Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

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Searchlight has the measure of Reform UK's leader: "It’s a script Nigel Farage knows well. Candidates or causes closely linked to him, perhaps even bearing his name and his photograph, make large, attention-grabbing promises. Votes are won on the strength of them. Then, once the votes are counted the promises are declared – with an air of wounded innocence – to have never been made, and certainly not by him."

AI fakes spread disinformation but, asks Anna Merlan, is the distrust they create even worse?

"Julie Critchlow, one of the mums involved, told The Times in 2006 that much of the food they were delivering was healthy, and that the accusation that the kids were given chips every day was ‘such a lie’. 'We were taking all sorts – baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.'" Heather Parry looks back twenty years to the media panic in Rotherham which followed the Channel 4 documentary series Jamie’s School Dinners.

Patrick Wadden argues that Medieval Irish people saw themselves as Europeans, not Celts: "The Irish language and people were only labelled as Celtic for the first time in the 18th century. In the rich and varied textual sources that have survived from early Ireland, including annals, saints' lives, laws, and sagas about great heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhail, the words 'Celt' and 'Celtic' do not appear even once."

"In the case of Peter Grimes, Forster suggests, something is lost. Rather than Grimes as a lugubrious murderer, in Britten’s opera the blame is rather sanctimoniously placed on the townsfolk for misunderstanding him, turning the whole thing into social criticism, which was far from Crabbe’s original. It takes away from the strangeness and mystery of the character of Grimes, from his psychological complexity, but also from the ‘horizontality and mud’ that shape the feeling of the poem and the world it describes." John-Paul Stonnard finds that E.M. Forster did not appreciate the version of George Crabbe's character Peter Grimes presented by Montague Slater, who wrote the libretto for Britten's opera.

Helen Pickles rightly suggests Ripon, Yorkshire's smallest city, as a tourist destination.

Martin Stephens remember making The Innocents (1961)

It wasn't only Jack Clayton who identified with the themes of The Innocents. Here's Martin Stephens who, at the age of 11, played Miles, remembering the making of the film. 

He has spoken about his career in general to filminc blog.

I can’t say that I was a natural actor but what I would say is that I was very directable. If you look at my fifteen, sixteen, eighteen films, whatever it was, you will see that when it was a good director I tended to be reasonably good and when it was a weak or poor director I was relatively mediocre. I would absorb what was going on. Also, to be honest, I didn’t have much of an ego in terms of what I was doing. ...

I’ll give you an example. I played Oliver in the musical in London when I was twelve. I did that for about seven months and my mom used to come a collect me.  Every day she would come up and sometimes she would be a few minutes early so she would go into the wings and see the final curtain calls before she would whisk me off to go to bed. 

One day the stage manager actually turned to her and said – as I was taking the bows and there was uproarious applause going on, and curtain call after curtain call – the stage manager actually turned to her and said "do you know that Martin couldn’t care less?" It was just doing a job.  I was enjoying it, but it didn’t really matter to me too much, I didn’t invest my ego into it.

And isn't the opening scene from the film disturbing? I do wonder if Clayton had seen Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

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Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

Alan Bennett on Dudley Moore and jazz

Alan Bennett is happily still with us, but his diaries no longer appear in the Guardian and the London Review of Books. I believe I read somewhere that he has said his life is too uneventful these days to be of interest, but if anything exciting happens he will be in touch.

Here he is in 2003, writing just after the death of his Beyond the Fringe colleague Dudley Moore:

30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical afterthought. 

In fact he came in as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of Beyond the Fringe remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he’d teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy. 

Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter’s drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during Beyond the Fringe he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn’t.

Later Bennett thinks again about the subject:

We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and disaffection. ... 

Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook’s The Establishment opened in New York. ...  But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.

Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us Peter’s lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley’s playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of Not Only ... But Also Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat. 

This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. ...

None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public’s appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn’t share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy. 

So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in Beyond the Fringe, this was partly what it was about.

The video above, parodying at once Benjamin Britten's composition and Peter Pears' singing, shows Moore's brilliance.

By all accounts, Pears found it very funny, while Britten was not at all amused - much as John Lennon enjoyed the Rutles much more than Paul McCartney did. But then the piece's title, Little Miss Britten, was surely what we would now call homophobic.

Michael Crawford paints a picture of the young David Hemmings

This blog's hero David Hemmings first made his name as a singer, being the first boy to play Miles in Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

One of the boys he beat to the role was Michael Ingram, who is known to us as Michael Crawford. Later, they were to alternate the role of Sammy in an English Opera Group tour of Britten's Let's Make an Opera.

In his memoirs Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String, Crawford paints a picture of Hemmings in those days:

David Hemmings ... was more precocious, and far more adventurous than I would ever have dreamt of being. When I was fourteen, David was fourteen going on 30! He was always disappearing into the bathroom with his girlfriend: I imagined that they were 'doing it', but I didn't have the faintest idea what 'doing' it entailed. David was a gentleman, never indulging in locker-room confidences. Still, we all knew that whatever it was he and his girl were doing behind the bathroom door, you could bet your life that she'd emerge with a smile on her face.

In fact David would arrive anywhere as if he had just come from doing it. He had a rolling gait like Robert Mitchum's in Build My Gallows High, and had the upturned collar too. His voice was always a little deeper than mine: he sounded as though he'd been smoking from birth. 'I think it's bloody,' he'd say. It was his favourite phrase - he said it about everything. It's difficult to appreciate just how cool that phrase sounded. He was everything I wanted to be. 

Whenever there was a woman around he was there first. And what a dancer! I remember he moved his hips a lot inside his very sharp trousers. David was doing the lambada before anyone ever thought of it. I admired him enormously. Looking back now, I think David was in the process of re-inventing himself - he was standing outside himself, trying on new personalities for size, tongue in cheek all the while.

At the end of the tour I was sent back to Oakfield kicking and screaming all the way. Predictably, I returned to the classroom as David Hemmings, swaggering in, collar turned up. First period of the day: geography. Mr Steele addresses the class. 'The Suez Crisis - what are we to make of it?'

From the back of the class I offer, 'I just think it's bloody'. My classmates turn away, sniggering loudly.

'It's bloody alright', Mr Steele agrees: 'Get out!'

Interestingly, one of Hemmings' obituaries said he seemed to be playing a different role - actor, business tycoon, director - every time you met him.

Happy New Year to all our readers

Last 1 January it was Martin Carthy's recording of January Man, so I've given him the night off this time round.

Fred Titmus goes to the opera

In his latest book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, Mike Brearley writes of being an intellectual among professional sportsmen and turns it into a reflection on the accident of our birth:

Similar cynicism came my way when I was doing philosophy in my early days playing cricket for Middlesex Fred Titmus, the senior player (whose first game for Middlesex in 1949 coincided with the first of my father's two games, so that after Fred played in my last game at Lords In 1982 he was able to say he 'saw the father in and the son out'), would prod me with questions like: "This philosophy that we're all paying for, what's it all about?" He was being sarcastic, goading, but he was genuinely curious. 

I took his curiosity seriously, and tried to give some sort of answer. In other lives, with different backgrounds, Fred might have been doing philosophy and I might have been born and brought up in King's Cross and had left school at fourteen, and learned cricket, football and boxing at a local boys' club. (I once had a spare ticket for Benjamin Britain's Peter Grimes, and asked him if he'd like to go. We sat in the gods, and Fred was taken with it.)

Brearley talked to the Australian cricket journalist Gideon Haigh about this book and his life for the podcast Cricket, Et Cetera. It's well worth a listen.

Boys from the first recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem stage reunion

Fifteen of the boys from Highgate School who sang on the first recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem have held a reunion, reports BBC News:

The recording, made in 1963, sold 200,000 copies in just five months (almost unheard of for a classical work) and won Britten two Grammy Awards - but the choristers, from London's exclusive Highgate School, were never listed in the credits.

Last year, Decca Records launched a search for the surviving members, with a notice in London's Ham & High newspaper.

Fifteen of them were able to reunite in Soho on Thursday, to hear a cleaned-up version of the Requiem and relive the "gruelling" experience of recording Britten's masterpiece.

"It was like going through some great storm, a great orchestral storm," recalled Tim Healey, who was 13 at the time of the original recording.

"By the time it was over, I was quite glad it was over - but then you look back and think, 'That was pretty amazing'."

As I blogged last year, one of the boys on this famous recording was John Rutter, now a celebrated composer.

Another, Nigel Law, told BBC News:

"I still remember the first day, which was a washout, thanks to [Russian soprano] Galina Vishnevskaya throwing a completely and utter wobbly.

"It was quite disturbing, hearing this woman scream."

You can find an amusing clip of Britten, who conducted the performance, rehearsing the boys at the top of this post.

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"But the personal consequences for Rafiq have been just as severe. Since the moment he stepped before the digital, culture, media and sport ... committee, he has faced relentless abuse, attacks and death threats. 'My life changed over that hour and 45 minutes,' he says in his soft Barnsley accent. His new memoir, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism, recounts some of the worst moments: the human excrement left on his parents' lawn, the chain-wielding man who stalked his house in the middle of the night." Azeem Rafiq talks to Emma John about racism, cricket and why he had to leave Britain.

Simon James welcomes the way the Liberal Democrat manifesto puts arts education at the centre of the party's plans for culture.

Liam O'Farrell went to a talk by John Rogers on his new book about London: "Rogers delves into the city’s ancient history following a chance conversation with a Pearly Punk King on the rooftop of the old Foyles building. This encounter takes him through Epping Forest to the prehistory of London in the Upper Lea Valley, unearthing Bronze Age burial mounds and their significance in understanding London’s historical roots and its enduring connection to its past."

"Putting Peter Grimes on stage was not as straightforward as it might have been. Initially, the story, scenario and the characters underwent substantial changes in the early stages of drafting. At first, Britten had Grimes murdering his apprentices rather than being at worst negligent, and Grimes originally goes mad in the marshes and dies there." Georg Predota looks back to 1945 and the Saddler's Wells premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera.

Ian Vince goes in search of ley lines. " What [Alfred] Watkins saw convinced him that there was a grid of secret lines in the Herefordshire countryside; a network of mounds, hummocks and tumps, moats, megaliths and camps that coalesced to form the nodes of a prehistoric track system."

"Hamer’s use of locations throughout the film is distinctive and surprisingly gothic at times. From seemingly innocuous suburbia and Edwardian retreats to country seats, castles and villages, the breadth of locations gives the film a visual strength above its more studio-bound peers." Adam Scovell revisits the locations use in the 1949 Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Happy 2024 to all who celebrate it

Happy New Year! Let's hope for a better year in 2024, and in particular for a change of government.

As Martin Carthy's recording of The January Man has reappeared on YouTube, I can give Benjamin Britten's New Year Carol the day off for once. What I really need is a wider repertoire of New Year songs.

Looking back on 'Satanic ritual abuse' and The Turn of the Screw

Embed from Getty Images

Like the December one before it, the Christmas issue of Fortean Times has an article from the era - the late Eighties and early Nineties - when the concept of 'Satanic Ritual abuse' flourished.

Its author, Bob Rickard, is most interested in the way this modern form of witch hunting took on the ideology of the medieval form of the pastime. But I am more interested by the way a humane modern view risked turning supposed child victims into suspects.

Rickard writes:

Where Lady Butler-Sloss's 1988 inquiry into child abuse recommended that a child's allegations "should always be taken seriously", it seemed reasonable that this meant deserving a 'proper' investigation. However, some social workers and childcare professionals sought to interpret the injunction as to believe a child's account literally and as wholly factual.

If a child's account of events had such high status, it was inevitable that it would be the supposed child victims who were grilled rather than the supposed abusers. 

It felt as though what was being sought from them was not so much a witness statement as a confession. There was an anxiety or an insistence that the child should 'disclose' abuse, as it was termed, and everything from browbeating to bribery, according to Rickard's account, was used to obtain it.

I am reminded of the importance of a suspect's confession in Softly, Softly: Taskforce and the varied ways that Chief Superintendent Barlow would set about achieving it.

But. even more, I am reminded of the ending of Henry James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw. where the boy Miles has to name Peter Quint even at the cost of his own life. Whether anything untoward had really happened or it was all in the mind of the governess who narrates the story is debated to this day.

John Rutter sang on the first recording of Britten's War Requiem

I can remember singing Old Abram Brown at school, but the first time I made a point of listening to one of Benjamin Britten's works I was in my early twenties. I had just read The Turn of the Screw and Radio Three was broadcasting the opera Britten made from it.

I found the music difficult, but interesting enough that I wanted to hear again.

Britten is now one of my very favourite composers, up there with Bach and Schubert. And the first of his works that I really got to understand was the War Requiem. I loved everything about it, even the austere black-and-white Decca box that the records came in.

Today, the 110th anniversary of Britten's birth, I came across this pleasing piece of trivia. The composer John Rutter sang on that Decca recording of the War Requiem as a member of the choir of Highgate School.

There is a fascinating video on YouTube in which you can hear Britten rehearsing the soloists, orchestra and choirs before that recording was made.

Here is a short and amusing clip from it. (If you follow the link to YouTube, you can listen to the whole thing.)

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"If the introduction of proportional representation is a Lib Dem red line, then the party needs to work out now how it would secure the political commitment to change, and the process for achieving it." Jess Sargeant says the Liberal Democrats must learn from their failure to achieve constitutional reform during the Coalition years.

Daniel Dennett is interviewed by Taylor McNeil about his career as a philosopher and his hopes and fears for the future: "AI systems, like all software, are replicable with high fidelity and unbelievably fast mutations. If you have high fidelity replication and mutations, then you have evolution, and evolution can get out of hand, as it has in the past many times."

"It isn’t brave to say you hate classical music so much as bog-standard normal. State publicly that you don’t like classical music, and you’re cool, funny and 'relatable'. State publicly that you don’t like popular music, and you’re a weirdo or a snob." Alexandra Wilson dissects a Twitter row.

Christopher Hilton on Benjamin Britten as a campaigner against railway branch line closures.

PsychoNottingham investigates one of the city's lost cinemas.

"An emerging leitmotif in much of Aiken’s subsequent work for children makes its appearance here — the resourcefulness of its young protagonists against the machinations of adults who wish them ill. It’s not surprising that Wolves has shown itself a popular choice with younger readers: it has the right amount of jeopardy, a bit of safe distance is created by its being set in the 19th century, and expectations are high that, like a fairy tale, all will come right in the end." Calmgrove offers an appreciation of Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

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"Calling people out triggers feelings of shame and defensiveness which entrench difference and deepen divisions. Calling people in acknowledges somebody’s starting point, encourages calmer conversations and potentially provides pathways to more open, evidence-based thinking. After all, changing an opinion is a big ask for all of us. It is a genuine challenge." Her experience at the centre of a storm has taught Corinne Fowler how to respond to the culture war through engagement and dialogue.

Matthew Pennell on the school buildings crisis.

"He was a real Liberal: happy to be in a minority arguing for change on a range of issues, undeterred by those who thought him obsessive or eccentric in his enthusiasms, a valued teacher to a great many students in Manchester and Canterbury, and a scholar who valued evidence and reasoned argument against emotion and prejudice." William Wallace remembers Michael Steed.

