At BBC Music Magazine we’re rather fond of Christmas… for the fizz and food, family and fun. But especially, of course, for the music. Even the most withering Scrooge must admit that festive hymns and carols are a prime reason to cherish the season of goodwill. Be they sacred or secular, they’re comforting and familiar, an important annual ritual, and often very well composed.
Yet one man’s stuffing is another man’s sprout, and no matter how much your heart may be lifted by the sound of Deck the Halls, for another, seemingly reasonable person, even the first few notes of that much-loved carol can be enough to cause irritation, fury and the desire to hibernate until the start of a new year.
So, we’ve put together a list of the Christmas music we’d rather do without. Needless to say, we’re not making any statement about the quality of the works below – and if your favourite festive tune should turn up below, don’t take it to heart. But at a time of relentless sparkle and (occasionally enforced) joy, a little grumble never hurt anyone…
Christmas music hell...
Arbeau/Ratcliffe Woodward: Ding Dong! Merrily on high
Music mattered to the Reverend George Ratcliffe Woodward. In a photograph taken outside the Old Vicarage in the Norfolk village of Little Walsingham, the Anglican cleric plays the part of the eccentric parson to perfection. Here stands a Victorian gentleman, old beyond his years, playing a euphonium. Perhaps he’s blasting out Ding Dong! Merrily on high, the ancient French dance tune which he converted into a carol by adding verses ‘riv’n’ with toe-curling archaisms.
Woodward’s ‘swungen’ bells and ‘sungen’ chants of ‘Io, io, io’ (‘Ee-oh, ee-oh, ee-oh’, if you’re posh, ‘Eye-oh, eye-oh, eye-oh’, if you’re not) are rivalled in the irritation stakes by the carol’s ‘Gloria’ refrain. My yuletide nightmares feature a loop track of its seemingly endless melody, more penitential flagellation than joyful acclamation. And then there’s the unbreakable emotional restraint that Ding Dong! all too often forces upon choristers, preventing them from turning the expression dial to peak ecstasy.
Andrew Stewart
Gruber/Mohr: Silent Night
It may be one of the most popular carols of all time – and declared intangible cultural heritage in 2011 by UNESCO, no less – but Silent Night, or rather Stille Nacht in the original German, has spoiled the anticipatory energy of many a Christmas carol service. Almost without fail, its difficult 7th leap in the third bar pulls the whole carol down to earth with a bang, as congregations struggle to rise to the heights of ‘All is calm’, instead landing just under the note with infuriating predictability. And more so, its repetitive falling melodic pattern, and slow – all too often, dragging – pace do it no favours.
Of course, lovely arrangements of Silent Night have been sung beautifully by many a professional cathedral and chapel choir – but for contemplative Christmas vibes, there are better, more musically rewarding examples. Try In the Bleak Midwinter in either the Darke or Holst versions for a more satisfying experience.
Charlotte Smith
More Christmas music hell...
JS Bach: Christmas Oratorio
I won’t rush to buy tickets for Bach’s Christmas Oratorio this December. When my choir programmed it last year there were shouts of joy. ‘Oh I love the Christmas Oratorio!’ But, I wanted to ask them, ‘Have you really listened to it all the way through? Or are you just remembering that first, glorious chorus “Jauchzet, frohlocket”? I challenge you to name any other chorus… because there aren’t many.’
Bach wrote the oratorio in 1734 (see p14) as six cantatas to be performed on separate days, from Christmas Day to Epiphany. It is nearly three hours long, so to perform it in concert you’re faced with cutting out whole parts or cherry-picking the arias and leaving enough choruses to satisfy the choir. I love the soprano aria with oboe and ghostly alto echo, and trumpets give everything a Christmassy shine, but it’s not enough to make me want to hear it often.
