Review: Cambridge Early Music: Arcangelo: Schütz – The Christmas Story
The acclaimed early music ensemble Arcangelo appeared in Trinity College chapel on Friday evening with a celebration of music for Christmas by Heinrich Schütz and some of his contemporaries.
Arcangelo’s founder and Director Jonathan Cohen conducted from the harpsichord this wonderfully-talented group of period instrumentalists.
The first half of the evening’s programme was devoted to Christmas motets by Schütz and by his older contemporary Michael Praetorius. There was also instrumental music from Johann Vierdanck (a German violinist, cornettist, and composer and a student of Schütz) and from Johann Hermann Schein, a German composer of the early Baroque era.
This was a delightful assembly of compositions not regularly performed and encompassing a variety of emotions; joy being central of course to the Christian feast, but also redolent of admitting those sorrows which, throughout Christ’s story, are never far away.
The performance opened with ‘Hodie Christus natus est’ (‘Today Christ is born’) a motet by Schütz full of life and hope as it makes its bright announcement of the miraculous birth.
Later in the programme in ‘Heute ist Christus der Herr geboren’ (‘Today is the birthday of Christ the Lord’), Schütz, moves from his earlier Latin proclamation to the Lutheran German of his heritage. Both motets are essentially joyful, especially in the ‘allelujah’ refrain of the second.
Yet, as already mentioned, a shadow intervened in Schütz’s ‘Auf dem Gebirge’ (‘On the mountains’) accentuating Matthew’s reference in his Gospel (2:17-18) to the Old Testament prophecy of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents (Jeremiah 31:15). Two male vocalists (alto and tenor) with a trombone accompaniment gave a deeply affecting account of this plaintive motet.
For the most part the rest of the music we heard in Arcangelo’s pre-interval performance had a festive sprit. Praetorius’s ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’ (‘How lovely shines the morning star’) built gradually from voices and continuo to a much more intricate mixture with a celebration of the nativity in a dance measure.
In fact, the art of dancing was particularly prominent throughout Arcangelo’s choice of the Christmas music we were hearing.
There were two movements from Praetorius’s specific collection of dance music, ‘Terpsichore’ – ‘Ballet’ and La Bourée’, The well-known ‘La Bourée’, infectiously upbeat, was the very epitome of Christmas season joy and allowed Arcangelo to display their wide variety of instrumentation to glorious effect.
Two further such movements, ‘Gagliarda’ and ‘Allemanda’ from Johann Hermann Schein’s sequence of instrumental dances in suites from his ‘Banchetto musicale’, and the ‘Paduana’ from his Suite No. 10 , all derive from the traditional device of portraying Jesus’s life and mission as a dance.
But the shadow of King Herod fell once more in the concluding piece by Schütz, referring to the Angel’s warning of Herod’s dark intentions to the 3 Wise Men who ‘departed into their own country another way.’
Here is Matthew’s indication that Christmas signifies ‘another way’, the one taken by the Magi on Christmas Day, who chose ‘another way’ rather than retrace their steps to Herod and the murderous darkness of such earthly powers.
So, after the interval came the main work of the evening ‘Die Weihnachtshistorie’ by Schütz, later known as ‘The Christmas Story’ written and performed in 1660 and published in 1664. This sometimes ecstatic and utterly beautiful composition is a worthy accompaniment to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ as part of a seasonal repertoire, though a guess that many of us in the audience were hearing it for the first time might not be far from the truth.
Nicholas Mulroy (Tenor) had a magisterial command of the Evangelist’s role throughout, while the two dazzling sopranos Katharine Dain and Zoё Brookshore with the rest of the Chorus appeared at strategic moments in the recitative with unforgettable deliveries.
Where each of the four Gospels has its focus, Mark (Calvary & the Cross), John (the divinity of Christ), it is Luke and Matthew who share the Christmas story and the infancy narratives. It’s from the latter two that Schütz forms his composition.
Schütz starts with the Gospel of Luke (2: 1-21) which is at pains to emphasise the truth of what will follow by focusing on the historical placing of the story, naming the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, and also Cyrenius, at that time the governor of Syria, before going on to describe the apparition of the angel to the shepherds, their message (‘peace, goodwill to all men’), and the shepherds’ journey to visit the child whom they find in a manger in Bethlehem (no room at the inn).
For his next 6 movements Schütz turns to the Gospel of Matthew where we find the story of Herod, the Magi’s visit, the gold, frankincense and myrrh, the flight into Egypt and the slaughter of the innocents.
Such time-honoured narratives when musically arranged by masters such as J.S. Bach (his St Matthew’s and St John’s Passions for instance), demonstrate the way in which music can give its own elusive powers to the accounts that we find in their Biblical sources.
With the Christmas story, were it possible for music to add more impact to what has been called ‘the greatest story ever told,’ its powerful text could hardly be more compelling than when placed in the hands of a devotional composer like Schütz and the flawless interpretative musicianship of an ensemble such as Arcangelo.
In popular sayings as ‘it’s coming like Christmas’ we recognise the inevitability of the things which inescapably touch the lives of us all. ‘Christmas comes but once a year’ it’s true, and amidst all the schmaltz and commercialism the beauty of Schütz’s music and Arcangelo’s enthralling delivery of its message seemed this year, more than ever, to carry a very timely significance.
JOHN GILROY
