Benjamin Britten: A New Year Carol

A happy new year to all our readers.

An article in the Financial Times gave the background to this haunting piece:

In May 1934 the young Benjamin Britten composed a carol — not for Christmas, but for New Year. In “A New Year Carol”, he set to music a lyric that had been circulating among folk song collectors for some decades, and which had been sung long before that: “Levy Dew”. 

As with many carols that are sung around Christmas and New Year, its origins and meaning were — and remain — a mystery.

Britten’s carol, with its sweet, simple melody, was published in Friday Afternoons, a collection of songs composed by him for the pupils of the school in Prestatyn, Wales, where his brother, Robert, was headmaster. (Friday afternoons were reserved for singing.) 

Britten used the verses that had been published in poet and novelist Walter de la Mare’s book of collected children’s poems, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, in 1931; this in turn was largely the same as the “standard” version that had been in print since 1850.

By composing the song for a school in Wales, Britten was taking it back to its roots: “Levy Dew” describes a ceremony that used to be performed in parts of Wales. Very early in the morning on New Year’s Day, children and youngsters would gather evergreen foliage, draw fresh water from the well, and go from house to house sprinkling water over the inhabitants or on their doors, sometimes in return for a few coins. As they did this, they would sing “Levy Dew”; it’s not known what tune they were using.

When I put together my Advent calendar I tried to avoid having too many boys' choirs, and you can find this, under the odd title Residue, on a recent Waterson Carthy album.

But there is a magic to the recording of Friday Afternoons by Downside School, a prep school in Purley that closed years ago. Wes Anderson used two songs from it in the soundtrack of Moonrise Kingdom.