, becoming a cellist in the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique.

While at the Opéra-Comique he formed a partnership with the young composer Friedrich Flotow, producing a series of pieces for cello and piano which they played in recitals.

He later wrote incidental music for performances at the Palais Royal, and a large number of songs, but he found that playing the cello was more remunerative. He made several concert tours and played before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in London in 1844.

When he felt that he had made enough money from performing he returned to Paris and devoted himself to composition, as well as converting to Catholicism and marrying a Spanish lady named Herminie de Alcain. His aim was to write a box-office hit of a comic opera, but his early efforts were disappointing and he was unable to get anything staged.

He returned to Cologne during the revolution in France of 1848, only trying his luck again in Paris in 1849, when he was appointed conductor of the Comédie Française, a post which he retained for five years. This position did however give him the opportunity to slip some of his own pieces into performances as incidental music.

His frustration at not getting his operatic work performed on stage, apart from a few minor performances, eventually led to him taking the plunge and, in 1855, leasing his own theatre, a very small one in the Champs-Elysées where the licence only allowed productions that had no more than four speaking/singing parts.

Later that year he moved to another theatre which he renamed the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens and which soon acquired a reputation for lively entertainment comprising humour, dance and song.

Offenbach wrote quickly and could produce up to seven complete productions in a year. He engaged up-and-coming scriptwriters and some of the best singing talent around, and his shows became very successful. Some of his shows were exported to London with Offenbach conducting them in person.

His first major success was “Orphée aux Enfers” (Orpheus in the Underworld) in 1858, a highly satirical work that poked fun at some of the leading figures of the day, as well as including suggestive dances such as the can-can. Needless to say, a show with such a terrible reputation encouraged everyone to flock to see it, and it still plays to packed houses to this day despite the satirical barbs being lost on modern audiences.

Offenbach was far more successful as a composer of light music than as a theatre director, as he had no money sense and spent far too much on such things as stage sets and costumes. Despite his huge popularity and growing reputation he was never a rich man.

Other operettas that are still staged today include “La Belle Hélène”, “La Vie Parisienne” and “La Périchole”. The music is always tuneful and often lively, although with no great depth. This is, after, the music of comedy and farce rather than tragedy.

In the 1870s Offenbach made many visits to Vienna where it is said that he persuaded Johann Strauss to venture into operetta. He certainly influenced many other composers of light music in Vienna and elsewhere, such as Franz von Suppé. The Savoy operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were England’s answer to Offenbach, given that French naughtiness was not quite the thing for Victorian London.

Offenbach had much less success in the United States, where American audiences failed to appreciate French wit. He also nearly died from the effects of the sea voyage across the Atlantic.

Like many composers of light music, Offenbach dreamed of writing something more serious, and his “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” was supposed to fill this gap in his output. However, although he lived to complete it he was never able to see it performed because he died, from heart disease, on 4^th October 1880 at the age of 61.

Offenbach’s reputation rests on the works mentioned above, although his output was considerably greater, with nearly a hundred operettas being credited to him. These pieces are largely forgotten due to their having been written for the immediate purpose of putting bums on seats in a Paris theatre. Also ignored today are his ballet music and his many pieces for solo cello.

However, even if all that had survived of his output was “Orphée aux Enfers”, that one comic masterpiece should be sufficient for Offenbach’s name to be remembered with affection.

© John Welford

Alessandro Scarlatti, 17th/18th century Italian composer

Alessandro Scarlatti was born on 2^nd May 1660 at Palermo on the island of Sicily. He was the eldest son of Pietro Scarlatti and Eleonora D’Amato.

Very little is known about his early life, apart from an entry in a church archive in Rome, dated 27^th January 1679, that refers to an oratorio being commissioned from “Scarlattino, alias the Sicilian”.

Alessandro married Anatonio Anzalone, a native of Rome, in April 1678 and they were to have a large family that included Domenico, born in 1685, who was destined to become even more celebrated as a composer than his father.

Some of Alessandro’s earliest compositions were operas that were well received when first performed and which led to his appointment as maestro di capella at the chapel of the royal palace in Naples.

In 1702 he travelled to Florence and then to Rome, where he became firstly assistant maestro di capella and later maestro at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Some of his best chamber cantatas and operas date from this time.

In the autumn of 1707 he returned to Naples where in 1709 he resumed his old job at the royal palace, at an increased salary. His large-scale opera “Tigrone” was composed at this time. He was honoured by the King of Naples with a knighthood.

