Martin Luther is generally
acknowledged to be a badass hymnist—he made congregational singing a key
fixture in the Lutheran worship service, so it makes sense that some extra
primo good Christmas music should come out of that tradition.
What you may not know is that
one of the 19th Century’s great translators of German Lutheran
hymns was an Englishwoman named Catherine Winkworth. Daughter of a silk
merchant, Winkworth was influenced by a couple of Unitarian ministers and
brought a lot of power to expanding hymnody. Not even in her 20s, after
spending a year in Dresden, she published a book called Lyra Germanica,
which was a collection of German hymns she liked and had translated. Winkworth
essentially opened up the world of Lutheran music to Anglophones, which
enriched Advent for us all.
In addition to her interests
in German and sacred music, Winkworth actively promoted women’s rights,
particularly to education. But my first introduction to her intelligence was a
delicious pun that was published in Punch when she was 16
years old. In 1844, Britain was expanding and solidifying its hold on India,
and one of its imperial coups occurred when General Charles James Napier’s
ruthless campaign to conquer the province of Sindh. In a droll play on two
languages, Winkworth remarked to her teacher that Napier could have announced
his victory with a single word, “peccavi”—Latin for “I have sinned.”
The pun has been credited to
Napier himself, perhaps by persons who could not believe a female—much less a
teenaged one—capable of such dexterity. But records back her as the author.
Today, we’ll have a
Luther-written Advent hymn translated by Winkworth. The text of “Comfort,
Comfort Ye My People” is based on Isaiah 40: 1-5. The German was published in
1671, set to a tune called “Freu Dich Sehr”, a setting for Psalm 42 that dated
about 100 years earlier. (Today it’s known as Genevan 42, from the Genevan
Psalter.)
You can hear the Renaissance
in this music—almost see glittering court dancers moving in and out in an
intricate pattern, possibly alternating with wassail. And at the same time, it
feels so contemporary, as though you might expect speakers-in-tongues dancing
in the church aisles. Yeah, a lot of dancing in this one.
Full of joy and energy; let’s
have some of that today.
Here’s the Saint Olaf College
Cantorei singing it. If you feel like dancing, that’s absolutely allowed.
Encouraged, even.
If you’ll recall, this year, I’m pulling in my own favorite
seasonal music, because I frankly need a boost. And one of my favorite
collections of said music is the 1991 A Carnegie Hall Christmas Concert,
which featured operatic sopranos Kathleen Battle and Frederica von Stade (also
two of my favorites), trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the American Boychoir.
Today I’m sharing Battle and von Stade singing “Gesù
Bambino”, magically intertwining their voices in this beautiful piece, rippling
in a swirling pattern, like water bubbling down a hillside.
Pietro Alessandro Yon wrote “Gesù
Bambino” in 1917, one of the darkest years of World War I. At the time, he was
running his music studio (which was located in Carnegie Hall), where he taught
students pursuing liturgical music. The melody was used by Frederick H. Martens
for his own Christmas carol, “When Blossoms Flowered ‘mid the Snows”, which I
confess I have never heard.
I love the refrain:
Osanna, osanna cantaro
Con giubilante cor
I tuoi pastori ed angeli
O re di luce e amor
Your shepherds and angels sang
hosanna, hosanna with jubilant heart, O king of light and love.
On Friday, my sister’s body won the fight with her brain.
By the time she died, at 0300 on Saint Nicholas Day, she’d been under sedation
for a week; she must have been exhausted from acting out all the bizarre orders
her disease had been giving her. Everyone who loved her—which is to say,
everyone who knew her—was heartsick at her passing, but relieved that the
struggle was over. She lasted just about three years after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
I am grateful that three years is all that bastard got of
her life. And I am so grateful that I had so many decades of her life to share.
Up until the diagnosis, Penny enjoyed her wine. Red or white,
many’s the glass she and I had with many, many the meal. She taught me how to
pour sparkling wine so it doesn’t fizz over the rim of the glass. (At the time
of teaching, I’d been drinking champagne for a fair few years, but clearly I still
had things to learn.) I think of that every single time I pour some bubbly, and
I’m grateful.
When we made dinners from the Time-Life series Great
Meals in Minutes, we always started out by pouring ourselves a glass of the
specified wine. That may or may not have contributed to the fact that we did
not once ever get the meal on the table in the promised “less than 60
minutes”. But we had absolutely rollicking good times, for which I'm grateful.
And the meals were pretty good, too.
