Puer natus in Betlehem
Baroque Music for Christmas
Puer natus in Betlehem
Baroque Music for Christmas
The features common to the
works on this
disc which otherwise differ in their genres, structures and
instrumentation, are their links with the Christmas season and their
dating. They are all Baroque works. The term Baroque in music covers
approximately hundred and fifty years from 1600 to 1750. The main
features were far from uniform in that time, despite some unchanging
principles of composition and performance: a continuo bass played on a
bass stringed instrument or instruments or one or more chordal
instruments such as an organ, harpsichord or lute; a musical fabric
consisting of this bass and one or two solo-like upper parts; a rhythm
derived from dances or from speech; a close relationship between music
and rhetoric, etc. So the 150 years divide into several shorter
periods, and the customs of composition differed not only from period
to period but from country to country. The two most typical and
contrasting national styles were the Italian and the French. They
nourished the music of other European countries, such as Germany, whose
own national ways mingled with them to a greater or lesser extent.
Christmas during the Baroque period became associated with a special
type of music, the pastoral.
It was of Italian origin, and later spread all over Europe in its vocal
and its instrumental forms. (In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term
pastoral was used for all literary, musical or dramatic works that
presented rural scenes, characters or moods in a strongly stylized way,
the characters usually being shepherds and shepherdesses.) The first
collection of Christmas pastorals, dating from 1637, were composed by
Francesco Fiamengo, an Italian, for Christmas music-making at the home
of his high-ranking patron. Pastoral music has an uneven number of
beats to the bar (3/2, later 6/8 or 12/8), a rocking rhythm, a mainly
stepping melodic line, parallel thirds, an accompaniment that imitates
the bagpipes, and a preference for symmetrical phrases. All these are
present in the music of Italian shepherds (pifferari),
who in Italian towns performed on a rustic, oboe-like instrument called
the piffero
as well as on the bagpipes, since the early 16th century. So the
pastoral style of the 17th and 18th centuries may well have been an
imitation of this style of folk music. One type of the Italian vocal
pastoral is called the ninna. It is a lullaby
addressed to the
infant Jesus and remained common at least until the 19th century among
both Italian and German composers. In the early 18th century the
pastoral also became incorporated into the forms of the concerto grosso
and the oratorio (usually providing one movement in each case). The
structure of this pastoral movement consists of alternate playing by
the full ensemble and a small consort of soloists. The most widely
known example of the "Christmas concerto grosso" favoured by the
Italians is Corelli's popular No. 8, Op. 6, which was printed in 1714,
after the composer's death. It presumably served as a model for many
similar works by other Italian composers, although the chronology has
not so far been fully clarified.
Francesco Onofrio Manfredini
(born in Pistoia in 1684, died there in 1762) was a minor Italian
composer who studied in Bologna under Giuseppe Torelli, a significant
exponent of the Italian concerto grosso, and others. Compared to his
contemporaries Manfredini was not a fertile composer, he has been
identified as the author of 43 printed works, a few other instrumental
pieces in manuscript, and six oratorios. He published his concertos Op.
3 in 1718, dedicating them to his patron Prince of Monaco. The last
piece in the cycle of twelve appears to unitate Corelli not only in
style but with its subtitle "Fatto per la notte di natale"
(#10-12). Employing two solo violins and a string ensemble, the piece
uses the three-movement form of the mature Vivaldi concerto, but
departs from it in the character of the movements. In the Corelli work
the famous pastoral appears at the end of the Christmas concerto
grosso, in Manfredini this rocking, Largo in 12/8
time replaces
a fast opening movement. The same, gentle, naively charming character
continues. Even the third movement, though marked Allegro,
is not really fast.
