A setting, in ’traditional’ style, of Christina Rossetti’s Christmas poem. Because the three-verse lyric is so short, like Edgar Pettman before me I have decided to add a Nowell burden; but instead of a made-up ’sing Noel’, I have chosen the burden from the famous Victorian classic, ’The First Noel’.

In my music, I have tried to achieve a simplicity appropriate to the lyric, but the style (in places, and especially the Nowell) perhaps owes more to M.-A. Charpentier than to English Victorian choral tradition!