In dulci jubilo!

The German-speaking lands have accumulated a large and rich body of Christmas music—liturgical, paraliturgical and popular—that in one form or another has been in constant use from the Middle Ages to the present. Some texts and tunes derive from late medieval hymns or hearken back into oral tradition. The great proliferation of such music, however, came during the Renaissance, in the century or so following the Reformation. Many settings were based on Lutheran chorales or were arrangements of popular songs. The great beauty and enduring charm of such pieces as Vom Himmel hoch reside in the sweetness and almost childlike simplicity of their melodies, often set to lush, modal harmonies with a characteristically German predilection for dark colors and dense textures in part writing. During the late 16th and 17th centuries, composers used many of these pieces as the basis for grand, celebratory works, often crafting elaborate settings for multiple choirs and instrumental ensembles, such as the arrangements of Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern and Gelobet seist du performed this evening.

Michael Prætorius, the leading creator of such compositions and the central figure on this program, was probably the most versatile and prolific composer of his generation. A devout Lutheran, he spent his professional life working as organist, Kantor, and Kapellmeister in a number of centers in northern Germany. A product of post-Reformation bourgeois society, he was for his time a man of tremendous erudition, a polymath who was well versed in philosophy, theology, and languages (including Greek and Hebrew and Latin) in addition to his formidable theoretical and practical understanding of music. His special area of concern was the vernacular Protestant hymn; he wrote over 1,000 compositions based on these hymns, as well as a significant number of liturgical works in Latin, not to mention a collection of popular music, and the massive encyclopedic treatise Syntagma Musicum. If, as conventional wisdom has it, his contemporary Heinrich Schütz was the greatest German composer of the age—the 17th century’s equivalent of Bach—then Prætorius was surely its Handel, infusing his compositions with a sense of joy and wonder which is nowhere more evident than in his music for the Christmas season.

Prætorius’ life spanned the transition from the High Renaissance to the early baroque—one of the major watersheds of Western musical history. Like all great composers, he was a synthesizer, assimilating the practices of his predecessors and contemporaries and using them as springboards for new musical applications that were far ahead of his countrymen—even Schütz. In terms of his personal stylistic growth, Prætorius studied and integrated the practices of Italian, German, and Franco-Flemish masters from Josquin des Pres through Claudio Monteverdi. His earliest works are imitations of the great High Renaissance masters, particularly Roland de Lassus. He subsequently turned to earlier German and Franco-Flemish composers for inspiration, enriching his harmonic language and broadening his command of polyphonic composition. He also began to structure his compositions as antiphonal works for multiple choirs, following the examples of more recent Venetian composers, notably Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. His last great outpouring of music, from which the works on this evening’s program are drawn, show influences of the latest developments from the emerging Italian baroque, including greatly elaborated polychoral settings for up to twenty independent voices, as well as dedicated instrumental obbligato lines, florid melodic ornamentation, contrasting sections for smaller and larger ensembles, concerto-like refrains, and use of a continuous accompanying bass line.

Yet another important dimension to Prætorius’ synthesis was his practical concern with concrete problems of performance. This sensitivity to pragmatic problems, unusual for his time, likely had two roots: Most fundamentally, as a follower of Luther, Prætorius held a deep conviction that sacred music was the property of an entire community of worshippers, not only the professional musicians and/or professionally religious among them. He thus understood and indeed intended that his music might be performed by ensembles of vastly different size, composition, and skill. For this reason he included in his last great collection, the Polyhymnia, detailed instructions for adapting his elaborate works for smaller ensembles, compensating for the absence of specific instruments, even coping with varying degrees of musical literacy.

Also not to be underestimated in this regard was Prætorius’ encyclopedic interest in the possibilities of textural and tonal variety, opened up by the Renaissance’s unprecedented refinement and proliferation of musical instruments. De Organographia (the second volume of Prætorius’ Syntagma) is an exhaustive treatise on the families of instruments—written, significantly, in the vernacular, so as to be more useful to practicing musicians. His discussion in this volume is remarkable not only for its comprehensiveness and theoretical sophistication, but for its many practical suggestions concerning the use of particular instruments.

What makes Prætorius’ output not simply eclectic, but a great synthesis in its own right, was his ability, demonstrated over and again, to integrate and direct his familiarity with diverse instruments and his mastery of different compositional styles to the service of particular musical—and, not incidentally, theological—ends. Prætorius’ skill in setting sacred texts went far beyond creating a musical mood or the simple word painting that were commonplace among Renaissance composers. It was a skill he applied with increasing sophistication as his own compositional style evolved. His early adoption of Venetian polychoral technique was a foundation of his strategy, since the short phrases and relatively homophonic movement characteristic of that style allowed him to bring words and phrases into greater prominence than in earlier polyphonic music. But as his music became more complex, particularly in the Polyhymnia, he moved away from simple dialogues between choirs and constructed much more intricate, polyphonic interactions among the individual voices within and among choirs. In order to maintain the prominence of textual meaning within these more complex settings—and, in effect, to preach more powerfully the words he was setting—he began to structure his compostitions as a series of contrasting sections, in which different rhythms, textures, and colors (achieved through carefully specified choices of instrumental obbligatos) served to express the various sentiments and meanings within a given text. This was a remarkable accomplishment; it was in effect the first important German use of Monteverdi’s principles implicit in the Vespers of 1610; indeed it was an extension of them in terms of their application to a much broader range of vernacular sacred texts. In this achievement, Prætorius laid the groundwork for development of the German Church Cantata form, which would reach its fullest flower a century later in the great works of Bach and his contemporaries.

The musical arrangements in this evening’s concert follow broadly in the spirit of Prætorius’ suggestions, as outlined in the Polyhymnia and Syntagma Musicum` II and III. The music is essentially Prætorius’, performed in some cases without addition or modification; but in many of the works Mr. Babbitt has expanded or rearranged parts, as well as adding his own newly composed instrumental lines in some places—all very much as a 17th-century Kapellmeister would have done for an especially festive occasion, using as his guides the suggestions in the Syntagma and Polyhymnia. In these arrangements Mr. Babbitt has been particularly concerned with honoring Prætorius’ ideas concerning the use of instrumental groups to color the sound of vocal ensembles. In his polychoral arrangements, Prætorius recommended mixing specific types of instruments with different voice groups, both to create variety and presumably to reinforce the varied sonorities of the human voice.

An interesting feature of the music performed this evening, taken as a whole, is its prominent mixture of vernacular and Latin text—often within the same composition. The extreme case is the Magnificat, the Latin canticle of Mary, which Prætorius, like countless other German composers from before the Reformation through the time of Bach, interspersed with popular Christmas carols, themselves set in varying combinations of Latin and German. While such mixing is certainly characteristic of German Christmas music, it also figures in many other traditions (compare, for instance, the English carols of the 15th century and the Spanish Christmas villancicos of the 16th and 17th centuries). It therefore would be a mistake to think of it as reflecting a uniquely German or Protestant sensibility. Its significance more likely lies in the multiple meanings and ambiguous origins of Christmas itself, with their popular and even secular components, and with the Christian extrapolation of that ambiguity into a way of showing the humanness of the Divine Presence on earth and symbolically of the ability of everyone, however imperfect, to come worship the Redeemer of All Nations.