One of the paradoxes of the modern Christmas is that we spend a terrific amount on the celebration before the feast and then terminate it abruptly just as it should be going strong. So, the festive season starts sometime in late November, and culminates on Christmas Day, with another effort at festivity on New Year’s Eve. But it shouldn’t be so, and it wasn’t always so.
By way of proof, take the Bach Christmas Oratorio, which is designed to be sung over the course of the Twelve Days of Christmas, starting on the first day of Christmas.
On Tuesday this week, the initial three days’ cantatas were performed at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square by the Monteverdi choir conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. He is an astonishingly charismatic conductor, a better looking version of the actor Bill Nighy, with a trademark velvet jacket with a flash of scarlet or pink at the sleeves and a notional age of 79 – he’s coming up for his 80th birthday.
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is one of his party pieces. “To me”, he writes, “Christmas without Bach is unthinkable. No other musician before or since has captured the wondrous essence of the Nativity, the miracle of the Virgin birth, and the coming of God’s light into the world, coinciding with the turning of the sun at the winter solstice….He explores a stupendous range of timbres, from the irresistible elan of his festive trumpets and drums, to the haunting pastoral hues for the arrival of the shepherds at the stable, and the glittery sheen of the majestic horns who accompany the Magi to Bethlehem.”
And it was a moving performance, on a cold winter’s night, with the audience squashed into the pews of this elegant, utterly Protestant church. The exuberant trumpets and flutes for the birth of Christ are followed by the brightness of the shepherds’ pastoral for the annunciation by the choir of angels and then there’s more trumpets and drums when they go to visit the infant at Bethlehem.
As Sir John points out, many of the component parts are unabashedly taken from music written for a secular theme, something that wouldn’t have bothered the first congregation.
The oratorio is in six parts, six self contained cantatas each meant to be sung on different days of Christmas. The first part is composed for Christmas Day, the next for St Stephen’s Day, the third for St John’s day and the latter three bring us to the Epiphany and the journey of the Magi to Bethlehem. So the congregation would have been turning up to church to hear these cantatas over the entire 12 days of Christmas. Although they were designed to be performed separately, they make an harmonious, celebratory whole.
But the point is that the faithful in Leipzig didn’t imagine that Christmas concluded on the day after Christmas; they were in it for the long haul, and their reward for continuing the festivities was to hear these wonderful pieces through the season.
The second part of the performance takes place today (Thursday 15th December)…hurry and try to catch it. But what would be really good would be to hear the music, as intended, for each feast in turn, concluding with a final performance for the Epiphany. A performance after Christmas would make complete sense.
So, if you’re not lucky enough to see Sir John conduct in person, you can catch up on the concert on Stage +, a video and audio streaming service from Deutsche Grammophon (there’s a free 14-day trial period). Try to string it out over the whole festive season, ending with the cantata celebrating the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem and the promise that “death, devil, sin and hell are utterly diminished”.
Even if a secular society is busy putting out the tree and taking down the decorations, you can finish the season with a flourish of trumpets and drums for the three kings. That’s how we should conclude the 12 days of Christmas…with a blast.
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