St. Paul's Cathedral Offers "Lessons and Carols" Christmas Service December 22

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, December 22) my husband Charles and I took the #10 and #3 buses to St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral for a traditional Christmas “Lessons and Carols” service, preceded by a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols – a 20-minute piece Britten composed to mostly Middle English texts during World War II, in which Britten had registered as a conscientious objector. Britten wrote it for a chorus of trebles – boy singers whose voices haven’t changed yet – and a harp, though in St. Paul’s performance the trebles were replaced by teenage and adult women. (Britten wrote a lot for trebles, and there have been the predictable allegations made against Gay men who work with boys that he was after more than their voices.) Britten set the texts pretty much as is instead of editing them into modern-day English – though one of my favorite things about Britten is his skill at setting English texts and rendering them understandable even if you don’t know them in advance. (I remember in 1978 going to the San Francisco opera for a performance of Britten’s 1951 opera Billy Budd and, among other things, being astonished at how well I could comprehend virtually every word of the sung text and had no trouble following the story even though it was an opera I’d never heard before, I hadn’t read Herman Melville’s novel either, and this was before the supertitle age.) The second song in the cycle (after an opening “Hostias” or “Processional,” which is sung in Latin) is called “Wolcum Yole,” and the opening lines are, “Wolcum be thou hevenè king, Wolcom Yole!/Wolcum, born in one morning/Wolcum for whom we sall sing.” The performance was quite beautiful, with the women’s voices blending beautifully and having no problem negotiating music originally written for boys.

The main event was something that seems to be unique to the Church of England (though the Wikipedia page on it explains that it’s been adopted by other Christian denominations as well): a pre-Christmas service that alternates choral singing of Christmas songs with readings from the Bible. The Biblical excerpts tell not only of the Nativity (mostly from Luke but with one verse each from Matthew and John) but of the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden, the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, and the parts of the Old Testament (Isaiah and Micah) that foretell the coming of Jesus Christ as the literal Son of God who will redeem Mankind’s sins and save Humanity from Adam’s and Eve’s screw-up in Eden. (I don’t believe a word of this nonsense, either, but it’s certainly generated some great art.) The 11 carols sung were H. J. Gauntlett’s and David Willcocks’s “Once in Royal David’s City,” Willcocks’s “Ding, Dong, Merrily on High,” Peter Warlock’s a.k.a. Philip Heseltine’s “Adam Lay ybounden” (yet another 20th century composer setting a Renaissance text in Middle English), Robert W. Jones’s “Through the Window, Gently Gleaming,” John Joubert’s “Touches,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” (one of three carols the congregation was invited to sing ourselves, though to my dismay instead of performing the familiar melody they did one from Ralph Vaughan Williams based on the folk song “Forest Green”), Malcolm Archer’s “I Saw Three Ships,” Pietro A. Yon’s “Gesù Bambino” (the other Christmas song that contains the words “Adeste fideles, Laeti triumphantes”), Will Todd’s “My Lord Has Come” and versions of the traditional “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” which we were invited to sing along with the choir. I knew their melodies well enough I had no problem joining in. Since Martin Green, the church’s musical director, was conducting the choir, I have no idea who was playing the organ accompaniment to some of the carols – and Charles and I were on the wrong side of the church to see for ourselves, though my guess would be it was the quite interesting woman who filled in for Martin last Friday for the last 2024 organ recital, Grace Lewis-McClaren.