December 10: "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella"

Quiet now, while the child is sleeping

It is wrong to talk so loud

Silence, now, as we gather around him

Lest the sound should awaken Jesus,

Hush, hush, see how fast he slumbers

Hush, hush, see how fast he sleeps

It's Saturday, arguably the best day of the week, so I have no intention of spoiling it with a heavy song. Instead, today I'm looking into the more under-sung than unsung carol "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella." This carol is one of the more innocent ones that exists, in that it's not just about being quiet around Jesus, but it also isn't weighed down by the burdensome religious undertones that I feel rob some perfectly good Christmas songs of their merriment. Nope, this one is just telling everyone to shut up for a second, Christ! (literally.)

"Bring a Torch" takes us back to the region of Provence in southern France, which is also the birthplace of "Farandole," which I talked about last Sunday. The people like to sing and dance, gotta give them that. In fact, the tune to which the song is sung is a traditional medieval dance tune. Listening to the song you can pick up on the lively, swinging waltz-like feel of it, stemming from it's time signature of 3/8. It's old enough that whoever wrote it, if it was one individual, has long since been lost, but it comes from no more recently than the 14th century. The consensus seems to be that the tune is derived from an air entitled "à boire Qu'ils sont doux, bouteille jolie," and I have no idea what that means. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a renowned 17th century French composer is often credited with arranging the tune as we know it today, but that is subject to quite a bit of debate, as I came to find. The first record of the lyrics (written in French, obviously) come from a 1553 compilation of Christmas music called Cantiques de Premiere Advenement de Jesus-Christ, apparently assembled by an anonymous Provence nobleman. 

*Author's interpretation of said anonymous nobleman,

some liberties taken

Who is responsible for the lyrics, then? That, as it happens, is a very difficult question to answer and sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole in my research for this post. There are a handful of possible authors for the "original" lyrics, ranging in time frame from the mid-17th century up to the early 20th century, but I can't seem to find anything close to a definite answer. The most common English adaptation of the carol is by E. Cuthbert Nunn, who translated them sometime in the late 19th century (he was born in 1868, so definitely no earlier than 1890). That seems to be his one and only contribution to music history, as any research on his life just leads back to "Bring a Torch." 

Regardless of their origin, the lyrics describe two milkmaids, Jeanette and Isabella (yes, two people, not one) who went to the stable to milk cows but instead found Jesus in the manger. They ran back to Bethlehem to get torches and bring the townspeople down to see him, but insisted that everyone stay quiet so that the baby could sleep. It's rumored that French painter Georges de La Tour was inspired by the song to paint his piece Le Nouveau-ne (The Newborn) which depicts two unnamed young women holding a baby.

Is that Jeanette and Isabella with Jesus? Maybe. It certainly fits the description. To this day it's a tradition in Provence for children to carry torches and candles to church on Christmas Eve. If we got nothing more from the carol than religiously sanctioning kids to play with fire I think that would be enough. I think the most important thing I'm taking away from all this is that it's clearly Jeanette, Isabella, not Jeanette-Isabella. And like I said at the beginning, this is a nice light-hearted tune with no extra baggage tacked on to weigh down your soul. It's pretty and happy and deserves a bit more airtime, I think.