In 1717 he was granted leave of absence to visit Rome, where his final series of operas was produced, this period marking his full artistic maturity. His last full-scale opera, his 114^th, was “Griselda”, produced in 1721. He also wrote a large amount of church music including an orchestral mass for St Cecilia’s Day and, in 1721, a pastoral to mark the accession of Pope Innocent XIII. He returned to Naples either in late 1722 or early 1723.

During his last years Scarlatti was noted as a teacher of younger musicians and a music theorist, for example expounding his ideas on accompaniment in a treatise entitled “Regole per Principianti”.

Alessandro Scarlatti died in Naples on 24^th October 1725, aged 65, and was buried in the church of Montesanto.

As well as his operas, Scarlatti composed nearly 700 cantatas that are known today, and many more might have been composed but have since been lost. It is for his operas and cantatas, both sacred and secular, that he is best known, although he did also write some purely orchestral and instrumental pieces that are of lesser importance. His keyboard pieces are of far less consequence and quality than those of his son Domenico.

Alessandro Scarlatti is an important figure in the development of European opera, being the leading figure of the Neapolitan Opera School which influenced composers including Handel. He was a master of melody and developed a more modern style in which the orchestra assumed a greater importance. His later operas also show a greater degree of emotional content than had been apparent in operas prior to this time.

His cantatas, which were written for a variety of instruments and soloists, were widely regarded for their beauty and originality. Many later composers were influenced by them and were not averse to stealing whole passages for inclusion in their own works.

Alessandro Scarlatti is therefore an important figure in the history of music, not only for his prolific output but also because he was an innovator who developed the art of composition along new lines and moved away from the formulaic rigidity that marked the works of his predecessors. He can therefore be seen as a transitional figure between the Baroque and Classical periods of musical composition.

© John Welford

Bela Bartok, a great Hungarian composer

Bela Bartok was born on 25^th March 1881 in the village of Nagyszentmiklos in Hungary. However, the upheavals caused by wars and other events in Central Europe in the intervening years mean that this village, and several other places associated with Bartok, are no longer in Hungary. His birth village is now in Romania and named Sannicolaul-Mare.

Bartok’s father was the director of an agricultural college and a talented amateur pianist, although he died when Bela was only seven. Along with his younger sister, Bela spent his early life moving from place to place as his mother tried to find permanent work as a teacher. His health was poor, and childhood illnesses stunted his growth and prevented him from mixing with people of his own age.

Bela showed early musical ability and he began composing at the age of nine. He gave his first concert as a pianist when aged ten.

He entered the Budapest Music Academy in 1898 but ill health forced him to interrupt his studies three times and he gave up composing until 1902, when he discovered the music of Richard Strauss which inspired him to produce a flood of new pieces, including the “Kossuth” Symphony.

In 1904 he first became seriously aware of Hungarian folk music, and he began to tour the region armed with recording equipment with which he collected hundreds of examples of songs and music sung and played by peasant people. His trips eventually took him as far as North Africa and Turkey. As well as making an extremely valuable collection of recordings from the ethnographic point of view, this music influenced everything he was to write from 1908 onwards.

In 1907 Bartok began teaching at the Budapest Academy and he continued to do so until 1934. However, he only taught piano and refused to teach composition, preferring not to share his increasingly experimental techniques. Having moved away from his “Straussian” period he was now producing works that were not so easily understood by his audiences and he faced growing opposition. Works from this period included his opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, the ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and a lot of piano music.

By the early 1920s the future was looking more promising for new styles of music, and in 1922 he made a prominent contribution to an international festival of modern music at Salzburg. He toured widely as a concert pianist and composed new works for performance, including piano concertos and solo piano works such as the “Improvisations”. He also wrote pieces that did not involve the piano, notably a series of highly regarded string quartets. He made his first visit to the United States in 1927.

The 1930s were a difficult period for Bartok as he watched the rise of the Nazis and deplored the support they received from the government of Hungary. As a protest he refused to give concerts in Germany. However, this did not prevent him from producing some of his greatest works, including the fourth and fifth string quartets, the “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” and the “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion”.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, and the death of his mother, Bartok reluctantly decided to make a fresh start and emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in New York where he spent the rest of his life. He never really took to life in the States, where he was celebrated as a performer but less well received as a composer.

He had a late flowering with three major works between 1943 and 1945, namely the “Concerto for Orchestra”, a sonata for solo violin and his third piano concerto. However, by this time his health was failing, from undiagnosed leukaemia, and he died in New York on 26^th September 1945 at the age of 64.

