This year, I was commissioned to write a Christmas carol. I’ve always wanted to write a carol. I never have because I’m scared to. Even Simone Biles has had trouble on the balance beam. It’s like that with Christmas carols. The beam on which you’re performing is the Christian article of faith that Jesus is fully human and fully God. The acrobatic elements are the words and music you use to bring that article of faith to life.
Meanwhile, you want to write something that gives the impression that it’s always been sung. A good example is the American carol “I Wonder As I Wander”, which sounds as though John Jacob Niles collected it from an old lady in a grey hat sitting on a porch in the Kentucky mountains. In fact, he wrote it himself, in the dialect he’d known from childhood, and the lyric has an introspection that tells you that, like “Bethlehem Down”, it’s a mid-20th-century art song in the folk tradition. One of the preconditions for the making of a carol is for the composer and the lyricist to stand outside the light of the lantern that Joseph’s holding, while the people singing and listening only see the illuminated mother and child. It’s so difficult to achieve that I eventually gave up, humbly acknowledging the superiority of all those others who managed to pull the cracker. Who knew? It’s not just “Bethlehem Down” that’s hard to write—it’s “Little Donkey” and “Away in a Manger” too.
That’s where Nico Muhly came in: a composer whom I’ve worked with before and wanted to work with again. We could do this together. Already he had some technical boundaries. We’d be writing for a boys’ school choir, so very few trebles, and the altos are mostly voices in transition. They would like to perform it this year, so we had a definite deadline. And Nico already had an idea of the kind of text he wanted. What he sent me was a 14th-century lullaby addressed to the Christ child, three stanzas beginning:
Lullay, lullay, litel child, child, rest thee a throwe,
From heighe hider art thou sent wyth us to wonen lowe;
Poure and litel art thou made, uncouth and unknowe,
Pyne and wo to suffren heer for thyng that nas thyn owe.
Lullay, lullay, litel child, sorwe mythe thou make;
Thou are sent into this world, as thou were forsake.
Nico asked whether I would be interested in making a modern translation in verse to be interleaved, or sung contrapuntally, with the original. And I did it. There was procrastination and months of further procrastination, and then several pages written out in a notebook and returned to repeatedly. It was, as they say, a learning experience. I learned that there are words I need to avoid. “Tiny” being one, “perfect” another and “womb” a third, along with anything that sounded at all artful or literary. If you want to write a carol, you’ve got to be able to kill your darlings.
Make no mistake about it, this baby Jesus is crying bitterly. His mouth is open, his eyes are all screwed up, his face is puce. Well may he cry. Just like so many others born in the time I was procrastinating. Babies in Gaza, babies in Lviv, babies in Darfur, babies in boats on the Channel. Not just these innocents either: I want to say, and I want to write, “Who brings a child into the world right now? Who isn’t appalled to think of what any baby has before them?” We sing lullabies as much for our own sake as for the babies’; their crying cuts right through us. We can’t bear it. This baby will be carried safely into Egypt, but every other boy in Bethlehem under the age of two will be put to the sword. Their mothers’ lullabies are better known than this one: we hear them in the “Coventry Carol”.
And at the back of my mind was Robert Greene’s pastoral lullaby from the reign of Elizabeth I: “Weepe not, my wanton, smile upon my knee/When thou art old ther’s grief inough for thee.” For the Holy Innocents there’s no promise of living to be old enough for grief. For the Christ child, at least in this carol, there’s already the fathomless grief of being born into a blighted world, the suggestion that even in the manger there’s grief enough for him. He is a baby like all the others, and unlike all the others, he has been born for the redemption of everything and everyone that was ever made.
There’s still a lot of revision ahead before we’re done. But now I think we’re getting somewhere.
Shush now, shush now, little one; well may you cry,
Wrapped in your swaddling bands, tucked into the hay,
Who brings a child into the world right now?
Who sends a child to share the trouble we’ve made,
A poor child, a nobody, another mouth to feed?
What a time you chose to be born, little boy.
