Nativity (2021)

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