Christmas with Bach and Handel
Christmas has in modern times become not merely a Festival but a Season. My father used to complain if festive fare appeared in the shops before the beginning of Advent, and there was a time when Christmas merchandise was not let loose until after Guy Fawkes’s Day (November 5); this year Christmas cards went on sale in October. After Christmas many regular shops and services close for ever-longer periods — here, living 50 miles north of London, we have to lay in survival food for a week — while the major stores begin their ‘annual’ sales well before the New Year and encourage post-festive mayhem.
Musicians cannot stand outside this process. December is a prime concert-giving period, particularly for amateur choirs: secular as well as ecclesiastical choirs usually feel that they have sung every known carol before they fall exhausted on Christmas Day. The Christmas season, for better or worse (usually some of each), dominates the year by sheer persistence, in a way that distinguishes it from all others derived from religious festivals.
It is difficult for us now to return in imagination to a time when Christmas did not have this dominance, but was just one of the three major Church festivals of the year, along with Easter and Whitsun. This is not just a matter of imagining what Christmas was like before Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, but of placing it in a different context. In the ecclesiastical calendar, Christmas Day was an occasion for release from the penitential season of Advent: it was immediately followed by a number of other important but lesser festivals, some of them relating to Christmas and some marking particular saints’ days.
This explains the relatively small amount of Christmas music that was composed before the 19th century, for Christmas music was only appropriate for the day itself: the periods before and after, if they were celebrated with special music at all, had different requirements. Nevertheless, some remarkable and stirring music was written for Christmas, such as Sweelinck’s Hodie Christus natus est (first published in 1619), and Purcell’s Behold, I bring you glad tidings, written for Christmas Day 1687. Purcell’s anthem, with accompaniment for violins, was composed for the English Chapel Royal, whose members enjoyed something like modern holiday provision. A memorandum in 1720 asserted that a ‘play-week, or week of Vacation from all Choir attendance’ had always been allowed ‘after the holydays of Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide’, though a century previously the ‘play-week’ was apparently that before Christmas.
Although Handel wrote some occasional music for the Chapel Royal, none of it relates to Christmas: his main career, in any case, was in the theatre. The London theatre seasons ran approximately from September to May, and the theatres were usually dark only on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, though the opera seasons often had a short gap in their programmes around Christmas and these times would have been busy because new operas were introduced in the first days of the new year. Handel must have had only a very short holiday. In 1738 he even began the composition of a new opera, Serse, on Boxing Day: the famous ‘Largo’ (Ombra mai fu) may have been written on that very day.
Although Messiah is often given during the Christmas season today, Handel always performed it in his Lenten oratorio series at the theatres, or at the Foundling Hospital after Easter: Charles Jennens, the librettist, had initially expected Handel to perform the oratorio in ‘Passion Week’ — that is, the week before Easter. Nevertheless, Part One of Messiah obviously refers to the birth of Christ, and within ten years of Handel’s death William Boyce had arranged some of the music as a Christmas anthem for the Chapel Royal.
Bach’s life at Christmas-time during the 1730s and 1740s must have been very different from Handel’s, for his musical duties in church would have been onerous, though no doubt rewarding when things went well. In 1734 he took on a particularly ambitious programme with his Christmas Oratorio, consisting of a sequence of six cantatas spread over more than a week: the first three days of Christmas (December 25–27), the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January), the Sunday after the New Year (2 January) and the Epiphany (6 January). All six parts were heard on their appropriate days at the Nikolaikirche, and four of them were also repeated at the Thomaskirche on the same days.
The parts of the Christmas Oratorio were similar in length and style to Bach’s other cantatas, but there is no doubt that he conceived the group as a single ‘oratorium’: while Schutz had dealt with the Christmas story in a single work, Die Geburt unsers Herren jesu Christi, 1660 (some of Schutz’s Christmas music is featured on AAM’s harmonia mundi release A Christmas Collection, directed by Paul Goodwin), Bach took on a project that must have demanded as much long-term stamina from its original auditors as Wagner’s Ring. The music is by turns extrovert — some of it indeed adapted from secular cantatas — and reflective. Perhaps there is no greater jolt to our modern expectations of ‘Christmas music’ than to hear an exquisite harmonisation of the melody that we usually refer to as the ‘Passion chorale’ in Part One of the Christmas Oratorio: but perhaps we have modern stereotypes about ‘passion music’ as well...
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Soprano recitative: ‘There were shepherds abiding in the field’ from Handel’s
Messiah. From a facsimile of the Autograph Score, 1741.
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