Benjamin Britten composed the exquisite A Ceremony of Carols while cooped up, bored, on a ship crossing the Atlantic and a nation has been everlastingly grateful, says Ysenda Maxtone-Graham
ONE had to alleviate the boredom,’ Benjamin Britten wrote to a friend in 1942, explaining why he’d written his A Ceremony of Carols. Never have we been more thankful for someone’s boredom needing to be alleviated. Bring on boredom, if it gives a composer the urge to create such a magical work!
Just thinking about A Ceremony of Carols, with its wintry harp sounds and thrilling three-part treble choir, sends shivers up and down the spines of all of us for whom the piece is the quintessence of beauty, expressing the mystery of the Christmas story like no other piece of music.
It happened like this. After three years in the USA, the homesick Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, decided to return to wartime Britain in the spring of 1942. They sailed in convoy on a Swedish ship, the Axel Johnson, which stopped off at various ports before setting off across the Atlantic. Going for a stroll in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Britten happened to wander into a second-hand bookshop where he bought a book of medieval English verse.
Cooped up on the ship for the following weeks as it zig-zagged across the Atlantic avoiding U-boats, in a cabin facing the ship’s refrigerator, which gave off noxious smells, Britten composed not just one but two masterpieces: Ode to St Cecilia and (using some of the medieval verse from that book as his text) A Ceremony of Carols, scored for trebles and harp.
This is the cussedness of the creative process: in the wrong place at the right time, inspiration can suddenly strike. In the unpromising surroundings of that swaying ship, Britten burst out of the creative block that had imprisoned him for months.
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 28, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 28, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
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