Master of the Nativity of Castello (fl. 1450–1500), image accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
I’d always kind of assumed that the answer to this question would involve something high-flown and theological about the incarnation of Christ, but that’s not really the case. This text, which has been set to some of the most sublime music ever written, is all about the earthy details of the Christmas story. Does that surprise you? It did me, when I actually took the time to look at the translation.
Before I go any further, here’s the Latin original with the English version:
O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, iacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Iesum Christum. Alleluia!
O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord, Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!
I had never noticed this before analyzing the carol for this post, but the ivy is mentioned in the first line and then it just disappears. Here are the first two lines:
The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.
Wouldn’t you expect that there would be a third line explaining the role of the ivy, something that starts out with “Of all the vines that are in the wood, the ivy bears . . . ” But there isn’t. Here’s somewhat of a explanation from an academic website:
The lyrics are somewhat puzzling. The first line is “The Holly and the Ivy,“ yet ivy is mentioned nowhere else in the carol except in the last verse, which is a repeat of the first verse. Holly is given the starring role in the song and ivy is ignored, so it seems strange that ivy is even mentioned.
The explanation that is often given is that the first line in the carol is a remnant of the old custom of linking holly and ivy together. In the rest of the carol ivy isn’t needed. The “holly” in the carol refers to Christ and the theme of the carol is his life. (“English Ivy Symbolism, Traditions, and Mythology“)
My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a great jazzy arrangement of “I[‘ve] Got No Strings” by Paul Langford. The original song was written for the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and was also released the same year, with slightly different lyrics, by Decca Records. Most post-1940 performances use the Decca lyrics, I suspect because they fit into a more generalized meaning than the film’s wording, which is closely tied to the scene at the marionette theater where Pinocchio performs along with other, stringed puppets. I’ll include videos and lyrics for the two different versions at the end of this post.
The original story of the wooden puppet who comes to life was written by an Italian, Carlo Collodi, in the late 1800’s. His tale is considerably darker than the Disney version. Pinocchio is downright nasty! He kills Jiminy Cricket! With a hammer! (The cricket reappears as a ghost later on in the story.) There’s a lot of violence in the original that doesn’t appear in the film: Pinocchio goes to sleep with his feet propped up on the stove and wakes up to find that they’ve burned off; Geppetto makes him some new ones. Pinocchio bites off a cat’s front paw when the cat is disguised as a bandit. At one point Pinocchio is being hanged, but apparently he’s taking too long to die and so his would-be murderers, the cat and the fox, wander off. The Turquoise/Azure/Blue Fairy rescues him. And so on.
Imagine, if you will, a film with tremendous star power, including Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro in the two leading roles, a spectacular setting centered around a South American waterfall that’s 100 feet higher than Niagara Falls, and cinematography if the highest order, and yet . . . it didn’t even earn enough in theaters to repay production costs. And it’s remembered today almost solely for its soundtrack, whose composer Ennio Merricone was best known up till that time for his music in the so-called “spaghetti westerns” that included The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
The great film critic Roger Ebert said that:
The Mission feels exactly like one of those movies where you’d rather see the documentary about how the movie was made. You’d like to know why so many talented people went to such incredible lengths to make a difficult and beautiful movie – without any of them, on the basis of the available evidence, having the slightest notion of what the movie was about. There isn’t a moment in The Mission that is not watchable, but the moments don’t add up to a coherent narrative. At the end, we can sort of piece things together, but the movie has never really made us care. (“The Mission”)
various images of the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, accessed via the website https://mariocastelnuovotedesco.com/new-light-on-intellectuals-who-fled-fascist-italy/
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Falls in Love with Spain and the Guitar
How likely is it that an 18-year-old Italian Jewish boy was given a trip to Spain as a graduation gift by his parents and fell in love with the country even though he never returned? That seems to have indeed happened to the young Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, so much so that “It was in Spain, as nowhere else that he felt at home…the experience left him with deep impressions that would one day be reflected in his music.”
Indeed, Castelnuovo-Tedesco is a completely fascinating character, who lived a remarkable life even as he dealt with the traumas of bad health, anti-Semitism, and a total uprooting of his life. There is no way I can deal with his biography in any thorough way at all, but I’d encourage you to at least read the Wikipedia article about him if he sounds interesting to you. (But I will include the tidbit here that his hyphenated last name came about because of an inheritance requirement put on his grandfather. You’ll see in the following material that sometimes I just use the initials of his last name.) It’s fascinating to note that a chance meeting with the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia at a music festival in Venice sparked C-T’s eventual composition of over 100 works for the guitar, an instrument he knew nothing about and had never played before this point. But for some reason Segovia asked the composer to write a piece for him. C-T said yes at the time, but later had second thoughts:
Dear Segovia: It would be a great pleasure to write something for you, because I have had the occasion to admire you many times. However, I must confess that I do not know your instrument and I do not have the remotest idea on how to compose for it.
But the great guitarist persisted, encouraging the composer to study other works for the guitar, and eventually C-T sent along his “Variazioni attraverso I secoli” (“Variations Across the Centuries”). Segovia replied that: “It is the first time I have met a musician who understands immediately how to write for the guitar.”
The German town of Speyer, where the Five Hebrew Love Songs was first performed. Image accessed via Pixabay.
