A couple of days ago it was Boxing Day – the Feast of Stephen, celebrated in the famous traditional carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’. Actually, although the tune is traditional, the words were written in the nineteenth century by J. M. Neale.
It was published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 in the hope that it would go away, but nearly a century later, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s a quote from the editors’ footnote: This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the delightful tune, which is that of a Spring carol. Unfortunately, J. M. Neale substituted for the Spring carol this ‘Good King Wenceslas’, one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call ‘doggerel’, and Bullen condemns as ‘poor and commonplace to the last degree’. The time has not yet come for a comprehensive book to discard it; but we print it not without hope that it may gradually pass into disuse.
I don’t think it will, somehow: and some time ago I wrote this version for a Boxing Day concert, and I thought that at least there was the material here for a little ‘scena’, mixing humour with word-painting. It was written for the wonderful soprano Maria Jette, who has performed a number of my songs over the years, and an equally virtuosic recorder player, John West.
So this nine-minute piece tells the whole story, with dramatic illustrations of the various events: the snow, ‘deep and crisp and even’; the frost, ‘cruel’; the King, ‘Bring me flesh, bring me wine’; the page, ‘Sire, the night is darker now…. I can go no longer’; the King, ‘Mark my footsteps, good my page, tread thou in them boldly’; the page, ‘in his master’s steps he trod…heat was in the very sod’; and lastly the moral, ‘Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing’.
And the tune is all there too – though not necessarily as we usually hear it!
You can hear a recording of the first performance here, together with a scrolling score, and the music is available from Colne Edition here.
Happy New Year!