Bela Bartok is one of the greats of 20^th century music, having a truly original style that owed little to earlier traditions except those of folk music. The music of his maturity combined passion with constructions that were highly intellectual. Some of his works strained tonality to the limit, but he never gave way to complete atonality, nor did he dabble with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. Even today much of his music is an acquired taste but, once acquired, it is extremely rewarding.

In his personal life Bartok was quiet and introverted, the passionate side of his nature only being revealed at the keyboard. He was awkward in company and preferred that of women to men. He was twice married, both times to pupils who were much younger than himself.

© John Welford

Robert Schumann, 1810-56

Robert Schumann is justly famed as being one of the central figures of German Romanticism in music, although he was far from the ideal of the romantic hero in his personal life, being regarded as dull by his two greatest contemporaries, Liszt and Wagner. Although he died, romantically enough, in a lunatic asylum, and he once attempted suicide by throwing himself into the River Rhine, his symptoms were more likely to have been caused by syphilis than romantic angst.

Robert Schumann was born on 8^th June 1810 in Zwickau, Germany. His father was a well-to-do bookseller and publisher, and Robert was able to gain a broad knowledge of European literature from his father's bookshelves. His early ambition was to be a writer, but he also showed promise as a pianist and his parents encouraged him to develop this talent. At least, this was the case until his father died when Robert was aged 16, at which point his mother decided that the law would provide a more secure future for him.

He therefore started law studies at Leipzig University and then at the more distant Heidelberg University, this move coming about because Robert knew that the law professor there, Anton Thibaut, was also a keen musician. Having absolutely no interest in law, Robert gradually persuaded his mother to let him take up music as a career, and in 1830 he went to live in the Leipzig home of a celebrated piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck.

Schumann had composed a few songs and piano pieces before his move to Leipzig, but after this point he produced a large number of compositions, mainly for the piano. These included "Carnaval", "Symphonic Studies" and three sonatas. He had hoped to combine composing with a career as a concert pianist, but this hope was dashed in 1832 when he damaged his right hand, either due to the use of a device designed to improve the movement of his fingers or (more probably) as a side-effect of treatment for syphilis that included the use of mercury. Whatever the reason, Schumann was now forced to concentrate on composition as his means of earning a living. He also fulfilled his early ambition to be a writer by contributing large quantities of music criticism to journals, especially the "Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik" which he helped to found and later edited.

Another consequence of Robert's residence at the house of Friedrich Wieck was that he got to know Friedrich's young daughter, Clara, and slowly became besotted with her (and she with him), although she was nine years his junior. Clara was a promising piano virtuoso and her father had no intention of allowing her to throw away her career by marrying one of his pupils. He did everything he could to frustrate the young couple's plans, firstly throwing Robert out of his house and then opening his letters to Clara, followed by a campaign of personal vilification of Robert's character. The couple were eventually married on 12^th September 1840, the day before Clara's 21^st birthday.

Clara Schumann had a considerable influence on Robert's development as a composer. He had often dreamt of writing symphonies, but she pushed him to realise that dream (in particular the "Spring" Symphony of 1841). He also produced a wealth of songs in the months before and just after their marriage (including "Dichterliebe" and "Frauenliebe und Leben"), and in 1842 he turned to writing chamber music.

However, the marriage also brought new pressures to bear on Robert, not least because he needed quietness in order to compose and Clara needed to practice the piano. As a virtuoso pianist in great demand, Clara performed concert tours on which Robert accompanied her, but he found it uncomfortable to have to play a supporting role. This exerted a strain on his mental health and he began to suffer from aural hallucinations, caused in part by his pre-existing syphilis. In 1844 the couple moved from Leipzig (where Robert had been teaching at the conservatory) to Dresden, where it was hoped that the less frenetic atmosphere of the quieter city would restore his health.

For a time the move did the trick, and new compositions followed, including the 1845 Piano Concerto, his Second Symphony (1845-6), an opera ("Genoveva", 1847-8), and more songs and piano music. He also composed for the local choral society, becoming their conductor in 1847.

However, he was not happy living in Dresden, partly through feeling overshadowed by the rising genius of another Dresden resident, Richard Wagner, with whom Schumann did not get on. In 1850 he was glad to be able to accept an invitation to move to Dusseldorf as the city's Director of Music.

