After a trip to the US, a spate of top-flight choral works flowed from Britten’s pen as he sped towards England aboard Swedish cargo ship MS Axel Johnson. A Ceremony of Carols was one such work.
What is Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols?
A Ceremony of Carols is an 11-movement work by the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76). Its text consists of an eclectic mix of anonymous medieval texts and later poems rather than familiar carols. Not all of the texts are festive, or even about winter – one of the carols, the Spring Carol, sings of ‘The deer in the dale, the sheep in the vale, the corn springing.’
When did Britten write A Ceremony of Carols?
Britten composed it in March to April 1942, while crossing the Atlantic on the Axel Johnson, a Swedish cargo ship, in the thick of the Second World War. At the time, the composer and his partner Peter Pears were heading back to Britain after a three-year stay in the US. According to Pears, their cabins were hot and stuffy, and the company on board ‘callow, foul-mouthed and witless’. Plus, of course, there was always the danger of being attacked by German U-Boat.
How Britten came to be in the United States
When Britten went to Chicago to play the solo part in his Piano Concerto, the bitterly cold mid-Western winter brought about a streptococcal infection that then flared up on his return to Long Island, and might have killed him but for the trained nursing skills of the Mayers’ daughter Beata. A springtime recovery heralded a productive year in 1940. First came the orchestral Sinfonia da Requiem; then Diversions – a left-hand concerto for the one-armed Austrian pianist and war veteran Paul Wittgenstein – was followed by the first Britten work written specially for Pears, Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.
1941 saw the premiere of Paul Bunyan – part operetta, part would-be Broadway musical, setting a libretto by Britten’s compatriot and fellow-exile, WH Auden, and staged at New York’s Columbia University. Although well performed, this did not catch on with either press or public. A disappointed Britten visited California, where he and Pears came across a copy of the BBC magazine The Listener. This featured an article by EM Forster about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), author of a verse tale about an outcast local fisherman, Peter Grimes. It was a key moment for Britten, whose desire to return home was now unstoppable. He and Pears got a passage on a merchant ship in a wartime convoy, and sailed from New York in March 1942.
Why is it called a ‘Ceremony’?
The work begins and ends with a plainchant Procession and Recession that the choir enter and leave the stalls or concert hall to. The eighth movement, meanwhile, is an Interlude for the harp alone.
And where do the texts for A Ceremony of Carols come from?
Shortly after the Axel Johnson left the US, it docked briefly in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was while browsing in a bookshop there that Britten found a copy of The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, compiled by Gerald Bullett. The poems in it fired his imagination to write a Christmas work.
What performers is it written for?
A Ceremony of Carols is for three lines of either boy trebles or female sopranos, plus a harp. Britten originally scored it for women’s voices, but then had second thoughts after the debut performance in December 1942. The revised, and published, version was first sung by the Morriston Boys’ Choir the following Christmas.
What are the best recordings of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols?
There are many good recordings. For a version with boys’ voices, try the 1990 recording by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge (Argo)
For women’s voices, the recently released recording by Tenebrae (Signum) comes recommended
We named Britten's A Ceremony of Carols one of the best pieces of Christmas classical music
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