This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll celebrate Christmas with an hour of English Nativity settings.
Hubert Parry was part of the English Musical Renaissance – not the actual Renaissance, but rather that flowering of English music which took place at the close of the 19th century, after a nearly 200 year dearth of world class composers following the death of Henry Purcell in 1695.
A professor at the Royal College of Music in London, Parry eventually became the school’s head. He influenced an entire generation of much better known composers, people like Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, John Ireland and Frank Bridge.
We’ll be listening to Parry’s “Ode on the Nativity,” for soprano, chorus and orchestra, on a text by William Dunbar. The work was given its premiere in 1912 at the Hereford Three Choirs Festival, on the same day as Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on Christmas Carols.”
Vaughan Williams wrote so much Christmas music. It’s remarkable that such a spiritual composer, who seemed particularly attracted to religious texts and Biblical subjects, was a self-proclaimed agnostic. At least by the end of his life he had softened his stance from atheism! He was particularly passionate about Christmas carols.
We’ll be listening to the very last music he ever composed, “The First Nowell,” a nativity play arranged and adapted from medieval pageants by Simona Pakenham.
Vaughan Williams worked diligently on the piece during his final month, but died before the work’s completion. Nonetheless, he had finished orchestrating two thirds of it and had mapped out the rest rather thoroughly. The finishing touches were applied by his assistant, Roy Douglas – he of “Les Sylphides” fame.
By the way, Douglas just turned 107 on December 12! He is still listed on the board of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society as its vice-president. Next to Douglas, Vaughan Williams was a mere lad while he was at work on the piece, at the age of 85.
I hope you’ll join me for “A Play in a Manger,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Christmas Eve at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
Merry Christmas!
PHOTOS: Vaughan Williams with fur on his clothes; Parry with fur on his face
