Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols

[Kate Wills]

On Christmas Eve 1918 the recently appointed Dean of King's College Chapel Cambridge revived a little known service in the hope of rekindling Christianity and assuaging the pain and grief of war. The Rev Eric Milner-White had served as an army chaplain, earning a DSO for his bravery. He wanted the Church to reconnect with the people, and did so in a way and on a scale he could never have envisaged, as millions of people around the world now tune-in to the Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols. Twenty King's choristers fell in the Great War, five choral scholars and fifteen former boy choristers. A couple of weeks ago, with the WFA December slot still vacant and running out of options, I revived some research I started years ago, and delivered it on the centenary of the death of 20 year old Lt Denys Maddrell of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. He won a choral scholarship to King's in July 1914, and sang bass there for a few months before donning khaki and dying of wounds on the Somme. If you do listen later today, take a look at those young faces and hear their ethereal singing. Young men just like them, but now "on another shore", stood and sang in their place, and their loss, and the loss of thousands like them, gave rise to the calm and beauty of a service they never knew, that has won universal affection.

[Alan24]

The origins of this festival was featured on Thought for the Day this morning. Today programme, Radio 4.

 

Alan 

[sassenach]

Excellent documentary about it the other day. This year will be Stephen Cleobury's last, I believe. 

[seaJane]

That's right, Stephen Cleobury retires in September.

 

It was good to hear Stille Nacht. As the carols this year apparently represented each decade of the service's history, I wondered what decade the German original was first broadcast.

[Ron Clifton]

Some people do not realise that the Festival itself is broadcast only on Radio 4 (repeated tomorrow on Radio 3) and is not the same as the variation shown on television. The television version is shorter, with fewer lessons, and although it has much music which is also in the radio versions it also contains material which is not in the radio version.

 

Ron

[sassenach]

13 hours ago, Ron Clifton said:

Some people do not realise that the Festival itself is broadcast only on Radio 4 (repeated tomorrow on Radio 3) and is not the same as the variation shown on television. The television version is shorter, with fewer lessons, and although it has much music which is also in the radio versions it also contains material which is not in the radio version.

 

Ron

...or that the chorister who sings "Once in Royal David's City" at the beginning does not know that he is "the one" until he is called forward at the last minute. For me the tv recording doesn't have quite the magic of the live radio broadcast.

Edited 25 December , 2018 by sassenach

[Ron Clifton]

Yes - that's a long-standing practice, dating back at least to David Willcocks' time in the 1960s, to stop the boy from getting a last-minute attack of nerves. But it is fairly well known within the choir that there are only three or four boys likely to be called upon in any year.

 

Ron

 

 

[David_Underdown]

On ‎24‎/‎12‎/‎2018 at 19:26, seaJane said:

That's right, Stephen Cleobury retires in September.

 

It was good to hear Stille Nacht. As the carols this year apparently represented each decade of the service's history, I wondered what decade the German original was first broadcast.

Also the bicentenary of the original composition of Silent Night: an emergency filler after it was found that rodents had chewed through the organ bellows, so a carol intended for accompaniment by guitar was hurriedly worked out (supposedly).