This proved to be a bad move, due mainly to the requirements of the post including conducting the city's choir and orchestra, a task for which Schumann was not suited. Although he made a promising start things soon went wrong, not helped by Schumann's declining mental health, and he was eventually forced to resign in 1853. During these years he continued to compose, producing his Cello Concerto and Third Symphony (the "Rhenish") in 1850 and his Violin Concerto in 1853, along with piano music and lieder. However, he was now finding it difficult to concentrate for long enough to produce consistently good work, and flashes of brilliance were countered by long periods when he produced work of indifferent quality.

The hallucinations mentioned earlier became worse, and he imagined that he was being assailed by angels and demons. On 27^th February 1854 he threw himself into the Rhine but was rescued and committed to a lunatic asylum near Bonn. His last years were confused and miserable, and he died without regaining his sanity, or composing anything new, on 29^th July 1856 at the age of 46.

Robert Schumann's reputation as a great composer rests on his early (pre-1841) songs and piano music and a handful of later works, most notably his symphonies. He was able to combine great beauty with wit and inventiveness, his major innovation being, in lieder writing, to make the piano an equal partner with the singer. As with any great artistic genius whose life is cut short by accident or disease, one is left wondering how they might have developed. In Robert Schumann's case, one also wonders whether his marriage to Clara, despite the positive influence she had on his ambition to branch out into new areas of composition, did not also have a negative effect by limiting his production of some of the greatest lieder ever written.

© John Welford

Sir Thomas Beecham

Sir Thomas Beecham was one of the most charismatic orchestral conductors of the 20^th century. Not only was he a top-rate musician and creator of orchestras, but he also had a way with words that has cemented his reputation as a great English “character”.

Early life and career

He was born in St Helens, Lancashire, on 29^th April 1879. His grandfather had made the family fortune as the inventor and manufacturer of “Beecham’s pills”, which proved to be an excellent patent remedy for indigestion (parodied as: “Hark the herald angels sing, Beecham’s pills are just the thing …”).

His father had followed in the family business, but was also musical, and it was the latter trait that Thomas inherited. He went to Oxford University, but was frequently absent attending concerts and opera performances, and he left without taking a degree.

His first experience of conducting was with the local St Helens Musical Society, but at the age of 20 he was given the opportunity to guest-conduct the famous Hallé Orchestra, which inspired him to greater things.

He moved to London to seek a career in music, although any hope he had of becoming a concert pianist was ruined by an injury to his hand at the age of 25. He married in 1903, but the marriage was not a happy one. He later had an affair with Lady “Emerald” Cunard that was to last until 1943.

Founder of orchestras and world-renowned conductor

He started a small orchestra, which was later expanded to become the New Symphony Orchestra, and this was followed by the Beecham Symphony Orchestra. He met the composer Frederick Delius and they became firm friends. Beecham was to become the great champion of Delius’s works, bringing many of them to public attention for the first time.

With his father’s help he was able to present operas and ballets at Covent Garden, including working with Diaghilev and Nijinsky.

When war broke out in 1914, Covent Garden was closed, but Beecham was able to renew his association with the Hallé Orchestra, giving many concerts with them, and also with the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1916 he was knighted in his own right, although he was due to inherit his father’s baronetcy in any case.

His father had bought the Covent Garden estate, with a view to giving his son a home for his Beecham Opera Company. However, he died in October 1916, the day before his will was due to be finalised. This caused huge problems for Thomas, who was forced into virtual retirement from the musical scene for three years while the financial affairs were sorted out.

In the 1920s he guest-conducted a number of orchestras, and spent a short time in New York, but his real wish was to have a full-sized orchestra of his own. He made many approaches to musicians whom he admired, and eventually recruited enough to start a new venture, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which played its first concert in the Queen’s Hall in 1932. The quality of the orchestra was clear for all to see and hear, and the LPO, and its conductor, were soon recognized as major forces on the British musical scene.

In 1936 he took the LPO on a short tour of Nazi Germany, but engineered things so that he able to avoid having to salute the arrival of Adolf Hitler into the concert hall. After meeting Hitler, he made the percipient remark, “Now I know what’s wrong with Germany”.

In 1941 the Queen’s Hall was bombed and many of the LPO’s instruments were destroyed. However, the players found other instruments and continued to give concerts in the Royal Albert Hall.

Beecham spent much of the war in America, where he not only gave many concerts, especially with the Seattle Orchestra, but arranged a divorce from the first Lady Beecham and married Betty Humby, a pianist.

On his return to Britain after the war, Beecham founded yet another orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic (RPO), which toured both in the UK and abroad to huge acclaim. He continued to champion the works of Delius, and also those of Berlioz, Sibelius and Richard Strauss.

