One of the bits of personal spiritual hygiene that I have practiced for several years is, sometime during the Twelve Days of Christmas, to take a careful, even prayerful, listen to the entirety of the cantata Hodie (This Day) by the iconic 20th-century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. He began working on it in 1953, and it was first performed the following year, when the composer was just into the ninth decade of his life. It is not terribly well-known beyond the circles of RVW fandom, perhaps partly because it requires significant resources (large orchestra, chorus, children’s chorus, organ, soloists) to perform. Fortunately, there are some fine recordings, and it is, in my experience, an exemplar of the gift that keeps on giving — I have yet to listen to it and gone unrewarded. Each time there is a nuance of text or music or performance that I had not yet noticed.
Let me begin by laying out the macro-architecture of the piece. The essential scaffolding consists of the familiar (all the more so for being in the King James Version) biblical texts from Matthew (Annunciation to Joseph, Wise Men), Luke (nativity, angels, shepherds) and the mystical (and majestically rendered, in this case) Johannine prologue. The bits from Matthew and Luke are sung very simply, in unison, almost in a recitative fashion, by children’s voices (in the classic English tradition, of course, boys), to the accompaniment of a small, portative organ. This material functions as a sort of narrative river — or, to employ a different metaphor, connective tissue — that supplies “flow” to the composition, moving it along inexorably.
On this frame, then, Vaughan Williams hangs a diverse array of extra-biblical texts that provide a continuous gloss on the biblical material, set musically either for chorus or soloist or a combination thereof. Some of this is liturgical (portions of Cranmer’s rendition of Gloria in excelsis), but most of it consists of poetry: from John Milton to George Herbert to Thomas Hardy, just to hit some of the highlights. The musical and dramatic climax is toward the end, with a textual mashup of John 1:1, 4, and 14; and, from Matthew 1:23, just the words “God with us.”
Sections from Milton’s long poem On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity serve as musical and dramatic bookends, the first, near the beginning, set for soprano soloist, and the second, as an energetic coda following immediately upon the climactic “God with us,” sung by the chorus. Here are some snippets to whet your appetite:
It was the winter wild,
While the Heaven-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to him
Had doffed her gaudy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathise.
…
And Kings sate still with aweful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.
But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of light
His reign of peace upon the earth began:
Ahead of the first of these “bookends” is an introductory chorus that quotes, in the original Latin, from the antiphon to the Magnificat at Second Vespers of Christmas (Hodie Christus natus est), and the simple boys chorus narrative of the Annunciation to Joseph. Following it is the material from Luke about the journey of the Holy Family to Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus. Then there is a chorus, a translation by Miles Coverdale of a hymn by Martin Luther (this is sung unaccompanied, and functions much as a German chorale would in the cantatas of Bach):
The blessed son of God only
In a crib full poor did lie;
With our poor flesh and our poor blood
Was clothed that everlasting good.
Kyrie eleison.
The Lord Christ Jesu, God’s son dear,
Was a guest and a stranger here;
Us for to bring from misery,
That we might live eternally.
Kyrie eleison.
All this did he for us freely,
For to declare his great mercy;
All Christendom be merry therefore,
And give him thanks for evermore.
Kyrie eleison.
The music here is not excessively challenging to sing, and is often done as a stand-alone by church choirs.
This is followed by the material concerning the angels and shepherds, wherein the angels’ Gloria is supplemented by material from the well-known liturgical canticle that begins the same way.
Now we encounter the second effort of the composer (after already having dealt with Milton) to work significant poetry into the mix, The Oxen by 19th-century novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, which meditates/fantasizes on the legend that farm animals, in solidarity with their kin in the manger, actually kneel at midnight on Christmas Eve. Vaughan Williams puts Hardy’s words on the lips of a baritone soloist. The concluding lines are both endearing and haunting:
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
After a brief narrative return to the shepherds as they return to their work, having duly worshiped the newborn king, there is another major bit of poetry, this time from the pen of 17th-century mystical poet and priest George Herbert, The Shepherds sing, and shall I silent be? Again, the material is assigned to a baritone soloist, and muses on the challenge of adequately praising the God who has reached out in saving grace toward humankind:
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev’n His beams sing, and my music shine.
With both Hardy’s text and Herbert’s, I find the music of Vaughan Williams to be a virtually perfect expository vehicle for the words of the poets.
Again, there is a short snippet of the boys chorus and the narrative flow they provide, about the Blessed Mother, who “kept all these things, and pondered them in her own heart.”
Next is a lullaby from an anonymous text, scored for soprano and women’s chorus, concluding with:
“Sweet Babe,” sang she, “my son,
And eke a Saviour born,
Who hath vouchsafèd from on high
To visit us that were forlorn:
“Lalula, lalula, lalula-bye,
Sweet Babe,” sang she,
And rocked him sweetly on her knee.
A tenor soloist then takes the baton, singing words from William Drummond’s Christmas Day, including:
Bright portals of the sky,
Emboss’d with sparkling stars,
Doors of eternity,
With diamantine bars,
Your arras rich uphold,
Loose all your bolts and springs,
Ope wide your leaves of gold,
That in your roofs may come the King of Kings.
Now there is a major transition, with a long narrative by the children’s voices about the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem, and their arrival there. This is followed by a poetic riff on the story by the composer’s wife, a respected poet in her own right, Ursula Wood Vaughan Williams. One might speculate about a conversation around the Vaughan Williams dinner table one evening, wherein Ralph cajoled Ursula into helping him out, since he was coming up empty in his search for appropriate material. She definitely delivered for him, producing seven stanzas: two to introduce the subject, one each in the voices of the three named-from-the-tradition Wise Men (Casper, Melchior, Balthasar — representing gold, frankincense, and myrrh, respectively), and two stanzas to wrap it up and send them back on their way. The individual Magi are each represented by a soloist, with the chorus doing the rest of the heavy lifting. The music is particularly compelling and dramatic.
Immediately following is another “choral,” No Sad Thought, also for unaccompanied voices. The first of the two verses is anonymous, the second by Mrs. Vaughan Williams, and is, I believe, of surpassing spiritual insight:
Promise fills the sky with light,
Stars and angels dance in flight;
Joy of heaven shall now unbind
Chains of evil from mankind,
Love and joy their power shall break,
And for a new born prince’s sake;
Never since the world began
Such a light such dark did span.
The musical setting is suffused with understated luminosity.
We now proceed to an Epilogue, with the previously referenced material from John 1 and Matthew 1, culminating in the chorus declaiming, in successive block chords, one for each word: “God with us,” then jumping immediately at a presto tempo, into another section of the Milton text:
Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears,
If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time,
And let the bass of heaven’s deep organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.
…
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering;
And heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.
The marriage of poetry and compositional artistry in this work is breathtaking. Though he was the son of a parish priest, Vaughan Williams was reputed to be an agnostic in his personal beliefs. Yet, when he donned his Anglican Christian identity for professional purposes, he inhabited that role with deft insight into the significance and subtlety of the Christian mystery.
As one who was a professional musicologist in what feels like a previous lifetime, I’m going to conclude, perhaps as a sort of a postscript that can safely be ignored by the general reader, by giving some rein to that long-bypassed part of me, and make a couple of technical observations that might seem random, but that are, I believe, worthy of attention.
Though Hodie is late in his life and career, it is, in contrast to his forays into more experimental styles, “vintage” Vaughan Williams, eminently recognizable, reflecting the clear modal influence of English folk song in its melodies, and evincing such signature devices as hemiola (slowing the perceived tempo briefly without actually slowing the “beat,” via longer note values instead of tempo markings), low brass playing in the high end of their range, and lots of tuned percussion (tympani, celesta, tubular chimes).
The final choral, No Sad Thought, is written with six flats in the key signature, which means it is in the key of C-flat. To a keyboard musician playing on an instrument tuned to “equal temperament” (which is somewhere well north of 99% of all keyboard instruments, and has been since the time of Bach), this is a head scratcher, because the keys a rehearsal accompanist would depress while helping the choir learn the notes would be identical to those played in the comparatively more sane and simple key of B-major, so … why not just write it in that key? I don’t have an answer to that question that I am fully persuaded by. But I have had discussions, sometimes a trifle heated (!), with more than one choral conductor who contended with notable vigor that B-major and C-flat major are distinctly separate keys. That is not a mystery I am likely to see solved this side of eternity.
