Thanks to Agent 5, we are able to share with you an encore performance of this lovely Christmas song, "The Carol of the Bells", given by a massed choir of American and Ukrainian singers at Carnegie Hall on 11 December 2022.
The song is actually Ukrainian, an arrangement by Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych of an ancient polyphonic folk song. The song was adopted by western culture, with new English words about bells, which are lovely enough in their own way, and which preserve the spirit of good cheer in the original.
The Ukrainian song, though, is not about Christmas at all, since it refers to pre-Christian traditions. It is about about spring, about the favorable signs brought by animals, about present love and coming prosperity. It is a song of affirmation and encouragement. Its very name, "Shchedryk," suggests generosity and abundance.
"Shchedryk" was performed in Carnegie Hall in October 1921 by Ukrainian musicians seeking support for a Ukrainian republic. Its composer had been murdered by the Bolshevik secret police earlier that year. Most of what is now Ukraine would soon thereafter be incorporated into the Soviet Union.
The song was Americanized in 1936, not long after the Holodomor, the great famine in Soviet Ukraine, just at the beginning of Stalin's great terror. Its origins were forgotten, as was Ukraine in general.
The Ukrainian children's choir that travelled to New York this month to perform the song came bearing a gift, their presence and their performance, one that gently echoed back to us our appropriation of a song, but without resentment, only with generosity.
(Notes adapted from "Gratitude to Ukraine", by Timothy Snyder, 11/12/22.)
Click here for the schedule of Christmas/Rizdvo & Theophany celebrations at Saint Elias Ukrainian-Greek Catholic Church, Brampton ON Canada.
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