Read on to discover the mysteries of In the Bleak Midwinter, voted our best Christmas carol of all time...
When was In the Bleak Midwinter composed?
December 1906 was one of the hardest on record. Fierce blizzards swept Scotland, more than a foot of snow was reported in Norfolk and most of Britain lay under a deep blanket of white. When, on Christmas Eve, churches across the country were filled with the sound of a newly published carol by the 30-year-old Gustav Holst, the words of its opening verse must have resonated with congregations, many of whom had braved treacherous conditions to get there: ‘In the bleak midwinter/Frosty wind made moan/Earth stood hard as iron/Water like a stone…’
Holst had been commissioned to write three carols by his friend and mentor Ralph Vaugh Williams, co-editor of the English Hymnal, published in October 1906 by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Church of England. In the Bleak Midwinter was the first of Holst’s contributions to the new volume, a setting of a poem by Christina Rossetti which first appeared as A Christmas Carol in the January 1872 edition of Scribner’s Monthly, a respected and influential American literary periodical. The poem seems simple, verging on banality in its rhyming schemes (…snow on snow/ …long ago). But delve a little deeper, and the cultural influences and philosophical ideas are far reaching.
Who was poet Christina Rossetti? In the Bleak Midwinter's author...
The extraordinary Rossetti family was something of a cause célèbre in the cultural life of Victorian England. Most prominent and controversial was Christina’s brother, the painter and poet Gabriel Dante Rossetti, a central figure in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her younger brother Michael was a leading critic, editor and biographer, while older sister Maria was a respected scholar and writer (and latterly a nun) whose works included A Shadow of Dante, a well-received guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy for English speakers, published in 1871 – around the time that Christina would have been mulling In the Bleak Midwinter. The youngest of the four children, Christina was a poet-prodigy who wrote her first rhyming couplet when she was just five years old. In family correspondence, she was variously described as ‘bright and lively’, ‘curious… sharp, whimsical’ but also ‘fractious and miserable’, often gripped by religious mania.
Gabriele Rossetti, the father, was an exiled Italian poet and academic, obsessed with esoteric thinking and the works of Dante Alighieri, whose verses he quoted liberally while striding around the family home in London’s Fitzrovia. Gabriele dubbed his children ‘two storms’ and ‘two calms’ – it’s easy to guess which category Christina belonged to. Christina’s mother, Frances Polidori, was a devout High Anglican who home schooled her children and took special care of Christina and Maria’s religious upbringing.
Dante's influence on In the Bleak Midwinter
The influence on Christina of both parents, and especially of her sister Maria and her Dantean leanings, is evident in In the Bleak Midwinter. Dante’s Divine Comedy takes the soul on a journey into the frozen wastes of the Ninth Circle of Hell, finally emerging into the light and warmth of Paradise, a realm of Divine salvation beyond the confines of Heaven and Earth. The parallels in Rossetti’s poem are clear as she moves us from a world of wintery desolation into a transcendental dimension where ‘Heaven and Earth shall flee away’ and God’s grace holds sway.
This is not the most obvious poem to set as a congregational hymn. The meter is highly irregular, with the syllabic stresses falling in different places in each verse. Unwitting singers find themselves stumbling over lines such as ‘Our God, Heaven cannot hold him’ and ‘But what I can, I give him…’, causing awkward blushes all round.
Why did Holst set In the Bleak Midwinter to music?
So why did Holst choose Rossetti’s strange, rather obscure verse to set as a carol to include in the English Hymnal of 1906? One reason must have been the religious leanings of its editors. Vaughan Williams’s co-editor was Percy Dearmer, a controversial and charismatic High Anglican clergyman who wanted to challenge the hegemony of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the standard Church of English hymnal dating from 1861 and published in an unsatisfactory and much criticised revised edition in 1904. (The volley of complaints included popular outrage over the decision to change ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’ to Wesley’s original text of ‘Hark, how all the welkin rings!’.)
Dearmer insisted that the English Hymnal reflected the role of the saints, the angels and the Sacrament and the importance of the Virgin Mary in the catholic traditions of the English church. All this would have drawn him to the High Anglican sensibilities and creative output of the Rossetti family. In the Bleak Midwinter had recently appeared in the first volume of Christina Rossetti’s complete collected poetry, posthumously published in 1904 – the central image of the Virgin in a humble stable with the child Christ suckling at her breast, worshipped by angels and beasts looking on adoringly, would have struck a chord with Dearmer’s belief in sensuality and beauty as inspirational forces in religious faith, embodied in the figure of Mary. Vaughan Williams, meanwhile, was concerned with the musical quality of the new collection, and its appeal to a broad church of English speakers. Holst was a perfect choice.
