What was on the table at 'A Poet's Christmas'?
March 26, 2011 12:49 AM   Subscribe

On Christmas Eve 1944, the BBC Home Service broadcast a program called 'A Poet's Christmas', featuring new poetry and music. Among the musical items was Michael Tippett's carol 'The Weeping Babe' (setting poetry of Edith Sitwell), which the BBC commissioned for the broadcast. I am trying to find out what else was broadcast as part of this program.

While searching on Google, most of the results reference the Tippett composition. I have also found this PDF of a page from the BBC magazine The Listener (issue from Thursday 28 December 1944) which includes some poems from the broadcast (but can't find an online source to see the rest of the issue beyond the couple of pages in that scan). I haven't had any real success with the BBC Archives, but before I write to them about this program, I thought I'd see whether there's anyone on the green with better research skillz than mine. Paywalled archives/journals etc are fine; I have access through my university. (But not, unfortunately, to the Cengage 'The Listener' archive, which is unaccountably not available through my uni library.)
posted by impluvium to Media & Arts (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
A Britten Source Book gives the authors as W. H. Auden, Frances Cornford, Cecil Day Lewis, John Heath-Stubbs, Laurie Lee, Louis MacNeice, Henry Reed, Ann Ridler, Vita Sackville-West, and Edith Sitwell.

Benjamin Britten supplied two works: "A Shepherd's Carol and Chorale—composed to texts by W. H. Auden."
posted by Knappster at 1:09 AM on March 26, 2011


Here's another snippet from a 1961 issue of The Score:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN'S Chorale was written for a B.B.C. program called Poet's Christmas, which was broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1944. It was a programme of verse especially written by Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Edith Sitwell, V. Sackville West, Laurie Lee, John Heath-Stubbs, Frances Cornford, Ann Ridler, Henry Reed, and Britten (Chorale and The Shepherd's Carol—both by W.H. Auden), Lennox Berkeley (Francis Cornford's There was neither grass nor corn), and Michael Tippet (Edith Sitwell's The Weeping Babe). [...]
posted by steef at 8:26 AM on March 26, 2011


Response by poster: Thank you both - this is research for a concert program that I'm putting together. I hadn't come across either the Britten or the Lennox Berkeley, so this is very helpful. We performed The Weeping Babe last October - it's fiendishly difficult but sublime.
posted by impluvium at 6:52 PM on March 27, 2011


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