Amanda Holloway
Handel: Messiah
I’ll admit I’m not much of a Scrooge. I love mangling the glorias in Ding! dong! merrily on high, and the season just isn’t the same without a stirring Hark! The Herald Angels Sing descant. But it turns out I am a festive pedant, because the one piece, much as I love it, that I could live without at Christmas is Handel’s Messiah. Yes, it’s become a great choral society tradition to give seasonal performances of this oratorio. Sure, I’ll concede that the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ adds an uplifting injection of energy to any festive playlist or programme. But doesn’t hearing it every single year feel boringly predictable?
And, to return to the pedantry, Handel didn’t have presents in mind when he wrote it in 1741. Messiah was composed, at lightning pace, for Easter, and first performed just after. The ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ is in praise of the Resurrection. Why not restore it to its rightful place in the calendar and let a contemporary composer gives us a fresh work for Christmas?
Rebecca Franks
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Hopkins Jr: We Three Kings of Orient Are
There are many joys to a traditional school carol service – candlelight, the scent of pine and that first angelic solo of Once in Royal. But nothing kills festive cheer faster than We Three Kings.
One moment we’re ding-donging merrily on high; the next, trudging across a musical desert, muttering balefully about ‘field and fountain, moor and mountain’. The tune plods along like a weary camel, the English mangled like badly translated biblical apocrypha. And those gifts! Gold: surely a bit bling for a humble manger? Frankincense: basically, a scented candle. Myrrh: embalming fluid – yuck! Naturally, I always got the ‘sorrowing, sighing, bleeding and dying’ verse. Guaranteed to dampen Christmas cheer. By the end, even the vicar would look desperate, glancing longingly at the mulled wine in the vestry. So, give me a rousing Hark! The Herald any day – Christmas deserves gusto, not myrrh and misery.
Ashutosh Khandekar
Leontovych/Wilhousky: Carol of the Bells
Some things are just unaccountably irritating, and for me Carol of the Bells – No. 3 (!!) on a recent list of the Nation’s Favourite Carols – is one of them. Rolling Stone magazine memorably defines Bells as ‘four notes repeated over and over and over until the middle of January’, opining that ‘nearly any version of this faux-classical glee-club cheese log is torture’. Indeed it is.
And here’s the difficulty – there are just so many rip-offs and re-arrangements of the carol’s drip-drip, ear-worm melody to be tortured by. How about LeAnn Rimes’s mind-numbingly metronomic plough-through? Or Family Force 5’s grunge annihilation? Or, worst of all, Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s heavy metal mash-up, with shredding guitars and boom-bang percussion? You can’t blame Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych. He penned the original choral piece from which Bells later developed. But if only he had realised the mayhem he was unleashing....
Terry Blain
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Mendelssohn: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
From the grandest cathedral to the diddiest village church, wherever there’s a carol service you can guarantee that this monster will be lurking, ready to inflict its unique brand of pain. It’s not the hymn itself I object to – in fact, I quite like it – but rather the torture of having to sing it. In short, unless you’re a testosterone-lite, high-voiced tenor, Ds above middle C do not sit comfortably, so when three appear in the first line alone, followed by a further seven over the next two lines, things are already hard work.
But worse is to come as, in the refrain, we’re then shoved even higher up to an E – six of them in all. Of course, if you are in the choir, you can happily duck below to sing Mendelssohn’s wonderful harmonies and only worry about the Trial by Repeated High Notes when the sopranos show off their fancy descant in Verse 4. However, as I’m inevitably in the congregation, I have no alternative but to face the ordeal four times over. By the end, my voice is in pieces.
Jeremy Pound
Mozart: Three German Dances, K605 – ‘The Sleigh Ride’
There’s a toe-curling moment in Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. The young Mozart is greeted at the Viennese Court with a keyboard march composed for the occasion by Salieri and performed by the hapless Emperor. After a few pleasantries, Wolfgang can’t help himself and shreds Salieri’s efforts with a blistering lesson in one-upmanship.
Yet when it comes to that perennial Christmas favourite, Mozart’s ‘Sleigh Ride’, the words ‘pot and kettle’ spring to mind. A seasonal stocking-filler, its ho-hum harmonic predictability betrays a bastion of banality to rival Salieri’s four-square ‘welcome’.
