In the bleak mid winter
In the bleak midwinter (NOBC 111) was written by the English poet Christina Rossetti1 at the request of Scribner’s Monthly magazine and published in their January 1872 issue. All her life she suffered from ill-health and depression. She never married, despite three offers, but devoted her life to poetry and religion. Christina was brought up as an Anglican, but she and her mother were both drawn to anglo-catholicism in the 1840s and regularly attended Christ Church, Albany Street in London. - a hub of the Oxford Movement.2 She died of cancer in December 1894 and was buried in Highgate cemetery in the family grave.
After her death, Christina became as popular as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a compilation of her poems, edited by her brother William in 1904 may have sparked the musical settings of In the bleak midwinter - first, by Gustav Holst in 1906, then by Harold Darke in 1909.
Ralph Vaughan Williams asked Holst to compose some hymns for his forthcoming English Hymnal book. They had been friends since they studied together at the Royal College of Music.3 Three of Holst’s hymns went into the hymnal but In the bleak midwinter was the outstanding contribution. It was early on in Holst’s career – The Planets composition was ten years away. He was very busy in 1906 trying to earn his living – he became Director of Music at St Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith in 1905 and was also working on two new pieces that were performed in February 1906 at Bath.4 But his new carol In the bleak midwinter was ready for publication in May 1906. Here are the opening bars (in modern notation):
Whereas Holst’s setting is perhaps more suited to congregational use, Harold Darke’s is arguably preferred in more formal choir occasions – it has featured more often in the King’s College Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, for example. Darke5 also studied at the Royal College of Music and was organist for fifty years at St Michael’s church, Cornhill, in London. There he composed organ music, liturgical settings, choral preludes and cantatas. Here’s a reminder of his carol tune (full choral score is available from Stainer & Bell, publishers):
1 Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was the youngest child of Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and political exile from Italy. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter and co-founder in 1848 of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists.
2 The preacher at Christ Church was Rev William Dodsworth, one of the most prominent Tractarians.
3 Gustav Holst (1874-1934) started at the Royal College of Music in 1893 and Vaughan Williams joined in 1895.
4 Holst was working on arrangements of two folk song selections – first, ten songs collected by Cecil Sharp and then fourteen songs from Baring-Gould’s Songs of the West. Holst himself conducted the orchestra in two separate performances on the same day at the Pump Room in Bath (Clifton Society report 8 February 1906). Holst reworked the selection of Sharp’s Somerset songs into the better known A Somerset Rhapsody, which premiered in London in 1910: Sutcliffe, David Cecil Sharp, a new biography (London: The Ballad Partners, 2023 pp160-161).
5 Darke (1888-1976) began as a student at the Royal College of Music in 1903 and returned as professor for organ in 1919.