It's Christmas week and, as usual on Liederabend, we start a series of three posts (short posts because we all are busy enough these days) with three songs about Christmas.
This week we are listening to composer Derek Holman for the first time. Holman was born in 1931 in Cornwall, and his career focused on organ, choir, and teaching. First in England and then in Canada, where he settled in 1965 and died three years ago, in 2019. He composed mostly works for choir, but also about sixty songs for voice and piano, generally structured in cycles. In 1986, he wrote The Centred Passion, six songs from Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H., one of which we'll hear today.
Tennyson published In Memoriam A.H.H. obiit MDXXXIII in 1850, and the initials correspond to Arthur Henry Hallam, a young man loved by everybody, brilliant and promising poet, who died suddenly at the age of twenty-two. Tennyson's cycle of 131 cantos (with the prologue and epilogue, a total of 2916 verses), and has inspired numerous song composers; for example, a few years ago we listen to Dark House, one of the songs in Jonathan Dove's Three Tennyson songs.
The canto XXVII of In Memoriam A.H.H. begins with the words The time draws near the birth of Christ; it is the first of three Christmas poems, and is also the fourth song in Holman's The Centred Passion, which we will hear performed by Gerald Finley and Stephan Ralls. As other poems around Christmas speak of light as a symbol of renewed hope at this time, Tennyson tells us here about the sound of bells, bells that play for Christmas and return hope to the poetic voice.
Certainly, it doesn't matter what shape takes hope: a light, a bell, a birth… I wish you a happy Christmas!
The time draws near the birth of Christ:
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
Four voices of four hamlets round,
From far and near, on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound:
Each voice four changes on the wind,
That now dilate, and now decrease,
Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.
This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish'd no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:
But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch'd with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.
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