Leroy Anderson
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Leroy Anderson (1908-1975), grouped with George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ives as an American music original, got the idea for the theme of Sleigh Ride as he dug in his Woodbury, Connecticut, yard for water pipes during a heat wave in 1946. As he dug and the perspiration soaked his clothes, he thought of a tall glass of ice water to quench his thrist, a thought that turned to winter and snow and then to racing over the countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh with a sharp, wintry breeze whipping across his cheeks. That was all the composer needed to conjure up a melody. For more than a year he worked to refine this theme, adding two additional parts to enclose the tune before he felt it worthy to premiere.
As with several works on tonight's program, Anderson's new 'holiday' minature took place not during the holiday season or even during winter, but at a May, 1948, concert of the Boston Pops, a group for whom Anderson had served as a sort of composer in residence for many years. It was such an immediate hit with the public that several recorded versions appeared within a year, including one with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops and one with the composer conducting.
A concert overture, Christmas Festival was arranged in 1950 by Anderson as a showpiece for his own orchestra. The compilation of melodies, whether by intent or by accident, illustrates both the secular and religious aspects of the season. It includes Joy to the World; Deck the Halls; God Rest ye Merry, Gentlemen; Good King Wenceslas; Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; The First Noel; Silent Night; Jingle Bells; O Come All Ye Faithful.
John Milford Rutter
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Composer John Milford Rutter (1945- ) is a British composer, arranger, and conductor who has been compared with English author Charles Dickens for the impact he has made on the Christmas season. Dickens produced the now classic A Christmas Carol and Rutter has composed and/or arranged more than thirty carols since he graduated Claire College, Cambridge. His Shepherd's Pipe Carol which he wrote while still in school has sold in sheet music alone nearly one and a half million copies.
Rutter, who specializes in choral music, considers himself in line with those British composers of the immediate past who had themselves written carols, composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, and others.
I think I’ve...been drawn to writing carols because there’s such a strong native [English] tradition. Christmas carols were the earliest form of vernacular choral literature permitted by the Church, back in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So even before the Reformation you could hear carols that combined English and Latin texts. The Christmas carol is, after all, one of very few musical forms which allows classically trained musicians to feel it’s permissible to write tunes without worrying about a kind of composers’ ‘political correctness’!
Star Carol (1972) was written for The Bach Choir and its then conductor, Sir David Willcocks, for performance at the choir’s hugely popular Christmas concerts in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The carol filled a request by Willcocks for a piece with a refrain which could be learned and sung by children during the concert – they were to enter at the point ‘See his star shining bright.'
Franz Xaver Gruber
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Several apocryphal stories surround the origin of the Christmas carol Stille Nacht (Silent Night). Was it the creation of an itinerant musician forced to seek refuge in an isolated church from a blinding snowstorm in the Tyrolean alps? Did the melody come from the pen of Mozart? Beethoven? Schubert, maybe? The Romantic heart knows no bounds when it comes to the fanciful re-imaginings of the mundane, but, in truth, the carol was the work of an assistant pastor Joseph Mohr (1792-1848) and his choir-master/organist friend Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863). The two men met on a Christmas Eve afternoon in 1818 in Gruber's apartment over the school at which Gruber taught. Mohr brought with him a poem he had written two years before while pastor in another village. He hoped Gruber would be able to set the words to music for the Midnight Mass that evening. In a few hours, Gruber had composed the music for Mohr's poem, and, that evening, they stood before the congregation at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria, to perform the song that would in twenty years become world famous.
Grove's Dictionary of Music offers the following information on the spread of the song from Oberndorf/Amsdorf to the wider world:
Karl Mauracher, an organ builder in the Zillertal, visited Arnsdorf in 1821, and must have been shown the song; Gruber referred to a ‘well-known Zillertaler’ who took the song to the Tyrol. It was probably taken to the Leipzig trade fair of 1831 by the Strasser family from the Zillertal, and first appeared in print in 1838 (‘slightly changed’, according to Gruber). Its fame spread rapidly: it came to be regarded as a Tyrolean folksong, and was eventually translated into many different languages.
In the late nineteenth century the song was attributed to various composers including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Only in recent years has the dispute been finally settled with the discovery of an arrangement of Stille Nacht in Joseph Mohr's hand with a note in the upper corner "Melody by Fr. Xav. Gruber."
Click Here for an audio example of verse one of the Gruber/Mohr original.
