Our first set is dedicated to Christmas music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The opening work, Verbum caro factum es / Y la Virgen le dezía, is an anonymous Spanish villancico from around 1556. Villancicos were typically lighthearted secular pieces, with dancelike rhythms matching the poetic rhythm of the text, but there were also many sacred villancicos as well. In this lively piece celebrating the birth of Christ, the refrains include a quotation of a bit of Latin chant from the Christmas Matins service.

We continue with the Christmas hymn that has the most ancient roots of all, O Come, O Come Immanuel. This hymn has its origins in the series of “O antiphons” (O sapientia, O radix Jesse, and several others) that were chanted as early as the 8th century at Vespers on the days leading up to Christmas—each one invoking an aspect of Jesus. In 1851, an English clergyman, John Mason Neale, adapted these ancient texts as an English poem, O Come, O Come Emmanuel and it was later set to the melody of a 15th-century hymn, Veni, Veni Emmanuel. (Translation is below.)
 

Though he is known today as a leader in the early 20th century avant garde—a pioneer in atonal and twelve-tone styles—Arnold Schoenberg was also a skilled arranger. In 1921, he completed a short chamber work titled Weinachtsmusik (Christmas Music), originally written for two violins, cello, harmonium (a small organ), and piano. It was probably written for a private gathering in December of that year. It starts as a straightforward setting of Michael Praetorius’s early 17th-century chorale Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen (Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming), but then transforms the melody in dense counterpoint. Schoenberg also works in references to Franz Gruber’s Stille Nacht (Silent Night).

The Coventry Carol was written in 16th-century England. It was originally part of a mystery play—a religious play staged by local trade guilds in the city of Coventry. Mystery plays often included musical interludes, and The Coventry Carol was originally part of a play dramatizing the nativity story from the gospel of Matthew. It begins as a soothing lullaby, but its later verses refer to the “slaughter of the innocents” ordered by King Herod following the birth of Jesus.

Our next set begins with works by two of the finest composers of the Baroque era. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio by was written in Leipzig for the Christmas season of 1734-35. Not really an “oratorio,” in the dramatic sense of Judas Maccabeus and other contemporary works by Handel, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is instead a series of six linked cantatas for Christmas Day and the feasts that follow it. Like many of the numbers in the Christmas Oratorio, the aria Schlafe, mein Liebster from the second cantata is in fact a reworking of an earlier piece. In this case, Bach recycled the aria from a piece written a year earlier, from a birthday cantata for Friedrich Christian, Crown Prince of Saxony. Here it is transformed into a lovely lullaby for the baby Jesus. (Translation is below.)

In 1717 George Frideric Handel moved to England to compose and produce opera. For nearly two decades, Handel was the most successful impresario in England, but by the 1730s, Handel’s Italian opera had gone out of fashion, and he turned increasingly to the English oratorio. His oratorios—dramatic renderings of Biblical stories familiar to his English audiences—were enormously successful, and their popularity endured and grew long after Handel’s death. Messiah of 1741 is, of course, Handel’s most enduring “hit,” but it is somewhat unusual among his oratorios in that his text is a pastiche of direct quotes from the King James version of the Bible. We open with the most dramatic sequence of the Christmas section: a series of three recitatives, the angels speaking to the shepherds, culminating in the exuberant chorus Glory to God. The finale of the set is the famed Hallelujah chorus. While this familiar and joyful chorus is actually the conclusion of the Easter section of the oratorio, it has long since become a standard part of the Christmas season as well.
 

The set continues with music by Felix Mendelssohn. In 1840, Mendelssohn was working as a conductor in Leipzig, and composed a short cantata, his Festgesang (Festival Song) for a civic festival honoring the 400th anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It was performed in Leipzig’s market square on June 24, 1840 by chorus of 200 men, accompanied by 16 trumpets, 20 trombones, and timpani. We present the second movement, Vaterland, in deinen Gauen here. If this section of a fairly obscure Mendelssohn cantata sounds familiar, it is because, in 1855, English organist William Cummings adapted it to set a Christmas text by the great 18th-century hymn-writer Charles Wesley: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.

Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky composed his ballet The Nutcracker for a performance in St. Petersburg during the Christmas season of 1892. It remains a staple of the ballet repertoire, and his suite of movements from the ballet is one of the most popular orchestral works ever written. Despite its enduring fame, Tchaikovsky was convinced at the time that he had written a flop. He didn’t particularly like the E.T.A. Hoffmann story that was selected as the basis for the ballet, and fought with the original choreographer about every detail. Thankfully, his musical instincts prevailed, and he created a score full of wonderfully evocative music. We present five excerpts from this beloved ballet here.