As we anticipate the annual live broadcast of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from King’s College, Cambridge (on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org, at 10:00 this morning EST), here’s a spot of trivia for you: Did you know that one of the most famous of all Christmas carols has its roots in Philadelphia?
Philip Brooks was an Episcopal priest and rector of Church of the Holy Trinity (located on the northwest corner of Rittenhouse Square) at the time he jotted down a poem, in 1868, inspired by a trip he had taken to the Holy Land. He conceived the text for a Sunday school service and requested that his organist, Lewis Redner, come up with a suitable melody.
For whatever reason, the task wasn’t at the top of Redner’s list of priorities. When Brooks checked in with him on his progress on the Friday before the service, Redner still hadn’t done anything with it. Of course, the organist assured him it would be done by Sunday, but it wasn’t until Saturday night, Christmas Eve, that he sat down and devoted any thought to it at all. Alas, his Muse was as lackadaisical as he. Redner wound up surrendering to Morpheus before he could settle on a worthwhile idea.
“I thought more about my Sunday-school lesson that I did about the music,” Redner later recollected. “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony.”
The carol was first printed as a leaflet by Richard McCauley, a bookseller on Chestnut Street, west of 13th. One of these found its way to the rector of All Saints’ Church in Worcester, MA, who asked to be able to include it in a hymnal titled “The Church Porch.” He christened the piece “St. Louis.” We know it better by the address of its opening, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
In the UK, the text was sung to the hymn tune “Forest Green,’ which had been adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams from an existing folksong, “The Ploughboy’s Dream.” Vaughan Williams had notated the song while doing fieldwork in Surrey in 1903 and published it three years later in “The English Hymnal.”
H. Walford Davies also set the text, in two versions, as a hymn known as “Wengen” and for choir as “Christmas Carol.” The latter is frequently sung on the Christmas Eve broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge, heard annually all over the world.
It may be the case that Brooks’ original poem is more familiar on the other side of the pond in its settings by these two venerable English composers, but in the United States, Redner’s melody remains one of the most recognizable of the incessantly sung Christmas carols.
Both Brooks and Redner were astonished by the popularity of their creation, which they had intended as a modest one-off for children. Never underestimate the power of procrastination! With a little help from those “angel whispers,” Philadelphia, for once, managed to live up to Penn’s vision of a City of Brotherly Love.
The Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square
Brooks & Redner’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:
The Vaughan Williams version (from King’s College, directed by the late Stephen Cleobury):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsul9A3dU40
H. Walford Davies: