A Boy was Born

Written when Britten was just 19 and still a student, the Christmas Cantata A Boy Was Born (1933) is a portrait of the artist as a precocious young man. The composer’s first large-scale choral work, it effectively presents a microcosm of the themes, textures, themes and techniques we later find in A Ceremony of Carols and Hymn to St Cecilia. Its opening phrase, “A boy was born in Bethlehem”, is set to a repeated four-note motif, out of which Britten spins his entire work: an unaccompanied sequence of six carols for eight-part choir, each a variation on this theme. That opening theme melts into the first carol “Lullay, Jesu”, transformed into a rocking accompaniment for an uneasy cradle-song that captures both the fragility of the infant Jesus and the looming menace of King Herod. The King steps into the foreground in “Herod” in music tossed violently among (initially) men’s voices, their shouts of “Noel!” less a celebration than a threat. “Jesu, as Thou art our saviour” offers a moment of meditation, looking beyond the human baby towards the mystery of the man to come. You can hear the camels’ undulating progress in “The Three Kings”. The chilly Nativity scene at which they implicitly arrive, “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”, is captured in upper voices, while snowfall accompaniment clusters delicately around Britten’s setting of the Corpus Christi Carol. “Noel!” is a tour de force, bringing back earlier themes, now combined and transfigured into an intricate finale.