Manfredini's
concerto grosso belongs to one of the most typical Italian Baroque
genres. The other work on this recording, scored for a large ensemble
of instruments, is a Telemann ouverture that takes the typically French
suite as its model. The suite is a piece in several movements, in most
cases a variety of dances, introduced by a ternary overture - the ouverture
which is likewise typically French. Often a whole work was styled an
ouverture by 18th century German composers. (Bach used "ouverture" as
the original title of four of his orchestral suites.) Georg
Philipp Telemann
(born in Magdeburg in 1681, died in Hamburg in 1767) was a prolific
18th century composer highly esteemed in his own lifetime. His "Ouverture
à la Pastorelle"
in F major (#2-8), which has survived in manuscript form (Hessische
Landes- and Hochschulbibliothek, Darmstadt, 1034/41) is an unusual
work, as the title indicates. Although the opening movement has the
ternary structure (ABAv) of a French ouverture, based on two kinds of
musical material, the musical material differs from what was customary:
instead of a solemn introduction in a taut, dotted rhythm, followed by
a vivid, virtuoso, concerto-type middle section, we hear gentle
Christmas music of a clearly pastoral character in Section A, where the
accompaniment imitates the bagpipes, and in Section B, where the rhythm
is a rocking 6/8. The dances that follow the overture all contain
simple, mainly chordal music and are frequently rustic in character. In
several movements there is a repeated use of upward and downward
progression in unison. This is a really decisive element in the Air,
which is entirely based on an incessant alternation between two
contrasting materials: a gentle Andante and "angry"
unison progressions. Alongside three well-known Baroque types of dance
- a bourrée in the second movement, a minuet
and a gigue
- the piece has genre movement titles familiar from other Baroque
suites such as "Air," "Caprice" and "Carillon." However, they are not
entirely supported by the music that follows them.
The
Christmas pastoral music is linked not only by certain compositional
techniques but by the use of two instruments which moved from folk
music to forms of composed music popular above all among the French
aristocracy, precisely thanks to the literary and musical pastoral. One
of them is the hurdy-gurdy (vielle
in French), which was
used at Versailles festivities by participants dressed as shepherds and
shepherdesses, and between 1731 and 1733 featured as a solo instrument
at the famous Paris orchestral Concerts Spirituels. The other typically
"pastoral" instrument, is the musette, a small
bagpipe, which
enjoyed great popularity in 17th and 18th century France. It too was
often played by someone dressed up as a shepherd. A special tablature
form of notation was devised for it. Two period musette tutors have
survived. (The term "musette" was also used for a type of gavotte
related to the pastoral that used a drone-bass and was employed by
composers from Couperin to Handel and Bach. The same term denoted
dances of a similar type in the early 18th century French ballets.)
Michel Corrette
(b. in Rouen in 1709, d. in Paris in 1795) was an organist, a composer
and the author of at least 17 tutors for various instruments. He wrote
a number of works which, according to the custom of the time, could be
performed on a wide variety of descant instruments. However, pride of
place among the possible instruments is usually given to the vielle
and/or the musette,
for which the composer seems to have intended them. This recording also
uses the vielle and the musette (accompanied by the organ and other
continuo instruments) for a suite by Corrette (#16), and for a series
of variations on a popular French children's song (#9). An Italian lute
piece in a simple, binary dance form, originally entitled a "sonata" is
also a kind of pastoral. It survived in a manuscript collection
(Biblioteca "G. B. Martini," Bologna) and bears no relationship, to the
later, classical Viennese sonata or sonata form (#14).
After
these secular chamber works, the recording enters the completely
different realm of German Protestant church music, with a series of
chorale variations played here on the organ (although they may
originally have been intended for a different keyboard instrument,
since they have no pedal part). The composer Georg Böhm
(born
in Hohenkirchen in 1661, died in Lüneburg in 1733) became the organist
of the Lüneburg Johanniskirche in 1698, the played a particularly
important part in the development of the chorale variation form. His
style influenced the young Bach, although it cannot be proved that Bach
was Böhm's pupil. According to the recollections of his son, Carl
Philipp Emanuel, Bach "liked and studied" Böhm's works, and what he
learnt from them was chorale arrangement. Luther's chorale "Gelobet
seist du, Jesu Christ"
(1524) (#15), was usually sung on Christmas Day in the German Lutheran
churches. Apart from Böhm's there have been arrangements of it by other
composers, including several versions by Bach (for example the grand
opening choral movement of his cantata of a similar title, BWV 91).
The
vocal pieces on this recording represent a wide variety of Italian
origin known uniformly today as cantata. Originally, the 17th century
Italian cantata had many different names and it developed in two types.
One was longer, with alternating recitatives and arias. The other was a
short work consisting of a single aria. Most pieces in Harmonia
caelestis
by Prince Pál Es¬terházy, the Hungarian Baroque composer, are of the
latter kind. The Prince (who was Palatine of Hungary from 1681)
practised composition and poetry, and his collection, printed in 1711,
contains 55 cantatas, in Latin, grouped according to feasts of the
church. The first of the Christmas ones was a setting of a popular
medieval chorale, Puer natus in Betlehem (#1), or
more
precisely an extended version of its first verse: "Puer natus in
Betlehem / Unde gaudet Jerusalem / Laudetur sancta Trinitas / Deo
dicamus gratias." The text Puer natus appears in many different
versions in the 17th century, including folk hymns noted down in
Hungary. In form, the piece alternates three different materials: an
instrumental sonata with a leaping melodic line and dance lilt, which
is fairly long compared with the work as a whole; a flexible part for
solo soprano, including the traditional text along with the first line
of the added refrain ("Quam mirabilia ista"), and rejoicing music, in a
lively dotted rhythm from the chorus, which sets the rest of the
refrain (Canite Caelites).
Cur fles Jesu (#17) is
another piece in a simple form with a strophic structure introduced by
an instrumental sonata. Both its text and music relate it to the
lullaby type of Italian pastoral. The first four bars of the soprano
solo are a varied form of the beginning of a Hungarian folk hymn, Haec
que facis (György Náray: Lyra Caelestis, 1695). The
long sustained note sung to the word dormi
and the repeated leap of a fourth by the violins, heard above it, may
also originate from this folk hymn (which is of the lullaby type). Both
solutions - the sustained notes in the vocal part and the rocking
nature of the accompaniment - appear to have been internationally
popular mannerisms at the time. (A well-known example is Arnalta's
famous lullaby in Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea.)
The
German Protestant cantata mainly served church purposes. Although it
uses soloists, it assigns a big part to the choir and to the Protestant
chorale. The cantatas of Dietrich Buxtehude (born
around 1637,
died in Lübeck in 1707) differ widely in the choice of their texts,
their performing apparatus and their composing style. Verse and prose
texts, biblical passages and chorale words, solos and choruses,
concerto movements and chorale arrangements all feature, often
alternating within the same piece. Das neugeborne Kindelein
(#13), for the first Sunday after Christmas (BuxWV 13) uses the whole
text of the chorale that begins with those words (Cyriakus Schneegaß,
1588), but without the melody of that chorale. The cantata scored for a
four-part mixed choir, three violins and bass, is a masterpiece. The
music exhibits luxiriant imagination and a careful construction, yet it
gives the impression of being a spontaneous, integrally developing,
autotelic process. Although the main lines of division in the music
coincide with the strophic division of the text, the music is not
strophic as such, but freely composed throughout, so that each strophe
is given a different musical setting. Buxtehude used the text as the
point of departure for his composition. According to one of the basic
principles of the Baroque the music is employed to stress and reinforce
the meaning of the words. The first strophe is flanked by a chordal,
orchestral ritornello in a dancing rhythm. This returns in an unchanged
form, and the same musical material is then taken over in lines 1-3 by
the choir, with a continuo accompaniment. The strict form is broken
only in the last line, where there is an imitation in a melismatic
part-fabric of the words auserwählten Christenschar.
In the
second strophe, each line is assigned to different musical material
that represents specific words or combinations of words in the text:
"The angels rejoice" is set to alternating jubilant concertante note
repetitions of the choir and instrumental ensemble; "Affably" elicits
gentle, tied note-pairs; "They sing" sets off a long melismatic
concertante; "God" calls forth a chordal section with long note-values.
The rhetorically similar structure of strophes 3 and 4 called for
similar musical treatment. They are each centred around their third
lines, using a highly flexible, openwork musical fabric as a start. The
soloists toss leaping motifs of 2-3 notes from one part to another,
exploiting in Strophe 3 the consonantal sounds in the word trotz
to arouse the negative feelings linked to the mention of Devil and
Hell. The ascending leaps of fourths at the same place in Strophe 4
express in a very tangible way the meaning of the words Frisch
auf.
Judit Péteri
Kálvária-templom, Szombathely