Victoria, Albert and Christmas
Carols at the Royal Albert Hall, beautifully played by the Royal Philharmonic, sung by the Royal Choral Society with me on backing vocals, and congenially hosted by Greg Beardsell, really brought home what a Victorian spectacle the modern Christmas really is. Though most of the carols we sing today had previous lives, their modern form, like the magnificent building we were in, was a bequest of the Victorian era. Once In Royal David’s City is a poem by Cecil Frances Alexander which was first published in 1848 and then set to music by Henry Gauntlett a year later. O Little Town of Bethlehem is based on a 1868 text by Phillips Brooks. In The Bleak Midwinter sets words by Christina Rosetti from 1872 to Gustav Holst’s 1906 (just too late for Victoria) tune. The English words for O Come All Ye Faithful were written in 1841 by the Catholic priest Frederick Oakley. A tune by Mendelssohn was adapted by William Hayman Cummings in 1855 and set to Charles Wesley’s earlier words. There have been many carols written since, and some magnificent Christmas music in other forms, but the conventional carol service is surely the longest-lasting commonly-performed popular music there is in the Western world.
Hark!, Stranger
One of the greatest books on writing of any kind is Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing The Hat. Whatever your field of composition, I recommend it as a fascinating insight into the obsessive attention to detail that marks the truly creative mind. One of Sondheim’s points came back to me in the establishing line of the greatest Christmas carol ever written. Sondheim spends a long time, he says, ensuring that the stress in the music matches the weight of the line. When the grammar of the music clashes with the sense of the words, the effect is to impair the clarity which is his objective as a lyricist. This is the difference between a line which reads well but sounds wrong. It suddenly occurred to me that this might be true of one of the most joyous songs ever written. The line Hark! The Herald Angels Sing is separated by an exclamation mark. The sense of the line, as read, demands a pause. Yet it is sung uninterrupted as if a band of angels known collectively as “hark the herald” were singing. The weight of the line doesn’t match the weight of the music. Yet do I mind, as Sondheim does? In the Royal Albert Hall at Christmas, I found it hard to say I did.
2023’s Random Highlights
Music
Here are three songs which were new to me in 2023. None of them are new but I discovered them and liked them enough to think you might too.
Taylor Swift and the National, Coney Island
Taylor Swift - coney island (Lyric Video) ft. The National (youtube.com)
Roy Orbison, She’s A Mystery To Me
She's A Mystery To Me (youtube.com)
John Denmark, Queen of Denmark
John Grant - Queen of Denmark (Strongroom Sessions) (youtube.com)
Books
My big discovery of the year was Elizabeth Strout. The Olive Kitteridge stories are well known from the HBO series but do try, if you haven’t already, the Lucy Barton novels. The first one, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is haunting and deeply sad although Lucy needs watching. As a narrator she is always onto us, the readers, to the extent that you discover in a later novel that her name isn’t actually Lucy Barton.
Rediscovery of the year was Christopher Isherwood. Ragged, unformed, rambling and yet really memorable, The Berlin Stories is a treasure trove, but A Single Man is better. A more mature book it has one of the great accomplishments in descriptive writing as its surprising, and affecting, conclusion. I went on from the fiction to Isherwood’s memoir Christopher And His Kind, in which he finally acknowledged his homosexuality and his guilt at not having done so earlier. Then, for the real Isherwood obsessive, I recommend Peter Parker’s monumental biography.
Then, in my professional capacity as a writer of words to be performed, I enjoyed Richard Sennett’s forthcoming memoir The Performer and David Wiles’s Democracy As Theatre: From The Greeks To Gandhi.
Finally, though he is a friend and it offends my principle that I should never be nice to people I know, the best book of the year was Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad. The story it tells is essential and it needs to be read in every generation. If we hadn’t understood that when it came out, it seems that the news every day serves to teach us again. It’s a story of human beings punished by appalling politics and it is, unfortunately, a story as old as time itself.
People
This is an era of mass fame. We are living at a time when people who grew up in a mass media society are now old. That is why there seem to be so many famous people dying each year. We are at the peak of the cohort who grew up in a world of mass, but singular, media. The man who embodied that in the UK was Sir Michael Parkinson. I had the privilege of getting to know him a little at the end of his distinguished life and I will miss him.
There are plenty of others who departed this year and every person will have their own personal list. Mine is made up of the following people, so a tip of the hat to Tony Bennett, Andre Braugher, Michael Gambon, Robbie Robertson, Bury Bacharach, Tina Turner and Shane MacGowan.
Happy Christmas. There will be plenty more next year.