Jack Bailey finds there is no central depository of data from British elections: "As time passes, historic elections get further and further away from us. While we might still know the key results, the details become more and more uncertain."

John Bridcut shows how Elizabeth II inspired Benjamin Britten to start composing again after he almost died.

"Alan Ladd got his big break with Frank Tuttle’s This Gun For Hire in 1942. The movie made him a huge star, a favourite of movie audiences. Ladd had, in some sense, broken into the entertainment industry by playing bit parts on radio shows." Aurora remembers the actor with a collection of his performances on radio.

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"The row over LTNs isn’t a culture war, it’s a microcosm of a much more fundamental question. How does a society built on fossil fuels shift its behaviour quickly enough to have an impact on the looming climate change catastrophe? It’s a question that’s not going to go away." Flip Chart Fairy Tales on the outcry over Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

James Ball says the government's online safety bill will annoy voters and may lead to messaging apps withdrawing their apps from the UK.

Norman Lebrecht argues that Arts Council hostility has added to the problems caused for opera by Covid and Brexit: "A climate of hostility towards opera was created. A state of siege set in and confidence sank. In mass media, opera was once again presented as a pastime for the privileged." 

Sixteen-year-old Jack Cornwell, who died after being wounded at the Battle of Jutland, was posthumously awarded the VC. Alex Churchill finds that his decoration was the result of newspaper clamour for a hero after the losses at Jutland and that the photograph of Cornwall that was used everywhere was actually of one of his brothers, because no photograph of him existed.

Richard Luck thinks The Day of the Jackal is an assassination movie without equal.

Think of Benjamin Britten and you think of Suffolk, but John Finn takes us to he several Islington houses where he and Peter Pears lived when they had to be in London.

Exploring the Aldeburgh to Saxmundham Branch with Em and Stu

The branch from Leiston to Saxmundham opened in 1859 and was extended the four miles to Aldeburgh the following year.

Passenger services survived until 1966, so (pace Em and Stu) you can include it among the Beeching cuts to the network. The 'I'm Backing Britten' campaign of 1968 came too late to save it.

And there is a village at Thorpeness - a select early 20th-century holiday village - but it is some way from the halt that was opened to serve it.

Watch the video and you will see that the line from Leiston to Saxmundham remains open for occasional workings to and from the nuclear power station at Sizewell. I believe they take spent fuel rods to Sellafield for reprocessing.

And you will see at the start that the terminus at Aldeburgh, where festivalgoers must once have alighted, has vanished. You can find some photographs of it on the Disused Stations site.

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.

Philadelphia Boys Choir: This Little Babe

Benjamin Britten has done well out of this Advent calendar, and here you can sense his genius in the extraordinary effects he gets here from a choir of boys and a single harpist.

A Ceremony of Carols, of which this is part, was composed by Britten in 1942 on his voyage back from America, where he'd been when the war broke out.

The words of "This Little Babe" are taken from Robert Southwell's Newe Heaven, Newe Warre, which was written in 1595.

They describe the infant Christ battling Satan, and the first verse runs:

This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

Read the full text.

Jeff Buckley: Corpus Christi Carol

This can be found on Jeff Buckley's album Grace and was inspired by Benjamin Britten's setting of the carol in his choral piece A Boy Was Born. That was first performed on 23 February 1934 - the day Sir Edward Elgar died.

The Financial Times, unexpectedly, has a good article on the history of the Corpus Christi Carol:

To begin at the beginning: in late medieval England there lived a grocer by the name of Richard Hill. He kept a "commonplace book" in which he wrote down all manner of things: learned advice, pious reflections, poems, recipes, cures (a cut could apparently be treated with a pint of ale, though it’s not clear whether the ale was to be applied to the wound, or drunk), and songs, including “Corpus Christi Carol”. Only the lyric survives; Hill made no record of any music.

The recording I have of the full Britten work includes the boys of the choir from All Saints, Margaret Street. Oh how it all fits together.