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December 2004 Program Notes
Buon Natale! Feliz Navidad!: Christmas in Italy and Spain
by Mary Burke
Much is made in our society of the stress associated with the Christmas season: social and familial obligations, shopping, travel, cooking, relentless advertising, and of course the saturation bombing campaign known as Christmas music. For weeks on end, we are pelted with nearly infinite variations on the same handful of carols and popular songs, which hammer into our heads the stock images of snow, coziness, Santa, and reindeer at the secular end, or mangers, shepherds, angels, and Baby Jesus at the religious end. They pummel us at every turn, and by the time the holiday actually arrives, we are battered, dispirited hulks. No wonder the stress gets to us!
Fortunately, Baroque Christmas music offers us a vast array of repertoire that is not familiar enough to have bred contempt. Instead of rearranging the same tunes over and over, composers of the era typically had to produce new works every year for their churches or patrons. Standard texts certainly did appear repeatedly, being intrinsic parts of the liturgy, but the settings could be as varied and exquisite as orchids. Tonight's program includes a number of works that are not explicitly connected with the Nativity, but remain appropriate for the season.
We tend to associate the name of Antonio Vivaldi primarily with concerti, secondarily with sonatas, and lastly with everything else he wrote. One of the things he is least known for is sacred vocal music, despite his having written over 60 such works (although for a composer as prolific as Vivaldi, 60 pieces doesn't amount to such a lot). Of these, his grand orchestral setting of the Gloria (RV 589) has achieved the greatest popularity. Many of the others were concerted settings of psalms and other sacred texts, some of which he set multiple times in various keys and configurations. For example, he produced three different settings of Psalm 113 (Laudate pueri Dominum), as well as arrangements of them. Tonight we will hear RV 600, his only minor-key version of the text. He set the Marian antiphon Salve Regina four times; tonight we will hear RV 617, the only surviving setting for solo voice. Between the influence of opera and his own instincts as a violinist, it is perhaps not surprising that his writing for voice in these works contains some "frankly exhibitionistic" passages, as Grove puts it. The Salve Regina makes a particularly appropriate opening work for a Christmas concert, as the antiphon's liturgical season ends just as Advent begins.
The other vocal works on tonight's program represent a very different approach from the opulent Roman ecclesiastical style of Vivaldi, though they were also written by a man of the cloth. Antonio Soler, a monk of the Hieronymite order, became the organist and later maestro de capilla of the monastery at El Escorial, long a center of learning and music in Spain. Though known primarily as a theorist and writer of keyboard music, Soler also produced numerous vocal works, most of which were (not surprisingly) sacred pieces.
Some 125 of these last were villancicos, a uniquely Spanish genre; originally a secular form of poetry and song dealing largely with rustic themes and characters, the villancico was gradually assimilated by the church, becoming a fixture of sacred music throughout the Iberian peninsula in the Baroque period. Gradually the villancico took on some of the recitative-aria structure of the Italian cantata, but it retained much of its traditional character, and continued to be sung in the vernacular rather than Latin. The tonadilla had its basis in traditional theater, originating as a strophic song (again featuring rustic characters) leading into a dance, to be performed between the acts of a play. Tonadillas could also appear in ecclesiastical works, such as Soler's Niños.
Arcangelo Corelli never became as much of a household name as Handel or Vivaldi, but they couldn't have done it without him. Although Corelli's own compositional output amounted to just a few dozen instrumental works, that handful of pieces, combined with his work as a performer and teacher, set the standard for instrumental writing (and violin playing) for generations. His Opus 6 collection of concerti grossi essentially codified the genre and became one of very few Baroque works to outlive both the composer and the era; the concerti received reprints and performances well into the 19th century, while luminaries like Bach and Vivaldi faded into obscurity with dizzying speed. Although the concerti were not published until after Corelli's death, he had been performing and revising them for years, so their influence was being felt all over Europe before they ever saw print.
The best-loved member of the set is the eighth, also known as the Christmas Concerto. This piece would likely have been performed on Christmas Eve, perhaps as part of a palace celebration prior to midnight Mass, or even during the Mass itself. Its most Christmasy feature (arguably the only one) is the final pastorale, a musical representation of the shepherds coming to Bethlehem to worship the newborn Jesus. Handel and Bach later used the same device in their great Christmas works.
Rounding out the program is a concerto grosso by Handel, which has no particular connection to the holiday, but feels appropriately festive. Completed in 1739, Handel's Opus 6 paid tribute to Corelli's. Handel had already published a set of concerti grossi before this one, but those included wind instruments, while Op. 6 kept to Corelli's string ensemble. The fifth of the set was composed in just three days, perhaps because Handel employed the labor-saving device of recycling: Several movements include material from his own Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, which in turn used material by Muffat, and a theme from Scarlatti turns up in the second Allegro—but, oddly enough, he borrows nothing from Corelli.
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