November 28, 2009: Bach's Christmas spirit

The Holidays with the Symphony series of concerts at Davies Symphony Hall began last night with a performance of the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 of Johann Sebastian Bach by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the direction of Ragnar Bohlin.  Soloists for the occasion were soprano Malin Christensson, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, tenor Lothar Odinius, and baritone Anders Larsson.  As I had observed at the beginning of this month, this work is actually a compilation of six cantatas, each of which was performed at a service for one of the twelve days of Christmas (the first day, the second day, the third day, New Year's Day, the Sunday after New Year, and the Feast of the Epiphany on the final day).  However, while these are six separate works, the Biblical texts cover a single narrative arc of the Christmas story, beginning, as the gospels do, with the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem for tax registration and concluding with the decision of the three Wise Men to return to their own lands without informing Herod of their encounter with Jesus.  As is the case with all of Bach's cantatas, the "lessons" from the Bible are interspersed with music to encourage meditation by the congregation, including solo arias, hymn settings, many in chorale prelude form, and one orchestral sinfonia.  The Wikipedia entry set the duration of the entire oratorio at "nearly three hours."

This is the same time scale as the Saint Matthew Passion, which was originally performed in its entirety on Good Friday.  However, while Good Friday is intended to be set aside as an entire day of intense religious meditation, Christmas is a time of feasts and fellowship.  One still attended church to remember the reason for the feasting, but the time spent there was far more limited than it was on Good Friday.  This is probably the reason that Bohlin chose to present only selections from each of the six cantatas, keeping the scale of the evening at a duration comparable to most Symphony concerts.  This might upset purists who believe that Bach's texts should be honored in every detail of the letter;  but, if they really wanted to be pure about the matter, they would insist on having each cantata performed on its appropriate date.

Those purists would probably also object to Bohlin's decision to have the texts sung in English.  However, this decision also honors the spirit of the music.  Since Bach was not a deep religious scholar, he probably never encountered the passage in Talmud that advises one to pray in the language one understands the best, thus emphasizing the desire to communicate with God, rather than just marking time with the alien babble of ritual.  Since each cantata is essentially an extended prayer, Bach probably would have assumed that non-Germans would pray in their own language.  After all, it was not as if the extra-Biblical texts he selected were high literature.  The author is unidentified, which may be just as well.  The devotional spirit of the music that highlights the text is far more sincere than the superficiality of the text itself.

It is also worth nothing that Bohlin chose the English translation by Henry S. Drinker for this performance.  For those unfamiliar with Drinker, his work was significant enough to earn him an entry in Grove Music Online by Jon Newsom.  Here are a few sentences that represent his contributions:

A lawyer by profession, he devoted himself in his spare time to music and from 1930 to 1960 he held informal gatherings (known as the ‘Accademia dei Dilettanti di Musica’) at his home to study and perform vocal music of the 17th to 20th centuries. (He also conducted larger groups on Sunday evenings.) Concerned that the words should be understood but also fit the music, Drinker began a series of translations remarkable for their craftsmanship and sheer number: between 1941 and 1954 he translated many Bach works (212 cantatas, the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion, the Easter and Christmas oratorios and the Magnificat), all Brahms's vocal works, all Mozart's choral works, all Schumann's and Medtner's songs, all the solo songs of Wolf, Musorgsky and Schubert and all Schubert's partsongs.

As a Philadelphian I can claim a degree of separation from Drinker of either one or two.  My own choir master certainly knew about those Sunday evening gatherings.  If he never attended one himself, he certainly knew those who did.  I remember his once telling me that Drinker insisted that everyone sing at those events.  He then paused and added, "Including Leopold Stokowski!"  Naturally, most of my experience in singing Bach cantatas involved Drinker's translations;  and I admire them as much today as I did as a student.

This was thus an evening that evoked Bach's own spirit of Christmas.  While it may not have been faithful to every note and word in the original score, the performance by reduced orchestra and chorus served the clarity of the notes that were performed excellently.  The choice of movements was sufficient to move the overall narrative at a brisk pace, and Bohlin's tempo selections maintained that pace.  The four soloists similarly captured this sense of spirit, making for an excellent launch of this year's holiday season.