Throughout his career he combined operatic and orchestral work, and was particularly renowned for his interpretations of Wagner. His career coincided with the 20^th century development of music recording, and in his later years he was to produce some of the finest early stereo recordings.

He continued to conduct until ill-health caught up with him in 1960. He died of a thrombosis on 8^th March 1961, at the age of 81. In 1991 his remains were re-buried next to those of Frederick Delius.

Wit and wisdom

No account of Beecham’s life would be complete without mention of his many witticisms and put-downs, that were long remembered by those who first heard them and, indeed, were the victims of them. For example, although Beecham and Malcolm Sargent were good friends who had much mutual respect, that did not stop “Tommy” from referring to Herbert von Karajan as “a kind of musical Malcolm Sargent”.

Here are some of his best one-liners, several of them making very incisive comments on the nature of music and how it is appreciated:

• A musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it
• Brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away
• Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle
• It is quite untrue that the British don’t appreciate music. They may not understand it but they love the noise it makes
• I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it
• There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between
• All the arts in America are run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women
• Great music penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory
• Film music is just noise … even more painful than my sciatica
• Beethoven’s last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man
• A harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm
• Try everything once, except incest and folk dancing
• The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought

However, sometimes his remarks were more accidental than intentional. For example, he was once irritated by the performance of a lady cellist whose efforts were not of the best. In all innocence, we must assume, he announced, “Madam, you have between your legs an instrument that is capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it”.

At a social function, he found himself talking to a lady whom he felt he knew from somewhere, but could not quite place. Their conversation went:

He:  How are you? How’s your family?

She: I’m very well, thank you, although my brother has not been well of late.

He: Oh yes, your brother. Is he still doing the same job?

She: Yes, he’s still the King.

© John Welford

The legacy of George Frideric Handel

George Frideric Handel was not a one-hit wonder. However, one of his hits is of such towering importance, and represents such a huge proportion of his legacy, that it deserves far more attention than anything else. But before considering The Messiah, let’s have a look at what else he has left us.

Handel was one of the three baroque greats who lived virtually parallel lives in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, the other two being Bach and Vivaldi. Handel had already achieved considerable fame as a composer of operas and sacred works before he left the court of the Elector of Hanover to settle in England in 1712. When the Elector became King George I in 1714, Handel was able to resume his duties as master of the king’s music.

One product of these duties was the Water Music suite, a set of dance movements composed for a royal function on the River Thames in 1717. Handel and his 50 musicians sailed with the king from Whitehall to Chelsea and back, playing as they went. The king liked the music so much that he asked for the whole lot to be played three times. The event lasted well into the night, and it was nearly dawn before the exhausted players were allowed ashore.

Coupled with the Water Music, in considering Handel’s legacy, will always be the Music for the Royal Fireworks, although the latter suite was a much later offering, dating from 1749 when the king was George II and the event celebrated was the ending of the War of the Austrian Succession. Our legacy is obviously the music itself, but the first performance was a far more dramatic event than anything likely to occur today, with the temporary building in which it was performed catching fire. Indeed, the rehearsal six days previously had seen a near riot as 12,000 people rushed to the venue and three deaths were reported.

Handel’s vast output of operas and oratorios, mostly on Biblical and classical subjects, is now largely forgotten, although we still hear a number of arias and other excerpts that have justly survived to the present day. For example, the aria “Ombre mai fu” has long outlived the opera Serse, and “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” is a welcome survival from the oratorio Samson.

Handel composed four coronation anthems for King George II, but it is fortunate that we do not have to wait for a new monarch to come along before we hear “Zadok the Priest”, as it is regularly performed and recorded.

However, it is for The Messiah that Handel is most revered, and rightly so. Composed in only a few weeks (there are disputes over exactly how many), it is the product of a genius who was overflowing with brilliant ideas as to how to get the most out of limited resources. Handel was at heart a showman, and he knew exactly how make an impression on an audience. For him, there was not a lot of difference between an opera and an oratorio in terms of musical effect, and it is a fact that he reused many good tunes and musical ideas – if an opera flopped but had a particularly good aria or chorus, it was likely to re-appear somewhere else, and that is one reason why The Messiah could be composed so quickly, and why it still comes across as being so fresh more than 250 years later.

The Messiah was an immediate success, as evidenced by the famous instance of King George standing in admiration during the “Hallelujah Chorus”, at which the rest of the audience felt honour bound to follow suit. It is always possible that George was merely suffering from cramp, but the custom has persisted to the present day.

