![]() His father died when he was a child and he was brought up partly by his mother and partly by his paternal grandmother. Poor little Vaclav had a difficult childhood. His name was Vaclav and he was Duke of Bohemia in the 10th Century. Good King Wenceslas was a real chap, except he wasn’t a king and he wasn’t called Wenceslas, but he may have been good. Good King Wenceslas is an even odder business. And ever since then people have been carolling away unaware that they are going against the explicit, written wishes of both the lyricist and the composer. Then he died, and a few years later somebody noticed that the tune would work very well with Hark the Herald Angels Sing and that was that. He wrote in a letter that he didn’t mind what new words were written just so long as they weren’t religious. However, he realised that once the anniversary had passed, it would probably need some new words as songs about type aren’t that popular. ![]() It was precisely 400 years since the invention of the printing press and Mendelssohn knocked out a song about it. All he did was to write a song about Gutenberg. He died without ever even hearing of the hymn. Mendelssohn would be even more perplexed and vexed by the whole thing. ![]() For example, the co‐founder of Methodism Charles Wesley wrote a beautiful carol that began: But even these new ones were a bit incoherent and the versions changed all the time. Then in the 18th and 19th Centuries folklorists started to collect these folk songs and smarten them up, and people started to write new ones. There is a religious version, but there are also versions that are just about holly and ivy, and the fascinating question of which one is better. The same thing goes for The Holly and the Ivy. It doesn’t make any sense anyway as a Christmas hymn because Bethlehem is landlocked. It was just a song that in some versions involved Jesus on Christmas day in the morning, and in other versions involved three pretty girls on New Year’s Day. Why would you see three ships come sailing by? The answer is that nobody knows. This is why so many of them are really rather odd.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |