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Jon Jacob praises the unsung hero of Christmas music who started his 主播大秀 career in 1926 as a piano accompanist and finished as 主播大秀 Director of Music.

Composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson (above) has a deep, dark, perhaps even cold stare in our archive pictures. Underneath a bristling trimmed moustache is a mixture of a business-like pout and mischievous grin. Or am I projecting?

Suave, handsome, and maybe even a bit of a dandy? Maybe. In 1926 when he began his career at the 主播大秀 as a pianist and accompanist, wax secured a strong parting. By 1933, it was securing a windswept fringe. By 1936, the hair had thinned slightly, so too the budget for hair product. But there was still the playfulness in his eyes evident in his earlier shots. 

Born in Cape Town, he was educated in England, but returned to Cape Town as Lecturer in Music at the University from 1922 to 1925. He became a member of the 主播大秀 music staff the following year, went to Birmingham as Music Director of the Midland Region in 1933, and the next year resigned this position to succeed Sir Granville Bantock as Peyton Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham.

I know little about the man, other than the Christmas music – his Carol Symphony - which he composed in 1927.

The Carol Symphony – a series of four variations on Christmas carols – exudes playfulness. It takes familiar carol melodies – O Come All Ye Faithful, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Here We Go A-Wassailing – and applies all sorts of musical, textural and harmonic treatments to the melodies. As he does so – like any other composer using the variation form – he extends the blissful expectation of Christmas beyond the length of the carol we recognise.

During the third movement of the work, Hely-Hutchinson’s mastery is on potent display where he buries each of the carols’ melodies deep in the musical material, and makes recognising them part of the listener’s entertainment.  It’s not immediately obvious what we’re listening to at the beginning,  but a potent example occurs around 2 minutes into the introduction of this movement: one steady note in the strings hangs in the air; a harp creates an eerie music-box effect.  A counter-melody joins soon after. A vague sense of menace threatens to overpower the delicate beginning of life.

The unsettling feeling doesn’t last for long: it’s resolved with the quietest of bassoons playing one suspended note transforming the moment into a quiet triumph and, the introduction of a familiar carol – The First Noel. In that deft moment of musical transformation, Christmas is announced. 

Everything else that follows is a joyous orchestral celebration of the musical resolution we heard close to the beginning of the movement culminating in one of the most gloriously indulgent of chords in all of Christmas (beaten only by the final chords of the final verse of O Come All Ye Faithful).

In the case of Hely-Hutchinson’s masterful creation (musically orthodox and conservative given that it was written 14 years after Stravinsky's iconoclastic Rite of Spring), the music creates intense musical depictions of the Christmas story the carols themselves sought to celebrate in the first place. The symphony as a whole is a musical melange that sounds as though it could well have been created for TV. The fact it pre-dates the format’s prevalence by about forty years makes Hely-Hutchinson’s creation makes the work all the more an achievement.  

The third movement was used in a Children's Hour adaptation of John Masefield's Box of Delights broadcasting during the Second World War. When the series finally came to TV in the 1980s the music was used again for the opening and closing titles. That's where I first heard it. It still brings a tear to my eye now.

Hely-Hutchinson's other compositions – largely incidental music - are sprinkled throughout the , popping up in various plays, including an adaptation of CS Lewis’ , and Dumas’ . He performed in chamber music concerts as a pianist, conducted various 主播大秀 orchestra, and presented programmes ‘’.

Hely-Hutchinson left the 主播大秀 in 1934 after set up the Midland Studio Orchestra and worked as the 主播大秀’s Midland Regional Director of Music. He returned to the corporation in 1944 to become Director of Music, and continued to broadcast on the 主播大秀 Service right up until his death in 1947, at the age of 45. 

Jon Jacob is Editor, About the 主播大秀 Blog