The Chesterton Carol is receiving a number of performances in the coming 10 days! But first, a backstory…
In 2010 the rising Contralto Imelda Franklin Bogue commissioned me to set the poem “A Christmas Carol” by GK Chesterton for voice and piano. I had never heard of the text, but I would have set anything just to hear Imelda’s rich and sonorous voice sing it. (Our later and larger collaboration, a beautifully performed and recorded set of art songs on the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, can be heard here on Spotify.)
As it turns out — and this is rather helpful for a composer — I loved the poem. Joseph Pearce once called it “mediocre”, but I respectfully disagree with a highly respected colleague: I think it absolutely penetrating, but in a way not typical of Chesterton.
I often tell my students that they should read at least two books at a time: The first can be for immediate erudition or pleasure. Yet the second book should be the one which engenders epistemic humility, by reminding us how much we do not know, and how far indeed we must reach in order for our thinking to meet that of the masters. (There is spiritual wisdom here, I think, because very few have reached the top of this proverbial mountain. For some, like Thomas Aquinas, God Himself revealed a shattering heavenly reality which caused this most prolific philosopher to come back down to earth, subsequently labeling his life’s substantial and world-altering work to be “mere straw.”)
G.K. Chesterton is one of those humbling writers for me: he has inevitably thought things through more deeply, with more cleverness, and with more poetic sensibility than I have. I was therefore initially profoundly moved by the simplicity of the text, which seemingly stood in such contrast to the intellectual heft of his general output.
A Christmas Carol
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap, His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world, But here is all aright.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast, His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings, But here the true hearts are.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart, His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world, But here the world’s desire.)
The Christ-child stood on Mary’s knee, His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him, And all the stars looked down.
That’s about a simple as it gets, at least on the surface. There is nothing entirely profound about the rhyme-scheme, perhaps very little to capture the interest of literary critics and theorists. And yet when one spends times with this text — as a composer must — the multi-layered contemplative richness emerged before me.
I have a particular friend on social media who also fulfills the role of spiritual and intellectual mile-marker for me, always posting commentaries which pique my conscience (and grow my reading list). Recently he posted the following quote from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy; leafing through my own copy in preparation for a Chesterton-themed interview next week, I discovered that I had this same page earmarked. I share it now, thinking that it perhaps provides an interpretive lens for the carol:
“The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.”
-Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Contemplation engaged, I was inspired to do several things musically. As an ethnic Pole, I grew up with the astounding tradition of Polish Advent and Christmas Carols, largely bittersweet and sometimes morose pieces which meditate deeply on the fragile Christ child, and the paradox of God consenting to be born into the muddy and cold world. Most Polish Christmas carols prefigure the passion and resurrection in some way. (Here is a nice performance.) As such, I was struck by such prefigurement in Chesterton’s words, and wanted to give them the appropriately Slavic response which comes naturally to me. Yet Chesterton was an Englishman through and through, and the English have their own beautiful carol tradition, therefore my approach attempted to create a new folk-like melody which lived between these two traditions. Yet the folk-like tune had to somehow ride the tide between child-like trust and mystical ecstasy…I’m not sure I found the right answer, but I think an answer was indeed found.
My wife is my most honest and trusted critic — she has no musical training, but she largely grew up without the polluting grime of western pop culture, and so her aesthetic filter is clean. Inevitably, when I play her something I am working on, she will point to the sections which “don’t work yet.” She’s living proof that the pursuit and perception of beauty does not require a doctorate, and she is my secret weapon in more ways than one. She’s also unfailingly honest and hard to get musical praise from (let alone effusive praise), so her sustained enthusiasm about the carol was encouraging. Every Advent she’d insist that I revisit the work and “do more with it.” And yet as is the way with new works in our time, outside of Imelda’s advocacy, the work fell otherwise silent for quite a while.
A decade and more later during the Covid era, I founded the Vos Omnes Virtual Choir, a group which continues to this very day with the purpose of providing high-quality recordings of new sacred works by living composers. I suppose part of my reward for this considerable effort (and indeed, every round of Vos Omnes production is a mini-calvary unto itself), I was allowed to include one of my own works. My wife reminded me about the Chesterton Carol, and so I set it for full SATB choir and chamber orchestra. The resulting performance was lovely and it went - at least by classical standards - somewhat “viral.”
Now as every Advent dons, several performances inevitably follow. This Advent, two higher profile versions will premiere. First, Three Notch’d Road - the Virginia Baroque Ensemble with whom I have collaborated many times - are premiering a pared-down chamber version around their state. It’s gotten nice coverage in the press, and concerts are already selling out. Sadly I cannot attend this event, but I look forward to hearing a recording of what the musicians did with my instructions to take this simple arrangement and “Baroque it up.” (Good period musicians, like world-class jazz performers, can do wonderful things with existing musical structures. Readers might hopefully recall that TnR appeared several times on my summer album release, Metanoia. Without TnR and the tireless and generous advocacy of their artistic director, Fiona Hughes, and her board of directors, the album and its subsequent success never would have happened! I am eternally grateful to them.)
The next weekend, the Benedict XVI Institute and Archbishop Cordileone’s choir will be premiering a new parish-friendly version of the carol for simple choir and organ. I’ll be at the concert and subsequent talk, and I look forward to meeting any of you who are able to come.
As this new Advent dawns, I wish for you all a luminous season where both the child-like simplicity and contemplative depth of Chesterton’s words can settle firmly into a fertile heart, ready to receive the author of joy.