Christmas music - carols, hymns, oratorios - is as much a part of the festive season as Santa Claus and lavish presents, but its history is rather more complex, writes Aengus Collins
Music provides such an all-pervasive backdrop to our Christmases, it isn't always easy to disentangle the various musical traditions that we tend increasingly to refer to generically as Christmas music. But Christmas carols, hymns, oratorios, as well as the more recent explosion of secular Christmas songs, all have their own histories.
Carols feel like one of the most familiar elements of our Christmas heritage, and their roots go back further than almost any other music that continues to be widely played today - to the late medieval period. In general, the carols we're familiar with have been filtered through the musical vocabulary of the 19th century, when there was a significant revival. But the form dates back to the 14th century, when the carol was a simple song of religious joy with strong but not exclusive associations with the Christmas period.
Christmas was a time of liturgical flexibility back then, when the rules of worship were allowed to bend. This licensed the use of carols in the celebration of the Mass. They were used as processional hymns, and their roots in music for dancing seem also to have permitted even more unorthodox uses. Clergy at the cathedral in Sens in France, for instance, were permitted to dance to Christmas carols, provided their feet remained on the ground.
The development of the Christmas carol owed much to the Franciscans, who recognised that the relatively simple form (four-line verses with repeated two-line burdens or refrains) had significant potential as a tool of religious education. They worked on the basis that the devil shouldn't get to keep the best tunes, fashioning new carols by changing the words of secular songs.
This reliance on the monks to foster the carol tradition caused obvious problems in the wake of the Reformation. In England, where carol singing was most strongly rooted, the monks departed following the Reformation, leading to a swift and almost total decline of the carol, and its replacement with Christmas hymns. The line between hymns and carols has remained blurred ever since. Many popular Christmas carols, such as Joy to the World and Hark the Herald Angels Sing are actually hymns.
The Reformation era wrought a wide range of changes on the musical world, all of which are reflected in the Christmas music of the time.
The combination of theological change and rapid developments in musical practice made the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th a particularly dynamic and vibrant period in musical history. The refined a cappella polyphony of a composer such as Palestrina gave way to new traditions of congregational singing in the Protestant churches, and to the increasingly worldly musical sophistication of composers such as the Gabrielis in Catholic Venice.
The past decade or so has given us recordings of a rich array of Christmas music from this period bridging the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, including Paul McCreesh's magisterial series of Christmas recreations. It makes for fascinating listening.
BY THE TIME we reach the second half of the 17th century, things are starting to fall into place for the subsequent emergence of the major Christmas compositions of Baroque giants Bach and Handel, the Christmas Oratorio and Messiah. The emergence of the opera had led to an injection of drama into Christian music as composers adapted the new form for use with Biblical texts. The new religious music that resulted didn't have a directly liturgical role, but was used to bring to life events and stories taken from the Bible, and from the Old Testament in particular. These new compositions became known as oratorios, because it was often in the oratorio or prayer room that they were first performed.
Alternating between arias sung by the various soloists, recitative sung by a narrator who would move the "plot" along, and stirring choral interludes, the oratorio was widely popular and was the form that both Bach and Handel would turn to for their Christmas music.
As one would expect, Bach's Christmas Oratorio, first performed in 1734, was conceived on an ambitious scale. It works as a unified composition, but it was written as a cycle of six cantatas, to be performed on six of the 12 days of Christmas (December 25th, 26th and 27th, January 1st, the first Sunday in January and January 6th). This multipart structure displays a breadth of vision that's typical of Bach, but not unique. Bach was influenced by the oratorios of Dietrich Buxtehude, among whose works (although it no longer survives) was a five-part Christmas composition entitled Heavenly Delight of the Soul on Earth at the Birth of Our Saviour Jesus Christ.
The Christmas Oratorio is one of Bach's most popular works, but it's not as musically significant as his other large-scale religious compositions. Bach recycled much of its music from earlier pieces, such as a cantata he had written for the birthday of Maria Josepha, the elector of Saxony, a year earlier.
Nevertheless, from its opening bars the Christmas Oratorio announces itself as a work to be reckoned with. The fanfare and triumphant choral singing with which it begins must have made for an invigorating and inspiring Christmas Day in St Nicholas's in Leipzig, almost three centuries ago.
Bach's oratorio narrates some of the key events of the nativity story, from the annunciation through to the arrival of the magi, but the author of the text he used remains unknown. The contrast with Handel's Messiah, first performed eight years after Bach's work, couldn't be sharper in this regard. Handel's librettist, Charles Jennens, was the driving force behind its composition. He had a theological point to make with the piece. Concerned at the Enlightenment's undermining of religious and Biblical truth, Jennens wanted to use Messiah to reaffirm the accuracy of Old Testament prophecy. The work's narration of Christ's birth, death and resurrection is accomplished using texts drawn solely from the Old Testament.
DESPITE ITS DETAILED theological and Biblical underpinnings, Handel's oratorio is a more warmly evocative work than Bach's. It was hugely controversial, though - far more so than Bach's Christmas Oratorio, which was firmly rooted in the needs of the Lutheran church. Handel's work was written for performance not in church but in the concert hall. One of the reasons Messiah was first performed in Dublin was nervousness about how this blurring of the sacred and the profane would be received in London.
When Handel brought Messiah to Covent Garden a year later in 1743, this nervousness proved well founded. On its first performance, it was savagely condemned in the Universal Spectator: "How will this appear to After-Ages, when it shall be read in History, that in such an Age the People of England were arriv'd to such a Height of Impiety and Prophaneness that the most sacred things were suffer'd to be us'd as publick Diversions."
But far from disowning it, history has embraced Handel's Messiah. One of the ironies is that a work we now associate so closely with Christmas originally had no connection with that time of year. During Handel's lifetime it was performed during the composer's annual series of Lenten concerts. Perhaps had things worked out differently, we would set Messiah alongside Bach's Passions rather than his Christmas Oratorio. But after Handel's death the association between Messiah and Easter was broken and it started to be performed at Christmas, a tradition that has thrived ever since.
Messiah is perhaps the most widely recognised and loved piece of sacred music that exists. It is by some distance the most frequently performed piece of Christmas music in our concert halls. For all the contemporary controversy he aroused, Handel seems to have been on to something with his mix of sacred things and public diversions.
Stocking fillers
This year brings some nice additions to the Christmas catalogue, including high-profile recordings of both Bach and Handel. On the Archiv label comes a re-release of a 1977 recording of the Christmas Oratorio. Conductor Hanns-Martin Schneidt is a former chorister at St Thomas's in Leipzig, where Bach served, and the choir is directed by Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's brother. This year's Messiah is a beautiful new recording under the direction of René Jacobs, on Harmonia Mundi.
For those with an interest in early music, the Orlando Consort's Medieval Christmas is recommended, while those looking to explore other traditions might be interested in Paul Hillier's recording of Orthodox Christmas music, A New Joy. The Hyperion label, which produced a wonderful disc of Palestrina's music for Advent and Christmas, this year releases a disc recreating Christmas Vespers at Westminster Cathedral, as well as a set of hymns and carols from St John's College in Cambridge.
For lovers of the 16th and 17th centuries, Paul McCreesh's three recreations of Christmas services deserve special mention: Mass for a Christmas Morning uses the music of Michael Praetorius; Christmas Vespers is built around the music of Heinrich Schütz; and A Venetian Christmas intersperses a setting of the Mass by Cipriano de Rore with compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli.
