Christian
Pastoral Poetry – The Pastorale
Christian
Pastoral Poetry – The Pastorale
That Johann
Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio constitutes for Central Europeans
today the embodiment of the sacred festival, to which only Handel’s Messiah comes
near in solemn splendour, should not deceive us into thinking that Bach’s
interpretation of the Christmas story in its formal unity and theological
statement is completely exceptional. However, it is less representative of the
long tradition of Christmas musical narratives from the Middle Ages to the present
day. These were robust, entertaining works, intended to be performed as lessons
on this fundamental chapter of Christian history.
Relics of
the great liturgical Christmas plays of the Middle Ages are found in the
popular shepherd and nativity plays found today in Catholic southern European
regions. Characteristically it was these very pastoral plays to which Baroque
composers were particularly devoted. Their preferred form, the Pastorale,
inspired by folk-music, was so immediately clear to audiences of the time that
Bach and Handel were able to incorporate them in their oratorios as
instrumental pieces, without fear of misunderstanding. The rocking 12/8 rhythm
and drone bass were stylistic features of music that was played in Rome every
year on Christmas Eve by shepherds from the Campagna on the zampogna (a
bagpipe typical of the region) and the shawm, which are still played today. Arcangelo
Corelli provided a musical model of this in the last movement of his Concerto
grosso in G minor, as an accompaniment to the performance of shepherd
scenes during the Christmas Mass. He has become as well-known for this movement
alone as he is for all his trio-sonatas and concerti grossi.
Ancient
Pastoral Poetry – The Accademia dell’Arcadia
Corelli’s
pastoral music in Rome had a significance of its own,
closely associated as it was with the numerous Roman academies of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most famous of them, the Accademia dell’Arcadia,
had in 1690 a number of prominent patrons, poets, and musicians, among them
Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Pasquini, Bononcini and Corelli himself,
meeting for the purposes of aesthetic decadence in the sane intellectual world
of a Utopian Arcadia. In the spirit of the bucolic world of Virgil’s Eclogues
a challenge was mounted to the overcharged poetry of the Roman High baroque
and its monumental music theatre. The participation of influential cardinals in
the Accademia dell’Arcadia shows that ancient heathen and Christian themes, as
touched on in the shepherd episodes of the Christmas narrative, were understood
always as common symbols of a better world.
From the
pastoral ideology of the Arcadians came a particularly rich quantity of
pastoral and Christmas music. Scarlatti’s cantata Oh di Betlemme and the
Concerto grosso fatto per la notte di natale of Corelli are outstanding
masterpieces of the genre.
Included in
this pastoral music are instrumental concertos in which the solo instruments
have a clear reference to Christmas events the oboe as a descendant of the old
shepherd shawm and the trumpet as a symbol of the power of God, heralding the
birth of the Christ child.
Michael
Struck-Schleon
From the
Concerto Grosso to the Solo Concerto
The
development of Baroque style is closely associated with the evolution of the Concerto
grosso. As in earlier choral works, a small solo group with its own
tone-colour and instrumental virtuosity is contrasted with the grosso,
the body of the string orchestra. This was the first suggestion of the
increasing emphasis given to individual personality, which as finally to find
its true from in the sole concerto.
The oldest
example included on this recording of this new formal principle is the Sonata
a otto viole con una tromba (Sonata for eight strings with a trumpet) by Stradella,
for two string orchestras. With the solo trumpet the dialogue between the
string groups takes on an extra dimension. The work was written in 1682 and
proclaims itself, in its four-movement form, a Sonata da chiesa (church
sonata).
The Concerto
grosso achieves its most perfect form in the twelve Concerti grossi,
Opus 6, of Corelli, published in Rome
in 1712, with the Christmas Concerto, included here, the best known.
During the
period of development from concerto grosso to solo concerto came two intermediate
forms, the opera-sinfonia and the concerto a cinque in which the solo
part with its virtuoso violin cadenza often has its own stave in the
score and a separate part-book, but is still bound in with the grosso.
The oboe concertos of Albinoni and Marcello are eloquent examples of this form.
As in the
secular solo concerto, so there developed subjective feeling and as increased
desire for expressiveness in the sacred solo motet, which took the place of the
choral motet in the first half of the eighteenth century. Contemplative empathy
with the life of Mart, the Christmas events and personal sharing in the Passion
narrative were the chief subjects of motets. Scarlatti’s Christmas cantata is
one of the earliest models of this new dramatic and emotional style of church
music.
The present
programme, therefore, brings together prescious compositions from the High
Baroque which are associated with the events of Christmas and which, in their
blend of the contemplative and festive, draw the modern listener under their
spell.
Helmut
Muller-Bruhl
(Adapted
from the German by Keith Anderson)