AT MY son's school Christmas concert, a close-harmony group of
the older boys performed a version of the Angelus which was new to
me. The teacher introduced Franz Biebl's Ave Maria with a
striking story. It had been written by a fireman, he said, for a
firemen's choir.
The piece is a haunting setting of the Angelus prayer, with
sonorous Aves. Throughout the rendition, I could not
escape the thought of a group of fire-fighters who met to sing at
night to subsume the tensions of the day into the luxuriant
harmonies of this gem of 20th-century church music.
We live in a time when skills are increasingly developed and
exercised through a profession. The impulse of the amateur has
become the realm of the dilettante. Friends who are professional
actors offer only mild disdain when amateur dramatics are
mentioned. Yet the season of Christmas provides something of a
reminder of the fact that participation in a community - and in the
forms of art and ritual which celebrate that - is something central
to our humanity. The division of professional labour in an indirect
way diminishes that.
Canon Alan Billings touched on this in Thought for the
Day on Radio 4 this week, in which he spoke about school
nativity plays, carol services, and concerts to celebrate
Christmas. Most particularly, he offered the example of the
Sheffield Carols, for which people gather in country pubs on the
edge of the Peak District to sing a singular set of carols that are
peculiar to the area.
Locals say that folk carols were driven out of the area's
churches in the 19th century, when the Tractarian Movement brought
robed choirs, high-church medievalism, and music played on organs
into the churches. But it was not just the old folk carols that
were driven out, but also many of the people who sang them. They
had been turned into a kind of audience at worship. Feeling driven
out of the church, the people took to the pub for their
carolling.
Yet the mystique of the carol lingers. Partly this is because,
as one vicar pointed out at another carol service, the nuggets of
theology buried in the carol - "veiled in flesh the Godhead see" -
reconnect us with the depths beneath the shallow busyness of our
contemporary Christmas.
Partly, however, it is because it also reconnects us with the
unspoiled potential of childhood. We go to the school nativity play
to see our children or grandchildren, and they make us reimagine
the story through their uncompromised eyes. Christmas celebrations,
as Canon Billings pointed out, lead to mixed emotions because we
get caught up in the joy and excitement of the children, but
something also triggers memories of our own long-forgotten
childhood, whose innocence was lost in the slow attritions of
life.
It is not all our own culpability. When I got home, I looked up
Biebl on the internet. He was not a fireman, it turned out, but an
assistant professor of choral music at the Mozarteum, the
celebrated academy of music in Salzburg. But he had had in his
parish choir a fireman, who in 1964 asked him to compose something
for his workplace choir at the fire station. The Ave Maria
was the result. So the teacher's story was half true. The piece was
an intermingling of the educated talents of a professional and the
enthusiasm of a group of amateurs. Perhaps there is a lesson in
that, too.
Paul Vallely is the author of Pope Francis: Untying the
knots (Bloomsbury, 2013).