Christmas in Music

Southland Times, Issue 21273, 19 December 1930, Page 19

Christmas in Music

Work of Great Composers

One of our very greatest English composers was Henry Purcell, who was born fifty years before Handel came to England, (writes Dr. Eaglefield Hall). Purcell died a ■young man of thirty-seven, and we have only his famous choral ode —‘‘A Yorkshire Feast Song”—to bear witness to his fine capabilities of dealing with Yuletide joy. One must love children, or have the ability to become as a child, for the Christmas bells to call forth the music from within. How impossible this is to some people is evidenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s heartless dictum—“Children are never too tender to be whipped; like tough beef-stakes, the more we whip them the more tender they become.” Rather must the composer approach the Christmas theme through the channel of Schumann’s beloved poet, Jean Paul Richter, who held that the smallest children are nearest God, as the smallest planets are nearest the sun. HANDEL. Handel had this childlike mind, or he could never have written the Christmas music to “The Messiah.” The eleven numbers dealing with the Nativity are the very best in the oratorio: for they demand natural, unsophisticated singing, and will not stand hollow-sounding overload of emotion so frequently applied by singers later on in the work. The “Pastoral Symphony” is nearly always spoilt by reading the word “Larghetto” (slowly) too literally. Christmas weather in Palestine is summer, and so Handel picked up a folk-tune from a Calabrian shepherd’s piping, and set it down here. The music should gently rock like a Sicilian boat-song, nothing more. I heard my ideal rendering of the Nativity Music .from "The Messiah” last Christmas, when I witnessed a modern morality play in a small Hertfordshire town, and the Christmas numbers from Handel’s “Messiah” were performed behind the stage by a small band and chorus. Never before had the music distilled so much of its unearthly beauty. Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn treated us rather poorly as regards Christmas music. When staying in -London with his friends, the Benickes, at Denmark Hill, in June, 1842, he wrote two little piano pieces to which he added four others later on, sending them to the Benickes as a Christmas present. They hence acquired the title in England of “Christmas Pieces,” but are not particularly distinctive. Far different are the “Christmas Pieces” of Niels Gade, the Norwegian composer. They

have fine musical material and are well situed to juvenile pianists. One has to look far into Brahms’s music to find anything to our present purpose; but in the "Volkskinderlieder,” arranged for the children of Robert and Clara Schumann, we find such delightful songlets as “The Little Sandman” and the quaint “Hunting Song” in which the Angel of the Annuniciatiou is represented as blowing his horn. Nor is Schunmann much more musically responsive to the call of Christmas bells. Yet the "Carnival” (Op. 9), with its seventeenth-century “Grandfather’s Dance” (a much favoured end-of-the-party children’s tune), is full of Yuletide spirit. It is not generally known that Berlioz's only attempt at an oratorio was “L’Enfance du Christ.” Very little is known about it, except that between the years 1840-1844 he wrote three parts of it—“ The Song of Herod,” “The Flight into Egypt,” and "The Arrival at Sais.” Peter Cornelius and Others. Far better Christmas music is to be found in the “Christmas Songs” by Peter Cornelius. He was the friend of Wagner, and, like him, believed in writing his own words for his music. Liszt’s oratorio “Christus” is only kown by the instrumental “Pastorale,” the “Procession of the Eastern Kings,” and a Papal chorus, “Tu es Petrus,” occasionally played on the organ. Sir Hubert Parry’s “Ode on the Nativity,” to fifteenth-century words by William Dunbar, is a good specimen of English choral art. Dunbar was a preaching Friar who afterwards entered the service of James IV. of Soctland. “He is at times as rich in fancy and colour as Spenser; as shrewd and coarse as Chaucer; as pious and devotional as Cowper; and as wildly grotesque in satire as Burns.” The best of all Christmas Mysteries is Rutland Boughton’s choral drama, “Bethlehem.” The libretto was adaped from the Coventry Nativity Play, and the work was first performed in 1915, at Street, Somerset, during the Christmas Festival of the Glastonbury School. Vaughan Williams has composed a “Fantasia on Christmas Carols” for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra, and the “Antiphon” of his “Mystical Songs” with its joyous peals of bells makes a magnificent Christmas piece for a singer with a medium range. Gustav Hoist’s “Hymn of Jesus,” performed at the Three Choirs Festival three years ago, is a kind of mystical Christmas work. It is set in modern musical idiom to words translated from the Apocryphal Acts of St. John.