The Boston Cecilia premieres 'Christ's Nativity'.
In its 142-year history, The Boston Cecilia has performed much of the choral canon of Benjamin Britten. Perhaps we have a special connection to Britten, given that he was born on Saint Cecilia’s Feast Day, November 22nd, in 1913. It is thought that Britten’s close friend and collaborator, W.H. Auden, had this in mind when he wrote the text for his and Britten’s final collaboration, Hymn to Saint Cecilia—a piece which Cecilia has performed multiple times. Cecilia also had the privilege of giving the American premiere of Phaedra, Britten’s last vocal work, composed in 1975. Now, in its upcoming Christmas concerts, Cecilia has the opportunity to share a work that is infrequently encountered: Christ’s Nativity, a Christmas suite for chorus. To the best of our knowledge, the complete suite has never been performed in its entirety in Boston.
by Deborah Greenman
In its 142-year history, The Boston Cecilia has performed much of the choral canon of Benjamin Britten. Perhaps we have a special connection to Britten, given that he was born on Saint Cecilia’s Feast Day, November 22nd, in 1913. It is thought that Britten’s close friend and collaborator, W.H. Auden, had this in mind when he wrote the text for his and Britten’s final collaboration, Hymn to Saint Cecilia—a piece which Cecilia has performed multiple times. Cecilia also had the privilege of giving the American premiere of Phaedra, Britten’s last vocal work, composed in 1975. Now, in its upcoming Christmas concerts, Cecilia has the opportunity to share a work that is infrequently encountered: Christ’s Nativity, a Christmas suite for chorus. To the best of our knowledge, the complete suite has never been performed in its entirety in Boston.
Britten composed Christ’s Nativity in 1931, when he was just 17 years old. The suite was originally called A King’s Birthday, and shows a young composer engaging with thought-provoking texts in a variety of styles, moods, colors, and textures. Books on Britten tend to give short shrift to the rarely performed piece, noting that musical ideas begun in Christ’s Nativity are elaborated and improved upon in A Boy Was Born (1932-1933). Musicologist Paul Kildea has suggested that the “unsettling” nature of the suite reflects a tension in Britten caused by his instruction with his new teacher, John Ireland, at the Royal Conservatory of Music and his previous study with Frank Bridge. Others have wondered about the influence of Mahler’s lyrical fourth symphony on the piece, since Britten is known to have heard the symphony around the time he composed Christ’s Nativity. Whether the young Britten was himself unsettled or intended to unsettle his listener, it is certainly challenging for the singer to adapt to the markedly different styles and moods of the five pieces.
The texts are primarily taken from an anthology of poems about Christmas given to Britten by his older sister. Gifting anthologies of poems spanning the centuries and deemed suitable to the Christmas season was a tradition that had developed in Victorian England. The text of the first movement is from a poem by 17th century poet Henry Vaughan. The opening command to “Awake” and “get up and sing” surely inspired the young Britten and the chorus is inspired to do the same. Then, just as singers and audience are fully aroused, they are lulled back in the second movement, “Sweet was the Song”, to the beautiful and mesmerizing scene of the infant in his mother’s arms. In movement three, there is excited preparation for the prince’s arrival. The frenzied excitement is followed in the fourth movement by a slow and moving contemplation of the sadness of the son who is delivered up for the salvation of all. Here Britten juxtaposes Biblical texts with text by the 16th century martyr, Robert Southwell. Finally, rousing us from the “pity” of it all, is a carol of joyous celebration of “Nowell” taken from a text by Victorian poet C.W. Stubbs about King Cnut, the Dane who became King of England. So perhaps, A King’s Birthday really was a more appropriate title for this collection of musings on birth and on kings, both spiritual and secular.
In his essay, Britten and the World of the Child, Robin Holloway writes of Britten, his style “has the power to connect the avant-garde with the lost paradise of tonality,” and perhaps what musicologists have noted about the tension in Britten’s early Christmas suite is the beginning of what Holloway is alluding to. It may have been a developing Britten who wrote what would become Christ’s Nativity, but Boston Cecilia is excited to introduce you to this beautiful suite of joyous contradiction.
"This Little Babe"
My parents, immigrants fleeing the onset of World War II, came to the United States with their young family as refugees in 1940 -the year I was born. They were grateful and proud to be welcomed in America. As assimilated German Jews, their religion was German art and culture, mainly music. Christmas was celebrated in the German style, with candles (lit !) on the tree, and much music. Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent and daily in the week before Christmas, we gathered around the piano with my father atthe keyboard to sing traditional carols from the book by Henri Van Loon and Grace Castagnetti.
by Susanne Potts
My parents, immigrants fleeing the onset of World War II, came to the United States with their young family as refugees in 1940 -the year I was born. They were grateful and proud to be welcomed in America. As assimilated German Jews, their religion was German art and culture, mainly music. Christmas was celebrated in the German style, with candles (lit !) on the tree, and much music. Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent and daily in the week before Christmas, we gathered around the piano with my father atthe keyboard to sing traditional carols from the book by Henri Van Loon and Grace Castagnetti.
