Episodes
Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey on BBC Four Tuesday 19 December, 2023
BBC Four presents Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey on Tuesday 19 December at 9.00 pm. In this enlightening program, Worsley explores the fascinating history and deeper meanings of beloved Christmas carols. With performances by The Kingdom Choir and the Hampton Court Choir, she uncovers how these songs have evolved and resonated throughout different cultures and time periods.
Hark the Herald Angels Sing
In Lucy Worsley’s Christmas Carol Odyssey airing on BBC Four on Tuesday 19 December 2023 at 9.00pm and featuring the Kingdom Choir and the Hampton Court Choir, Lucy Worsley shows us that our beloved carols have deeper meanings than we first think in this joyful treat. She explains how their tales combine to form a unique Christmas history. Carolling from door to door is a holdover from the ancient wassail, a fertility rite for pagan religions. Christianity brought a new name for an older midwinter celebration to Britain: Christmas, and wassailing was a big part of that.
But religion quickly abandoned hymns. For the Puritans, who sought to outlaw Christmas completely, they were completely unnecessary and irreligious. Contrarily, French Catholics were all about having a good time, so Lucy goes across the water to study a jig composed by a dancing priest in France during the Renaissance. Carolers in the nineteenth century turned the music she dances to into Ding Dong Merrily on High.
Even in conservative Protestant Britain, the carol found an audience outside of the Church, and new renditions appeared in unexpected places. Lucy finds a little memory game called The Twelve Days of Christmas in an 18th-century children’s book that she finds at the British Library. Additionally, Christmas songs may contain subversive or even dangerous political messages. During the centuries following the Reformation, Catholics in Britain endured persecution. However, a scribe named John Francis Wade managed to encrypt a message in the carol “O Come All Ye Faithful” that expressed support for a Jacobite uprising.
Hark the Herald Angels Sing, sung by the world-famous gospel choir The Kingdom Choir, was a fortuitous combination of words and music that led to the eventual capitulation of the Church of England to the carol’s persuasive power. The English villages of Surrey were Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 20th-century musical pilgrimage. Henry Garman, an old farmhand, sang a song for Vaughan Williams that became O Little Town of Bethlehem.
Lucy finds a simple story of a young parish priest in the snowy Austrian Alps who is looking for a tune for a poem. The discovery of one led to the creation of Silent Night. During the renowned Christmas truce of 1914, this straightforward carol would transform into a hymn in support of peace during the First World War. Another thing that Silent Night brings to mind is that Christmas carols have always been and will always be “popular music,” or music that the masses enjoy and sing along to during the holiday season.
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