Sometimes the genesis of a now-popular piece can be almost unbearably poignant in light of the present. Such is the case with the popular Five Hebrew Love Songs with music by Eric Whitacre and lyrics by Hila Plitmann. Both composer and lyricist have been extremely open about the meaning of the words. Here, for example, is a relevant paragraph from Whitacre’s website, describing how the songs came about in 1996 as the result of a request from the violinist Friedemann Eichhorn:
Because we were appearing as a band of traveling musicians, ‘Friedy’ asked me to write a set of troubadour songs for piano, violin and soprano. I asked [then-girlfriend] Hila (who was born and raised in Jerusalem) to write me a few ‘postcards’ in her native tongue, and a few days later she presented me with these exquisite and delicate Hebrew poems. I set them while we vacationed in a small skiing village in the Swiss Alps, and we performed them [Plitmann sang the soprano part] for the first time a week later in Speyer.
No. Hey, that was easy, wasn’t it? You can just stop reading now if you want to.
However, if you’d really like to know what “Scarborough Fair” is about, I’ll say that the true meaning is probably quite different from the impression you have. That was certainly the case for me, as I always vaguely thought as I listened to Simon and Garfunkel that the song was about a pining lover asking someone to say hello to a former true love if that someone was going to the fair where presumably the former true love was going to be. A wistful “Say ‘hi’ to him/her for me,” in other words, perhaps in the hope that the lover would say, “Oh yeah–I should get in touch.” (This sort of thing never happens.)
Pallbearers leaving Westminster Abbey at the end of Diana’s funeral, as they were accompanied by “Athene.” Image accessed via Parade Magazine.
John Tavener was one of the most intriguing, unconventional, and prolific composers in British music, but it’s fair to say that at least for Americans he’s known for only a couple of pieces, notably “The Lamb” and “Song for Athene.” When my own choir sang that first piece I was woefully ignorant about Tavener, thinking that he was some sort of musical flash in the pan. After all, he’d said, “‘The Lamb’ came to me fully grown and was written in an afternoon and dedicated to my nephew Simon for his 3rd birthday.” Doesn’t that quotation make him sound like someone who just jots down musical compositions as the inspiration strikes him, without taking too much thought?
In reality, this picture of John Tavener as a dilettante is very misleading. As I’ve read about the composer’s work and life (he died in 2013 at the age of 69), it’s become very clear that he worked extremely hard on his compositions and took his work very seriously. He also took his religious faith seriously, converting to the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1977. But don’t think that he was some kind of stern and forbidding sourpuss! He also loved fast cars and had a famous collection of them. He seems to have been one of those rare people who just plunges into life in all sorts of ways. This zesty approach is all the more fascinating when you realize that he suffered from serious health issues for most of his adult life, having had a serious stroke in his thirties as well as several heart attacks and cancer. This panoply of disorders probably stemmed at least partially from the fact that he had a condition called “Marfan’s syndrome,” a genetic disease that attacks the heart and usually leads to abnormal height. Tavener was 6 feet 6 inches tall; most medical historians believe that Abraham Lincoln suffered from the same disease. But Tavener (like Lincoln) didn’t let his suffering dampen his humor: “He told a reporter from London’s Guardian newspaper that doctors couldn’t pinpoint a cause of some of the pain he was enduring. ‘All they ever say is, “You’re lucky to be here at all!’” Tavener said, ‘which is charming.’” But he also saw the spiritual side: “Suffering is a kind of ecstasy, in a way. . . . Having pain all the time makes me terribly, terribly grateful for every moment I’ve got.” (both quotations from “In Memoriam of a Genius”)
The Anointing of Solomon by Cornelis de Vos. According to 1 Kings 1:39, Zadok anointed Solomon as king. Image accessed via Wikipedia.
To answer that question it’s necessary to delve into the following ideas:
1. A history of British coronations dating back to 973.
2. An explanation of why a German composer, George Frederick Handel, was commissioned to write a set of coronation anthems for a British ceremony in 1727.
3. A look at the source of the actual text for the anthem referencing said Zadok.
Let’s start with #3. Zadok was the high priest of Israel at the time of King Solomon’s coronation around 970 BCE. The story about his role in this event comes from the book of I Kings in the Jewish Bible; the text for the anthem is shortened and simplified to read:
The miniature gem “Gaelic Blessing” written by John Rutter in 1978 has an interesting connection with the choral music scene in the US. How did that happen with an English composer and a Scottish text? It all started with one of those inexplicable human connections that can never be completely teased out.
John Rutter started his long relationship with America in 1974 when he was contacted by a church choir director, Mel Olson, in Omaha Nebraska, and asked to write a 20-minute piece for Olson’s Chancel Choir. How did someone from Omaha even know about John Rutter, then in the very early stages of his composing career? I don’t know for sure, but it seems possible that Olson had gotten hold of Rutter’s early Christmas music and liked it. Whatever the reason, Rutter was very pleased to get the commission and ended up writing his magnificent Gloria. As he said in answer to my inquiry when I wrote about that piece, “Other commissions from the USA just seemed to follow, to the point where I was able to look upon America as my second home.” And one of those commissions was for “Gaelic Blessing” in 1978, but this time it was the Chancel Choir that reached out for a piece they could dedicate to Olson. I haven’t been able to find a detailed description of Olson’s career, but I’m wondering if this was a farewell gift to him from that choir because he was leaving Omaha. He ended up at in California, where in 1985 he was involved in the initial performances of Rutter’s Requiem.
No. Hey, that was easy, wasn’t it? You can just stop reading now if you want to.
