Maynooth University’s annual carol service is one of the hottest tickets in Kildare, I had been told beforehand. Now I know why.
For a start there’s the venue: the magnificent college chapel, said to be the world’s largest of its kind. Then there was the music, provided by several choirs, the church organ, and a small orchestra, all magnificent too.
Inspired by this backing track, even the vocally shyest among us were singing like Protestants after a while. My friend Sarah, in contrast, was reduced first to silence, then tears, by Silent Night.
She was again visibly moved during the crescendo of The First Nowell, although in that case the movement was vertical and violent, after an unexpected cymbal clash from the nearby brass section caused her briefly to lose contact with the pew.
Still, in its own way, that too was in keeping with the generally uplifting nature of the evening.
It was David Stifter, German-born Professor of Old Irish at Maynooth, who got us in to the event, for which there is a ticket lottery.
Possibly to ensure his own admission this year, he had gone to the trouble of creating a new, old-style hymn for the service, written in the Irish of more than a millennium ago and set to music by TG4 Gradam Ceol composer of the year, Ryan Molloy.
The song begins: Is álaind a llae indíu,/ním thicfa badid sorchu./Is subae co síd is sám/no ferad form co follán.
Which translates as: “Today is a beautiful day,/I will not have a brighter one./Joy with peace and rest/Have been poured upon me abundantly.”
Unfortunately, I did my best to ruin David’s beautiful day by texting him on the way out to Maynooth to say that, by the way, his tickets had never turned up.
So far from experiencing peace and rest, he first had to seek out the people on the door and warn them about my ticketless status.
After that, having told me to ring him if there was any problem, he realised he had forgotten his phone and had to sprint home for it, then sprint back to the chapel, suit and all, in case I was trying to call.
By the time we met – with me blithely unaware of the crisis thus precipitated and confident I could get in anyway via the usual journalistic method of blagging – poor David was in a welter of sweat.
Oh well, the world premiere of his hymn was a triumph too. And guilt over the trouble I had caused only added to the fervour with which I sang the line in O Holy Night about being part of a world “in sin and error pining”.
That great French hymn has been described as a religious version of the Marseillaise. Which has a certain irony in the context of Maynooth University, founded just before the French Revolution and strongly associated with the ancien regime.
Even the great chapel, built a century later, still incorporates the old monarchist symbol of the fleur-de-lis in its floor mosaics.
It’s ironic too that this most reverent of Christmas hymns was written by a man of little piety, who in the end preferred socialism to Christianity.
Or at least that was true of Placide Cappeau, the poet who wrote the original text as Minuit, Chrétiens (“Midnight, Christians”).
But the secular note was underlined by Adolphe Adam, the composer who added the music and was first to liken the combination to the anthem of the revolution.
Cappeau’s most famous song may also owe its origins to a violent accident of his childhood. Growing up the son of a cooper, he might have followed his father into the wine business.
But when he was only eight, he had his right hand amputated after a shooting accident. The loss of limb earned him an education he might not otherwise have enjoyed, leading to careers in law and literature.
O Holy Night was long frowned upon by some Christian leaders, for the “militant tone and dubious theology” of the original lyrics.
Of particular offence was a line suggesting Jesus had come into the world “to cease the wrath of his father”. But even the writer of the music was criticised: rumoured (wrongly) to be Jewish and to have been motivated by profit rather than piety.
In 1864, a French journal of Catholic music called the hymn “debased and degenerate”, urging its banishment from “houses of religion, which can do very well without it”.
But as recently as 1956, it was still “expunged from many French] dioceses due to the emphatic aspect of its lyrics ...”
Of course, it was in the less strident English version, by the American John Sullivan Dwight, that we heard it in Maynooth. And as usual, it was a show stopper (or a service stopper, to be exact): given full, glorious expression by the multiple choirs and instrumentalists.
Restored to her seat, despite several more cymbal clashes in the interim, Sarah was also again reduced to silence.
“It’s so beautiful,” she sighed at the end, “we only ruin it by singing along”.