(When I saw her in February, she could remember that we
used to cook together, but could not recall the one we did every Christmas we
spent together, butterflied grilled leg of lamb with a savory sauce.)
There’s one wine-related incident that I think of every
time I have a glass of red. It was the 80s and we were having dinner at a
restaurant on the fringes of Old Town Pasadena. We had a bottle of red with the
meal (I don’t remember what main course I had, but the appetizer was carpaccio,
and it was stupendous) and then we decided to have a glass of dessert (red)
wine, which was quite nice. Penny being well known to the restaurant, the manager
came by and topped up our little glasses. At this point we realized that our
tongues had turned purple, so we sat there in the trendy restaurant, sticking
our tongues out at each other and laughing like maniacs.
(Don’t @ me about the fact that Penny drove us home. It was
the 80s and we were admittedly irresponsible that night. Big gratitude that all was well.)
Two years ago, when I took her and two of her friends out
to dinner, I was drinking a glass of red. I poked her and stuck out my tongue,
asking if it was purple. It was, and she remembered the dinner. That she did is
a blessing, and I am grateful for it.
Well—back to Advent. In Penny’s honor, today we’ll have one
of the approximately 12,347 variants of seasonal songs about mobs forming to
rove villages in search of booze. This version is from Gloucestershire, because
it’s called the “Gloucester/Gloucestershire Wassail Song”. I mean, I’m taking
that as a clue.
Wassail, in case you are a little unclear, is one of the
approximately 12,347 variants on mulled cider or wine or beer or mead. Mulling
involves heating [mead, wine, beer or cider]; adding spices such as ginger,
nutmeg, cinnamon and the like; and topping it with a slice of toasted bread, as
a sop. (Sop: you know—like the toasted slices of baguette or croutons on the
top of soup. Think: French onion soup.)
Oh, and it’s drunk from one big, communal bowl. No germ
theory here.
Wassail dates back to Medieval times. I don’t know when all
the spices started to be added, because they would have been extraordinarily
rare and prohibitively expensive during that period. And I’m not sure about the
significance of the toast being white; white flour and bread were also very
expensive, and therefore only the very wealthy could afford it.
The custom of wassailing—roving around the village singing
and demanding booze—is bifurcated. In apple and cider country in the west of
England, you go out to the orchards in mid-winter to, you know, wake them up.
To serve notice that the trees will have to shake off their winter sleep in a
couple of months, and get back to work, because those apples are key to the
local economy.
Wassailing through the village focuses on a kind of
jolly-faced exchange between the peasants and the landlord class: here we’ve
come to wish you well (wassail comes from Old English, and means “be thou
hale”), oh—and have you got any food and drink on you? Great. Hand it over.
This explains all the verses in the song about wishing the
master all the best: a good year, a good piece of beef, a good Christmas pie, a
good crop of corn, blah, blah, blah. Just the slightest bit on the toadying
side, but hey—it’s Tradition.
I’m giving you a performance of “Wassail” by the Utah State
University Chorus.
I especially love this version because—even though it’s
a Concert, they’re having such fun with it. I also love the fact
that, it being Utah State, and the composition of the performers and audience
is probably heavily Mormon and therefore strictly tee-total, they’re totally
delivering on the progressively tipsy nature of the piece.
Penny would have got such a kick out of this, and I’m
grateful for that, too.
We’re at Advent II, which is about peace and preparation.
Both are critical elements of the season—stepping away from the quotidian
madness to reflect upon the gift soon to be given, and to prepare for receiving
it. It is not, after all, a blender that you can put on your pantry shelf after
politely thanking the person who regifted it to you. No, no—we’re talking about
a paradigm-shifting, bootstrapping, disruptive thought leader here; this takes
considerable groundwork for those who are part of the distribution chain.
So today let’s have “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”. It’s
the first chorus in J.S. Bach’s cantata of the same name, BWV 140. It’s based
on a Lutheran hymn that predates Bach by about 125 years, and it’s about being
both alert and prepared for the arrival of the Messiah. The text references the
parable of the wise and foolish virgins—two groups of maidens waiting to greet
the bridegroom at a wedding. Only one group has really thought through—and
prepared for—this arrival; no prizes for guessing which one.
(Also, you can take it as read that this is one parable
that’s overdue for an update removing the sexist framing. Or at least mention
all the men at the wedding who are getting drunk on beer, shooting craps and
generally getting in the caterer’s way, all the while expecting someone else
to see to the lighting.)
Here’s a performance of it by the Amsterdam Baroque
Orchestra and Choir.