Someone had given us a vinyl set of recordings of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, and my father - and all of us- became enormous and lifelong fans of Britten. I am so grateful that Donald Teeters shared that enthusiasm. Cecilia repeated that song cycle frequently, as well as many other of Britten's masterpieces.
Of all the carols, in their origins and variety, I am most deeply moved by Britten’s setting of Southwell’s text, 'This LittleBabe'. The image of the 'silly tender babe' shivering on a haystack, the infant Messiah clothed in rags “in freezing winter night”, is uniquely poignant.
For me, the story of the “freezing winter night” brings to mind not only the small babe in the manger, not long before his parents will have to flee Herod, but also my own parents flight from Germany and Hitler, and the current refugees fleeing Assad and the conflict and terror in Syria. Britten wrote A Ceremony of Carols as he returned to England in the midst of World War II. He had fled England at the start of the war, but felt he needed to return. It was a dangerous journey through a U-boat and submarine infested Atlantic. He had decided he needed to be back home. It is a gift for me to share this work and these memories with Barbara Bruns and Nicholas White and our audience.
HE SAYS GLORY! THE CHRISTMAS POEMS OF DAVID EVETT
BY CHARLIE EVETT
The late David Evett
When I first looked at the program for the 2014 Cecilia GalaI noticed Nicholas White’s auction offering: a composition with the text of your choosing. I mused over what text I might choose. What bit of scripture or ancient poem... Hey wait a minute! I know a guy...
Dad wrote poems for most of his life. Many were for special occasions -- for a marriage, or special birthday, or notably his own 50th wedding anniversary. He did have a book of poems for the general audience published by Cleveland State University Press in 1985, though this never attracted much notice. But standing above all were the poems he wrote every year at Christmas, beginning in 1972 and continuing through 2010, before his death in 2011. They took many forms and covered all kinds of topics, though usually they blended national news, big family developments, and imagery from Advent and the Nativity.
Being on something of a deadline, they were always written in anguish and desperation. Dad might take a break from grading that term’s papers, or perhaps put aside the duty and the blank page and head out with the dog into the cold. But eventually it was always done, and it was always brilliant, and beautiful.
So, with our commission in hand, Mom and I began to go through everything, trying to settle on a poem that would work as a piece of music for a general audience. We whittled the set down to two, and, unable to decide between them, threw ourselves on the mercy of the composer to make the final decision. He couldn't decide either, and much to our delight commenced to produce a set of the two together.
The poems are from 1976 and 1978, on either side of the great fulcrum of our family history -- the sabbatical trip to England in 1977. ‘76 was was spent planning, sending countless letters in advance to secure places to stay with friends and colleagues, and arranging access to the Elizabethan houses and artifacts that were the object of Dad’s research. The year was also spent saving every dime to finance the trip.
The Angel (1976 -- but the second in the set) seems to spring from the excitement and optimism of those days. Big ideas come to you. They send you out into the world to seek discovery. “The Angel appears -- he says Glory!”
By 1978 we had long been back, but profoundly changed by the experience of living in England for five months. First there had been the theater, as we went to just about everything the Royal Shakespeare Company put on in Stratford and London. Helen Mirren in As You Like It! Judy Dench and Ian McKellen in Macbeth! Henry VI parts I, II, and III! Then there was the music. Evensong at Kings College and visits to almost all the great Cathedrals. We discovered that bargain tickets for the London Symphony could be had for those fifteen years old and under, and when I heard the Hungarian Dances and 1st Symphony of Brahms, I was hooked for life.
The 1978 poem, His Unresisting Love, has the ambition and expansiveness one acquires when traveling abroad and returning home; the broadening of perspective that comes from living with people of different habits and concerns. It uses the device of alternating Latin and English lines (macaronic), after the manner of In Dulce Jubilo, or even more aptly, Benjamin Britten's Hymn to the Virgin. A Hymn to the Christ Child if you will.
One of Dad's best qualities was his ability to make our little corner of the world seem so special. Whether it be an old house in Cleveland, or a parish church in Brookline, if Dave Evett is present you know you can expect the best; art and ideas worthy of anyone's attention. This place! This company! THIS NIGHT!