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Bittersweet Carols
“It depends where this carol is sang”, we wrote earlier. If warbled by grimy street-kids or plump matron, in Visayan -speaking areas, it’s the 1933: “Kasadya Ning Takna-a.” If crooned where movie-Tagalog is lingua franca, it’s the hijacked version: “Ang Pasko ay Sumapit.” Whether sang in the original Cebuano or Tagalog, this daygon or carol is about a season where, as the blasé New Yorker Magazine put it, “an array of luminous images hint at all manner of annunciation.” My six-year old granddaughter Kristin senses this truth. She hears carols sang by her mother, nanny, TV---even her Lolo. Her eyes sparkle as she dons white gown and angel wings for nursery school Christmas program. “We kneel Lola,” she explains. “When?” the wife asks. “When we sing: ‘Fall on your knees. O hear the angel voices…’” This old man will long be gone when Kristin enters college. She’ll find her childhood insight repeated by Hamlet: “That season comes wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated...The bird of dawning singeth all night long/ So hallow’d and so gracious is the Time.” This “hallow’d time” resounds with carols. The classics endure, like “O Come All Ye Faithful (“Adeste Fidelis”) and “O Little Town of Bethlehem”. But what happened to lilting Spanish carols like, “Nacio, Nacio Pastores”? Kids, besieging godparents today, sing: “Mano Po Ninong, Mano Po Ninang” or “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” This country boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas”, writes Manila Bulletin columnist Jullie Yap Daza. “(But) the supreme irony is not the slightest effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol ‘Ang Pasko ay Sumapit’ to it’s author, Vicente D. Rubi” of Cebu. In 1933, Cebu Christmas festival officials asked composer Rubi to join a competition. Rubi asked,. in turn, Mariano Vestil to scribble the lyrics. Their “Kasadya Ning Takna-a” won hands down. “Today, wherever Visayan is spoken, carolers still belt out the same infectious beat that Rubi and Vestil blended so brilliantly 76 years ago,” Inquirer noted. Bulahan ang tagbalay nga gi awitan….(“Blessed are those who carols are sang for”). A Manila-based record company, however, hijacked Rubi and Vestil’s carol for P150. Nong Inting, who died in 1980, “was denied what was due him in royalties,” Daza wrote. The platter firm conned Rubi and Vestil with legal dodges until their deaths. That’s par for the course in a country where an “elite of thieves” govern and scandals like the ZTE broadband scam abound. Those who crassly exploited Rubi and Vestil have kindred spirits everywhere. “Until his death in 1980, ‘Nong Inting’ would shuffle to his gates and teach startled carolers how to sing his daygon. Lyricist Vestil died in 2004. All he got was than an inside-page newspaper obituary-column titled:. A Bitter Sweet Carol”. “Few noticed the songwriters obituary, the Inquirer column stashed read: “Twenty four years after Rubi’s death, the lyricist Vestil went to his grave, also bereft of benefits and recognition– although their carol continues to resound, albeit in forms that Rubi and Vestil never sought… Tiene cara de hambre, the orphan tells the Crucified in the movie classic: “Marcelino, Pan Y Vino. “You have the face of hunger.” Insult threatened to pile on injury. A Philippine Star article column noted that Josefino Cenizal was being considered for a “National Artist” award. It adds: He composed the country’s most loved carol: Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit.”It was Levi Celerio who supplied the lyrics. Did they? Protests erupted. Cebu Normal University museum curator Romola O. Savellon, for example, asked:. “Are we going to take this sitting down?” Columnist Jullie Yap Daza weighed. “(Doesn’t that) make a mockery of the festival that this carol sings of? Bagong tuig, bagong kinabuhi, the Cebuano original and it’s Tagalog adaptation proclaim. It echoes the Advent cry of Isaiah: ‘Break the fetters of injustice…and break every yoke. Then, will your light break forth as the morning’. In the Charles Dickens 1843 classic, “A Christmas Carol,” the miser Ebneezer Scrooge dismissed what Vestil and Rubi celebrated as “humbug.” But “the Bethlehem story gives us an ‘array of luminous images’,” theologian Catalino Arevalo SJ writes. (We see) “the night sky alight with bright angels, simple shepherds startled from sleep, magi…It is a happening, above all, for the deepest heart. “Christmas is not, first of all, a revelation for the intelligence…It is looking at a Son who was born for us, who would die for us, because we mattered to him, because we are infinitely cherished, infinitely loved… At the crib, the first task is to look. “The hopes and fears of all the years Are met in thee tonight,” the 1861 (?) carol says of the little town of Bethlehem. It boggles the mind. But Christmas’ unique grace is that carol writer and carol thief, can say, together with the kings and shepherds: “Let us go to Bethlehem and see what the Lord has made known to us. Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com |
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