I would suggest that Handel’s true legacy with The Messiah has much to do with factors other than the brilliance of the music. It is the only major piece of church music that is more often performed today by amateur choirs than professional ones. Baroque music was designed for smaller ensembles to perform than that of later periods, and it is quite possible for a choir of 30, plus soloists and a small group of musicians, to produce a very satisfying performance.

The music is spectacular and challenging, but it is not impossible! The choral pieces are all scored within the vocal ranges of most singers, the “twiddly bits” are soon mastered with a bit of practice, and the thrill of belting out “For Unto Us a Child is Born” and “All We Like Sheep”, (and not going astray during “… have gone astray …”!) is an experience worth having.

Indeed, it has become common practice, at least in the UK, for performances of “Messiah from Scratch” to be held. Everyone turns up, at village/town hall or church, has an afternoon in which to rehearse, and then performs in front of an audience in the evening. If you can read music, fine, if not – stand next to someone who can!

That is Handel’s legacy – music that ordinary people want to listen to and perform centuries later, when our world is very different from his.

© John Welford

A Ceremony of Carols, by Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” is regularly heard around Christmas time, either in churches or performed by choirs and other music groups in secular surroundings. The complete work takes around 22 minutes to perform and is best heard in its entirety, although it is possible to extract individual carols and sing them out of context.

The work was written in very unusual circumstances. Benjamin Britten (1913-76) and his collaborator and lover, the tenor Peter Pears (1910-86), had spent three very successful years in North America while the Second World War was beginning in Europe. They decided to return to Great Britain in 1942 and undertook a long and hazardous sea voyage aboard a Swedish cargo vessel, the “Axel Johnson”. Although Sweden’s neutrality, and the Atlantic convoy system, would have afforded some protection against German U-boat attacks, the ship’s safety could never have been guaranteed.

During the voyage, which took nearly a month as the ship visited other ports before making the final crossing, Britten completed his “Hymn to St Celicia” and had hoped to finish another work (for the jazz musician  Benny Goodman) but this was confiscated by customs officials who feared that the score could contain a hidden code of some sort.

Britten therefore had time on his hands. When the ship docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia, he came across a book of early English poems (The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems), and these formed the text which inspired him to write “A Ceremony of Carols”. Britten had also become interested in writing for the harp and intended to write a harp concerto. It was therefore a natural progression to write a work for a small boys’ choir with harp accompaniment.

By the time the ship docked in England Britten had written settings for seven carols, the words of one of which (“Balulalow”) had been hand-written on the flyleaf of the copy that Britten had bought.

Britten later added two further carols and an arrangement of the plainchant “Hodie Christmas” that frames the piece as a processional and recessional. There is also an instrumental interlude for the harp on its own. Two carols are linked together such that they are normally numbered 4a and 4b. The pieces are therefore numbered from 1 to 11, although there are ten individual carols.

The first performance of the Ceremony was on 4^th December 1943, given by the Morriston Boys’ Choir at the Wigmore Hall, London. This choir later made the first recording of the piece. A version for a four-part choir was made in 1955 by Julius Harrison.

After the processional mentioned above, the choir sings the lively “Wolcum Yole” accompanied by plucked chords on the harp. “There is no Rose” is a gently melodic carol sung by the choir before a carol sung as a treble solo, namely “That yonge child”, which describes Mary singing a lullaby to Jesus. This leads naturally into “Balulalow” which is a lullaby, sung at first by the soloist and then the full choir. The next carol, “As dew in April” raises the tempo to allegro, which is preparation for the lively presto of “This little babe”.

After a short harp solo, the carols resume with “In freezing winter night”, with its starkly atmospheric harmonies that would make one shiver even on the hottest day, followed naturally by a carol that takes the listener out of winter and into spring. “Spring carol” gives thanks to God for the blessings of spring and makes no mention of Christmas at all. The ceremony reaches a climax with “Deo Gracias” in which the voices finally tumble over each other like a peal of bells as they sing words that link the Nativity to the Fall of Man – “And all was for an appil, An appil that he tok, As clerkès finden written in their book”. The recessional to “Hodie Christmas” concludes the Ceremony.

Many people would say that they find Benjamin Britten’s music challenging, but he was a composer who was adept in many different fields and styles and much of what he wrote is extremely easy on the ear of even the most unsophisticated listener, even when the music presents considerable challenges to the performers. That is certainly the case with “A Ceremony of Carols” which takes considerable skill and talent to perform well but, when this is achieved, offers an experience of real pleasure and spiritual uplift.

© John Welford