Holst's understated music for In the Bleak Midwinter
Holst’s tune, dubbed ‘Cranham’ after the Gloucestershire village where the composer spent much of his younger years, has often been criticised as being a dirge which ultimately fails to reflect the epic Dantean journey on which Rossetti’s poem takes us. It’s true that the melody, closely contained within the space of an octave, hardly captures the metaphysical expansiveness of a poem that juxtaposes the tender sincerity of the love of Mother and Child with the cosmic grandeur of God’s love in the vastness of creation. However, the understatement and sincerity of Holst’s setting chimes with Rossetti’s ultimate message that no amount of opulence and pomp (so characteristic of the Edwardian era) is worth the love contained within the hearts of the simplest and poorest souls.
Harold Darke's setting of In the Bleak Midwinter
Whatever its shortcomings, Cranham proved to be a popular tune, and one which must have come to the attention of an aspiring young composer and organist called Harold Darke. Also in 1906, the 18-year-old Darke took up the post of organist at Emmanuel Church in the London suburb of West Hampstead, a great Gothic Revival edifice with Anglo-Catholic traditions at the heart of its worship. At the time, he was a lodger at the Hampstead home of a family called Calkin, and it was there that the budding composer presented his hosts with a rather special Christmas present: an autograph score of his own setting of In the Bleak Midwinter. Dated 9 December 1909, the score bears the dedication ‘To MAC’ – Margaret Agnes Calkin.
Darke’s setting, published in 1911, owes much to Holst. After an unassuming but instantly recognisable two-bar introduction on the organ, the meter and melodic contours of the solo soprano line of the opening verse echo the rise and fall of Cranham. Thereafter, Darke breaks free, imbuing Rossetti’s text with more nuance and dynamic range than Holst, reflecting that this is an anthem for church choir rather than a congregational hymn.
Darke was coy about the more sensual elements in Rossetti’s poem, perhaps in consideration of his dedicatee’s sensibilities: in her 40s, it’s likely that Margaret Calkin held traditional Victorian views on matters moral. So, he omits verse four which puts the spotlight on a virginal mother’s intimacy with her baby son, sealed with a kiss. He also bowdlerised the phrase ‘A breast full of milk’ to ‘A heart full of mirth’, utterly unsuited to the personal spirit of Rossetti’s poem. Later editions of Darke’s carol re-instated the original text.
The greatest carol of all time
The Calkins, celebrating their Edwardian Christmas, could hardly have known that, a century later, Darke’s setting of In the Bleak Midwinter would be voted ‘The greatest carol of all time’ in a 2008 BBC Music Magazine poll involving 51 leading directors of music from Britain and the US. At the time, the magazine posed the question, ‘Does any other song get to the very heart of Christmas as understatedly but effectively as In the Bleak Midwinter?’
Other musical settings of In the Bleak Midwinter
There are plenty of other settings of Rossetti’s poem. Among the choral versions is Variation 5 of Britten’s A Boy Was Born (1934), which features a graphic account of a bleak, frozen landscape – you can hear the frosty wind moaning in the opening dissonances and as layers of voices overlap in a doleful refrain of ‘snow on snow’. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Bob Chilcott’s 1994 Mid-winter, banishing the very idea of ‘bleak’ with its catchy melody, lush harmonies and dramatic key changes: pure Disney. Richard Allain’s 2012 version is a beautifully textured, harmonically complex response to the imagery, while Joanna Forbes L’Estrange turned to Rossetti’s poem in 2022, producing a haunting, painterly setting for upper voices and harp.
The popularity of Darke's setting
Among all of these, the popularity of Darke’s setting endures. It continues to be performed all around the world in a variety of arrangements, including for upper voices, for tenors and basses, and accompanied by strings in a version by John Rutter. In its original form, the carol continues to play a central role in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge, where Darke himself was organist during the Second World War.
By the time of his death in 1976, Darke had begun to voice his frustration that his most famous work, lasting barely five minutes, had completely eclipsed a lifetime of achievement as prolific composer of high-quality choral music. Few share in his ambivalence. In the Bleak Midwinter continues, year after year, to provide a moment of humanity in a brutal world, and a message of hope that the simple virtues of humility and sincerity will prevail. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without it.
