- Richard Mills
Nativity (2021)
- Wise Music G. Schirmer Australia Pty Ltd (World)
- S,T,Bar + chchchildrch; 2.2.0+2bb-cl+bcl.2/0+2f-hn.0+2ctpt.2+btbn.0/2perc.handbells/pf.cel.kbdglsp.org.hp/str
- chchchildrch
- Soprano, Tenor, Baritone
- 1 hr 10 min
Programme Note
In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
So writes T.S. Eliot in Gerontion, which begins:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain
The complex images of this poem, and their coalescence into a statement
of yearning for salvation and grace amid spiritual aridity, can be seen as
analogous to this work: a meditation on the Christmas story, conceived
and written during this difficult year, when our world is in a slightly-morethan-
usual state of flux.
Part I of Nativity begins with notion of a ‘past within a past’; a poem of
Yehuda Amichai opens the doorway to a meditation on the traditional
Christmas story, via the prophetic Messianic texts of the Old Testament,
juxtaposed with prose renditions of the Gospel texts and punctuated with
fantasias on traditional carols. The music invites consideration of the
character of Mary, the mother of Jesus, revealing her ecstatic response to
motherhood via her ‘fiat voluntas tua’ or ‘Thy will be done’, as we hear her
joyous canticle, the Magnificat.
This is her response to the mystery of the incarnation, the intersection
of the eternality of God outside time, with the fragility of humanity in
the person of a defenceless child – a child for whom creation yearns, as
attested by the voice crying in the wilderness, to which the angels are
heard in eventual response with their glad tidings, and the invitation of the
shepherds and the wise men to Bethlehem.
In the legendary poetry of divine motherhood, the composer celebrates
the special status of all mothers and children, and the family as a symbol
of peace, nurturing and truth. The image of the stable, its absolute
simplicity diffusing grace and the capacity for wonder in contemplation
of the sacredness of birth, leads to the final carol of the first part, Once in
Royal David’s City.
Part II of Nativity leaves the biblical narrative and shifts to the
contemporary Middle East. Children sing Chad Gadya – a wry Hassidic
fable of the causality of violence – and a Jewish father tells the story
of recovering his lost son in the company of an Arab shepherd who
was looking for a lost goat, traditionally a sacrificial victim. The father
concludes with the observation: ‘Searching for a goat or a child has always
been the beginning of a new religion in these mountains.’
The yearning for salvation returns via a choral fantasia on Veni, veni
Emmanuel. This fantasia has its triumphant apex shattered by machine
gun fire; in the chaos and violence of combat, children and mothers are
inevitable victims. More images of childhood in the context of war follow: the vulnerability
of infancy in a Fantasia on the Coventry Carol Lullay, Lullay; in which a
newborn son is seen as a deliverance from death in a troubled world; and
the plight of two children from Jerusalem, Amir and Anna, whose tiny lives,
threatened by the unending cycle of violence, are contrasted starkly with
the beneficent eternality of nature and its growth.
The plight of children as casualties of war and hate is not new. We hark
back to the story of Herod and his paranoid slaughter of the innocents,
the voices crying again in the desert as Rachel laments the suffering of
her children. This is a preparatory resonance of the disappearance of the
singers and songs of indigenous motherhood, as mothers’ songs vanish
into the desert wind, destroyed forever by the relentless advance of
European ‘settlement’. Here is an image of desolation and profound loss –
the result of the seemingly inevitable conflicts of history.
Part III begins with a gradual dissolution of this despair by a procession of
children – harbingers of hope – ringing handbells as portents of simplicity
and innocence. The bells morph into the bells of Christmas, becoming a
kind of exorcism of conflict, in a setting of Tennyson’s poem
In Memoriam A. H. H. (‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’).
The music prays for peace in our world and returns to the sacred
innocence of children, eternal in its truth and beauty, via the simplicity of
the final carol, Silent Night.
The process of Nativity is one of oblique narrative, a series of images
sequenced into a temporal frame, telling us stories which operate on
many levels, and different metaphorical dimensions. The fragility and
wonder of motherhood, birth and childhood are constants; the capacity of
children to inspire what is best in ourselves is a cause for celebration and
thanksgiving, for all of us of whatever persuasion, especially at Christmas.
Finally, the meaning of this piece cannot be expressed in words. As the
great composer Lutosławski once said to me years ago: ‘If music could be
expressed in words, then there would be no need for music.’
Happy Christmas dear listeners.
Richard Mills, 2021
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- 12th December 2023
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- 12th December 2023
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