“If Mozart Wrote Christmas Carols!” --A Look at Musical Styles

“”‘’—
First of all, greetings of the season to all who visit this page!  Some of my friends think it’s silly to go about greeting everyone at this time if one is an atheist, but I think that’s going too far.  Just because we reject the mythology doesn’t mean we reject every single bit of the cultural overflow of the ‘holy’ festivals, too!  Perhaps cynically, the Roman church leaders conflated the birth of Jesus with the several midwinter festivals that were observed throughout most of the northern hemisphere.  Some of these had superstitious overtones, while many of them were simply an opportunity to gather with families, so that the womenfolk could keep company together, while the guys probably got drunk.  I personally don’t feel the need to join in the general inebriation, even if I don’t condemn it entirely!  (Just walk home, don’t drive, fellas.)

Christmastime is when I relegate music to the background, and when I was younger and more energetic, I made tapes of Christmas music, then CDs, and now, just playlists, so that I could have the sort of music I wanted while we played cards, or had dinner, or did the cooking.  But others have had the same idea, and on YouTube you get a number of compilations of this type.  One of these, startlingly, was entitled: “If Mozart Wrote Christmas Carols.”

I get the idea.  Mozart is a stand-in for the generic classical composer.  We classical music buffs know just a little too much to be able to view one classical composer to be typical of all of them.  Even Bach, who died just a couple of years before Mozart was born, wrote music in —what is to me, at least— completely different styles, and Mozart wrote in a completely different style to, say, Brahms (though you can sometimes hear how M. influenced B).

Bach
To the delight of all of us, I’m sure, there is an 19th-century composer who wrote one of the most popular arrangements of a Christmas carol that is performed by good choirs even today: Robert L. Pearsall’s setting of In dulci jubilo.  Though Pearsall was born in 1794 (a couple of years after Mozart’s death), he wrote in a style much closer to Bach’s style than almost anyone else I know.  Here it is:



But even this highly Bach-like setting (a harmonization of a carol or hymn is called a setting, rather than an arrangement) doesn’t sound anything like the setting of J. S. Bach himself of this same carol.  (Incidentally, the Bach organ prelude based on In dulci jubilo is almost the definitive organ postlude for the end of a service of carols.)  Here it is, sung by one of my favorite choirs: The Sixteen Choir, led by Harry Christophers.

If Mozart had taken it into his head to write a setting of this carol (and it seems to me not the sort of thing to inspire him), it would probably have sounded very different indeed.  There are a number of pieces written in the last decade or so that are quite clever parodies of Mozart and the better-known classical composers; This is "What if Mozart wrote I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" which does not sound very much like Mozart.  (It does sound like Mozart-like present-day writing; composer who turn out the incidental music for TV dramas set in the 19th century like to write this sort of thing; Mozart was highly admired in the UK at that time by the Middle Class, while the more highbrow musical specialists probably liked Wagner and Brahms.)

While most people who know little about classical music (but who probably like it a lot) think that Mozart was the central figure around whom classical music revolved, there really isn’t a single composer who can fill that symbolic spot; we would need someone who is a sort of composite of Wagner, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and maybe a little Chopin thrown in.

Bach did write a number of carol settings, or rather, Christmas hymn settings.  We’ve already heard In dulci jubilo; he also wrote wonderful settings of Vom Himmel hoch, a favorite German Christmas carol, Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern, or How Brightly Beams the Morning Star, and the two gorgeous settings of hymns for the Christmas Oratorio: Break forth O beauteous Heavenly Light, and Beside thy Cradle here I stand.

Here is a performance of How Brightly Beams the Morning Star, by Maasaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan.  This should knock your socks off.

Incidentally, Tchaikovsky did actually write a lovely carol, called The Legend.  This performance is by the choir of King's College, Cambridge University.

Another major classical composer who wrote a Christmas piece that is performed by choirs today is Hector Berlioz, taken from a larger Christmas work: L'Infance du Christ.  This is called The Shepherd's Farewell.

[To be continued]