A bland central section compounds the tedium, though a dusting of sleighbells (plus a pair of post horns) bestows a certain wintry cheer – albeit despite the customary penny-pinching omission of five differently-tuned bells as requested in the score. Undeniably amiable, K605/3 is nonetheless as hackneyed as those pale-imitation German Christmas markets that sprout across the UK. Bah humbug, say I.
Paul Riley
More Christmas music hell...
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
While certain melodies inspire greatness, others simply grate. There is a point at which familiarity tips into overexposure and, for me, The Nutcracker has reached this unfortunate conclusion. The fault does not lie with Tchaikovsky, who packed the festive ballet with hummable tunes. Rather, it is the over-use of the ‘Sugar Plum Fairy’ motif in adverts, which in recent years has accompanied a girls’ night out at Candyland (Baileys), Santa trying to break into hotel rooms (Airbnb) and dads dancing in Christmas jumpers (Sainsbury’s). Did we learn nothing from Cadbury’s ‘everyone’s a fruit and nutcase’ desecration of ‘Danse des mirlitons’?
‘I hope I never hear that God-awful Nutcracker music again,’ opines Homer Simpson, shortly before a medley cast to the Act 1 No. 2 March. But The Nutcracker has always been ripe for reinvention: the ballet itself stems from the shorter Nutcracker Suite, and has been arranged by Grainger, Pletnev – and many more.
Claire Jackson
Traditional: The Twelve Days of Christmas
Some may say The Twelve Days of Christmas is the perfect festive song. It is famously repetitive, ideal for congregational singing and offers the opportunity for silly noises and inventive choreography. It has an interesting history, too, the ‘twelve days’ referring to the period between Christmas Day and Epiphany, traditionally celebrated in Europe with religious feasting.
But forgive me for being the Grinch; after singing it annually in choir for over a decade, the charm has worn thin. Not only does the song’s relentless structure become a test of endurance, I can’t get out of my head the poor person who is buried under an avalanche of birds, dancers, drummers and dairy products by the end of the song. Not to mention the other questions… Where did my ‘true love’ find 30 ‘lords a-leaping’? And what are the swans swimming in – do I get a free lake too? The only saving grace is that you could earn some money from those 40 gold rings. Yes, the song has charm, but as an expression of holiday love, it’s far too stressful.
Miranda Bardsley
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Traditional: We Wish You a Merry Christmas
My beef with We Wish You a Merry Christmas is not that it’s schmaltzy, or over-familiar, or impossible to sing. It’s just a bit… boring. When I hear O Little Town of Bethlehem or In the Bleak Midwinter, I can close my eyes and be transported to Midnight Mass. The flickering candlelight, the singers’ breath in the cold cathedral air: those hymns conjure all this.
With this one, though, I am not transported anywhere. I think it’s partly the endless repetition of that melody and (within each verse) the same amiable but forgettable lyrics. You ‘wish me a Merry Christmas’, do you? Great, thanks. And you. No, the truth is that singing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ doesn’t bring me any of that nourishing festive warmth that other carols provide. Instead, all that repetition and banality feels like the musical equivalent of data entry.
Steve Wright
Wade: O Come, All Ye Faithful
Carol fans seem to be divided into Hark haters and Faithful haters, and I’m firmly in the latter camp. Mainly because of the words, which in some verses fit so awkwardly. Everyone in a singalong concert has different ideas about whether you sing ‘Go-od of Go-od’ or ‘God o-of Go-od’ in verse 2, and as for ‘Offer him incense, gold and myrrh’ in the full seven-verse version… most of us have given up by then. Then there’s the passing note that anyone who hasn’t had it beaten out of them in a good church choir puts into the last bar of each verse. And the descant that middle-aged women who remember it from school days insist on singing even though they can no longer produce a pleasing top G.
But it is redeemed of course by THE CHORD, so loved by church musicians that it even has its own commercially-available T-shirt – the ‘Word of the Father’ climax of David Willcocks’s setting of verse 7, which purists only sing on Christmas Day. Faithful should be banned until then.
Clare Stevens