George Frederic Handel
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Messiah premiered the evening of April 13, 1742, as one of a series of charity concerts in Dublin, Ireland. George Frederic Handel (1685-1759), the German-born, Italian-educated, English citizen, composed this masterpiece over a three-week period during the summer of 1741 set to a libretto by Charles Jennens. Handel, depressed and in debt, followed his usual manner in composing, incorporating material from his earlier works and the works of other composers along with his original ideas. At the premiere, Handel led the singers from the harpsichord while Matthew Dubourg, an Irish violinist, composer, and conductor, led the orchestra. The original composition took approximately three and a half hours to perform, and little is known of the reception the work received at its premiere, but it was a success when Handel led a performance in London the following year. Not until 1818 did an American premiere take place in Boston.
Handel altered and revised Messiah depending on the occasion and the musical forces he had at his command, and it was only in 1754 that an 'authentic' version was presented at a benefit performance for London's Foundling Hospital. Yet, other notables have sought to improve on the original modest orchestration. Mozart expanded Handel's scoring by adding woodwinds and organ. Later, in the twentieth century, Eugene Goossens, composer and conductor, augmented Mozart's arrangement with the addition of more woodwinds and brass. Goossens' version was popular for a period of time, but it is seldom heard in a live performance today. The trend in performance now is to opt for the more modest orchestration of the original.
The choruses from Messiah offer some of the most inspiring and stirring music that Handel ever wrote. Of particular note is the most famous of them, the Hallelujah chorus. The text is taken from three verses in the New Testament book of Revelation in the King James version of the Bible. The chorus comes at the end of part two and tradition dictates that the audience stands at this point, as King George II did in Handel's time, to show deference to the King of Kings.
Irving Berlin
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White Christmas is considered the most popular song in America's history. The composer of the tune came to America with his family from a backward Russia, hoping to fulfill the great promise of his adopted land: In America, one can become whatever he wants to be, limited only by his own ambitions. Arriving in New York City in 1893, Irving Berlin (1888-1989) - Israel 'Izzy' Baline - and his family settled into an apartment on the squalid East Side, and 'Izzy' and his sisters started school. Fate intervened, however, and young Berlin found himself, following the sudden death of his father, on the streets of the city hawking newspapers to do his part in keeping the family together. With only two years of formal education, the young lad took in the flavor of his paper route, observing and noting the sights and sounds that drifted from the saloons and parlors that were part of his borough. His keen natural skills allowed him to quickly advance. In 1908 he was hired on at a saloon as a composer; in two years, he was hired by a song writing firm in Tin Pan Alley. He was moving on up by virtue of his abilities and for this he gave thanks to America - "God bless America," he would often quote his mother's favorite expression.
In 1911, Berlin had his first world-wide success, Alexander's Ragtime Band, a tune so infectious that it revived the ragtime mood that had gripped the country a decade before with Scott Joplin. From there, the rest of his life was the American dream, something he mentioned at every opportunity. In his sixty years plus of songwriting he estimated he had written more than 1,400 songs; for a time, he wrote a song a day, most often at night while the rest of the city slept. Berlin tirelessly supported the efforts of the country during two world wars. During World War II, he maintained a troupe of entertainers who traveled from camp to camp to keep up the morale of the troops; he was away from home and family for three and a half years. Fellow songwriter Jerome Kern gave Berlin the ultimate praise by stating that Berlin was not part of American music, but that "[H]e is American music."
Where, when, and how White Christmas came to be written is open to question. Berlin, as he often did with other of his songs, gave conflicting accounts. One account by Berlin states that in 1940 he was poolside at a hotel on a hot day in Phoenix, Arizona, when the words and tune came to him. He called his secretary in New York City and told her to get pencil and paper and copy down the words to the "greatest song that's ever been written." Another account relates that he was away from his family for an extended period in 1937 when his agent visited him and brought a short film of Berlin's family waving, laughing, and playing in the snow back East. Berlin, missing his family during the holiday season, waxed nostalgic and the words and music flowed easily from him.
Whatever the truth may be, the song was introduced in the wartime film Holiday Inn (1942), starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds. It became an immediate hit and provided Crosby his most enduring legacy. But for Berlin, of all his songs, God Bless America was the best.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), an English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores, was also a collector of English folk music and song which influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, beginning in 1904, containing many folk song arrangements set as hymn tunes, in addition to several original compositions. (His name is pronounced 'rayf' with his surname double-barreled, but without a hyphen.)
At the turn of the twentieth century, he was among the very first to travel into the countryside to collect folk-songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations to enjoy. As musical editor of The English Hymnal he composed several hymns that are now world-wide favorites (For all the Saints, Come down O love Divine). Later he also helped to edit The Oxford Book of Carols, with similar success.
Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols can be placed squarely in the mainstream of his folk-song works. It incorporates four traditional English carols treated in full: 'Come all you worthy gentlemen', 'This is the truth sent from above', 'On Christmas night all Christians sing' and 'God bless the ruler of this house, and long may he reign'. The first and the last of these came from Herefordshire and 'On Christmas Night' collected in Sussex by Vaughan Williams himself in 1904. Fragments of other well-known carols appear from time to time as linking passages or counter-melodies.
The score is notable for the opening cello solo and for the varied treatment of the choir, who are not only asked to sing conventionally, but also to do so with closed lips (as in the humming tone at the outset), to vocalise to 'ah' and to sing with half-closed lips, as the composer described it 'with a short "u" sound as in the word "but"' developing the choral treatment he had first used in the Five Mystical Songs. This makes for a very varied and atmospheric choral-orchestral texture. The Fantasia was first performed at the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford in September 1912 with the composer conducting.
Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky
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Peter Ily'ich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) considered his music for The Nutcracker ballet to be "infinitely poorer" than that of The Sleeping Beauty. Following the success of his opera Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), Tchaikovsky had accepted two commissions from the director of the Imperial Theatres - one for a ballet and another for a one-act opera. The director gave Tchaikovsky no options on the subject for the ballet; it was to be based on Alexandre Dumas père's adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffman's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Tchaikovsky liked neither Dumas' adaptation nor Hoffman's original story but felt compelled, for financial reasons, to fulfill his obligation.
He began work on the score in early 1892 prior to leaving for a successful tour of the United States. He finished the piece by late summer of the same year. To generate public enthusiasm for the ballet, the composer made a suite of eight of the numbers he had already completed and presented The Nutcracker Suite, Op. 72a to the St. Petersburg branch of the Musical Society on March 19, 1892. The complete ballet debuted in December 1892 to generally poor reviews. While the suite was an immediate success, the complete ballet did not achieve great popularity until the 1950s. It has since become standard Christmas fare.
Of special interest is Tchaikovsky's use of the then newly-invented instrument, the celesta. The composer was particularly intrigued by the heavenly sound the celesta produced and used it in several places throughout the score, but in no place more effective than in the 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' where it is a featured solo instrument.
Victor August Herbert
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At the turn of the twentieth century, no American composer enjoyed as much favor with the public as Victor August Herbert (1859-1924). Irish born, German educated, classically trained cellist of some European renown, Herbert arrived in New York City in 1886 with his wife, opera singer Therese Förster, both with commissions with the Metropolitan Opera. Herbert played cello with the orchestra, taught cello at the newly-established New York Conservatory of Music, and composed serious classical music. It was Herbert's performance of his own Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor in 1894 that inspired Antonin Dvořák, then supervisor of the Conservatory of Music, to write a Cello Concerto in B minor, premiered in 1895. Herbert's concerto, while a success at its premiere, has fared less well in public esteem than Dvořák's, but it has enjoyed a revival of sorts during the past two decades. Above all, Herbert wanted to be recognized as an opera composer. Of his two attempts at opera, Natoma and Madeleine, neither one achieved any lasting acclaim.
In the realm of American light opera, however, Herbert ruled supreme for nearly two decades. Herbert was familiar with the operetta, having witnessed the success in Europe of this particular art form in the works of Offenbach, Suppe, the Strauss brothers, Lehar, and others. And Gilbert and Sullivan were popular in the States, with local troupes dedicated to performing just their works. Herbert wrote his first operetta in 1894, two years before assuming conductor duties with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It was commissioned by a popular group, the Bostonians. Prince Ananias proved a success and Herbert composed three others for Broadway productions in short order. In total, the composer wrote more than forty operettas in the twenty years before World War I. After the war, the operetta as a popular form lost favor with the public, and Herbert turned to writing sophisticated dance music for other Broadway composers such as Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, Through all these years, however, he continued to produce more serious music, but other than a few pieces, none ever achieved a consistent concert presence.
March of the Toys comes from one of three or four Herbert operettas that have stood the test of time to be revived on occasion. Babes in Toyland (1903), The Red Mill (1910), and Naughty Marietta (1914) are still staged today, if not on Broadway, at least in local playhouse productions. The March is from Babes in Toyland, an operetta that Herbert and his librettist Glen MacDonagh wrote to specifically compete with a highly popular musical version of The Wizard of Oz, then taking Broadway by storm.
