Hitting the highest notes
Philip Hope-Wallace
Ah to be born again ... out with the Quorn again? Not in my case, I am a coward when mounted. But I'd love to have the treble voice I had when [did nervously ride horseback, as Americans nervously have to add. It would be splendid to experience the thrill of actually hitting the highest note in 'Hark the Herald' on Christmas Day, which made the juices flow, and renewed hunger already dimmed by eating forbiddenly and so the more sweetly the glace plums from your stocking left by Father Christmas (never 'Santa Claus'—would that rejection have been a side effect of the 1914 conflict ?)
[did a lot of singing as a boy and when my voice broke I still hung on for a bit in the trebles. I remember nearly having a conniption or whatever it is called while holding the high A in Brahms's A German Requiem— we were at peace by then so it was alright, and I was at Charterhouse. Peace! But it wasn't good for my adult voice which sings with unlovely qualities. My father sang baritone, one of my sisters a well-trained soprano, mother played the piano and put in a note or two. We sang much: Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, hymns, Scots ballads, border ballads—Mary calling the cattle home across the sands of DEEee and never returning (sucked down). Oh how we cried about that. These things were more a reality to me than the carols about which I wish to speak, some of them having tiresome titles, mock antique sounding (even if genuine). What is this goodly odour or This is the night we go singing Noel (0 no we don't, said a rebellious inner voice).EvenGod rest you merry gentlemen, which was spoilt ab initio by the pedantry with which it was explained to you that you should take a breath before 'gentlemen' to show that you understood it wasn't the gentlemen who were merry, the latter word being an adverb for prosperously. Same as in German's Merrie England, you were told. (That inner voice spake up again—pooh!) But I genuinely loved a handful of carols: the Coventry Carol, whether 'good' music I wouldn't even now care to testify, also any carol where one got a solo to oneself as in 'Last night as I lay on my bed ...' with some conclusion about 'a song for Christian boys to sing' (myself) and (rurti)Christian men to
hear!
I doubt if these family carollings were an undiluted musical treat and indeed one could sometimes see as much from the looks of captive audiences: cook, French governess or strangers within our gates. But although there certainly was in the house a wind-up gramophone—which played things like Melba's 'Caro nome' and Harry Lauder's 'Stop your tickling Jock,' it didn't seem to run to carols. On the other hand, just as German bands once did, quite proficient gangs of carol singers would themselves gather in the stilly night without and sing until bribed with charity and even refreshment to desist. I trust it still happens though mostly now these ceremonies seem to have dwindled (like Penny for the guy) to a handful of kids (we called them urchins or . . . get this! street arabs) raising the letterbox and doing one verse of 'We three Kings,' ringing the bell before they'd even finished that, what's more. The Sally Army however comes round, heaven be thanked. It's a part ofChristmas I like in St John's Wood when the band plays 'Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht' and all the sentimental Viennese refugees fling wide the windows of their splendid flats and hurl out handfuls of coin.
It occurs to me that they probably brought that particular tune with them. I don't remember hearing it in the 1920s, in this country at lest. But I may be wrong. The Prince Consort may have imported it with the yule log. I may be making the subject of carols sound very parochial. Devolution and transposition needed. What about Welsh, Norman or Basque carols?
The truth is that in sixty-five Christmases, and on most other blessed or unblessed days, I have heard so much music, joined and enjoined so many `Adeste Fideles' that I cannot clear-cut my memories—Gracie Fields made me cry in that one, though, at one point in the war. I had probably had a few in the knowledge that we shouldn't have a blitz that night: illogical in those days, some of us.
But one Christmas I remember well and the contrasts of music that it offered were striking and memorable fora lifetime. It was Rouen, capital of Normandy, in the 1920s.
I was staying and doing lessons with a Protestant pastor's frugal family. We went by tram to the Temple (not Mormon nor legal but Norman and Reforme). Brought up on King James's version and Messiah, to say nothing of the disembodied sightless lark-song of cherub English choristers, the sheer barbarity of this French culte dismayed me. Lines from St Luke which have never failed to make my eyes prick came out in French as quite awful (I don't want to offend anyone but for that matter the Roman Mass in French strikes me as displeasing compared to any Anglican equivalent and I can't understand how the countrymen of Racine can be doing with it). In those days it was only the Prods who used the vernacular and so I blamed them alone. The crisis came with the final hymn. Like fiends and fishwives brawling we joined in 'Mon beau sapin roi des forets quefaime ta verdure ...' (that last word got a special nasal snarl) and what do you think the tune was? We were near enough in date to the General Strike for me to feel a flush. It was of course the Labour Party anthem, °The Red Flag' derived of course from 'Tannenbaum' of which this hymn was a translation and destined to serve also I believe as the state anthem of Maryland. These things I learned later. But I thought how nice it would be to see how the Catholics were getting on in their marvellous cathedral where Marcel Dupre besat the organ console and great singers from the Opera lifted their voices under cloche hats, in the case of the sopranos —this was before the Vatican forbade such frippery and secularism. Well, in point of fact, on the very eve of the unlovely service in the Temple I had most wickedly seduced the son of the house to steal out with me and hear the Catholic Messe de Minuit and, wonder of wonders, the best French tenor of the day went soaring through 'Minuit,
chretiens, c'est l'heure solennelle .' (great Caruso number, by the way). They say I haven't much taste but I near as damn grovelled into conversion to the other faith. It was rather reassuring the next year to get back to 'Good King W' and 'Away in a manger.' But never seem to hear carols at all nowadays except on British Rail. Time to get to church again [see.
Previous page
