Continuing our exploration of classical music that is inspired by water, in one context or another, we have a monumental masterpiece by Claude Debussy.
I’ve never had the easiest relationship with Debussy’s music. His approach to music from a place of tonal color-painting, with less emphasis on melody and on form, has generally kept him at arm’s length for me. I’ve generally found it difficult to engage with Debussy’s tendency to create musical mood through orchestral effect and color alone.
But…as I’ve engaged more and more with the visual arts in the last bunch of years, and engaged more and more with the abstract in the visual arts–even in photography!–I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the abstract impressionism in Debussy’s music. (Debussy famously disliked the label “impressionist” being applied to his music, but it seems to have stuck.) So we have this piece: La Mer, a three-movement tone painting in which Debussy paints in sounds and tones and chords his feelings regarding the sea.
Arnold Schoenberg seems to have a reputation as having been more intellectually interested in tonal experimentation than actually writing beautiful music…and by that I may well mean, “That’s how I thought of Arnold Schoenberg for many years.” Well, that’s unfair, and here’s why. This is as lovely a piece of chamber music as I have ever heard. It’s simply titled Weihnachtsmusik (“Christmas Music”), and it’s scored for two violins, cello, harmonium, and piano.
(And if you’re wondering what a harmonium is, it’s basically a keyboarded squeezebox instrument that uses a bellows to push air over a set of reeds.)
In addition to music and photography and literary content creators, the last couple of years I’ve been following a bunch of “cozy content” creators on YouTube and Tiktok. These are almost always women (seriously, I have yet to find a man making this kind of content; if they’re out there, the algorithms have yet to serve them up to me) who make pleasant, calming videos of them doing everyday stuff like cooking and decorating their homes and walking in the woods and that sort of thing. And this time of year, a lot of these creators are making holiday or winter-themed content. So, here are a few of those!
This creator is a photographer, filmmaker, and nature conservationist living in Sweden. She specializes in squirrels, and a warning: her content is beautiful and addictive.
This next is a bookseller in France!
I love this kind of content, and I love the notion that people are out there making money by just making content about their daily lives…especially at Christmas.
This video is fourteen years old, and the YouTube algorithm only decided to show it to me…today.
This is the same algorithm where if I hear the words “how to use hearts of palm in cooking” in a dream, the next day I’ll see a dozen videos on that subject.
So, what makes a Christmas song a “Christmas Song”, anyway? Does the lyrical content have to be specifically relevant to Christmas? Obviously not, as many of the most accepted and beloved songs for this time of year don’t mention Christmas specifically at all (“Jingle Bells”, “Winter Wonderland”, and so on). But the ones that don’t mention Christmas do tend to be at least Christmas-adjacent, with their focus on wintry stuff…but even those can feel strange at times. When we were in Hawaii at Christmastime a few years ago, hearing “Winter Wonderland” in a tropical paradise really messed with our heads.
I saw a rant video online the other day, maybe it was on Tiktok, about “My Favorite Things” and how it is NOT NOT NOT a Christmas song! Not only does it have nothing lyrically to do with Christmas, it’s not even a winter song (though it does mention a couple of wintry things in its roster of “favorite things”). How can it be a perennially-heard song this time of year then, with many cover versions? Is it just that it mentions wrapped packages “tied up with strings”? Can that be all?
Well…yes. Yes, it can. And the answer to “Why is it a Christmas song?” is clearly very simple: Someone decided early on that it was, and now it has many decades–over six of them now!–of momentum and tradition behind it. And what people who perform a lyrical dissection of “My Favorite Things” every year in hopes of finally proving beyond doubt that it is not a Christmas song completely miss is that human tradition often makes things into Things even though there’s nothing inherently Thingy about them, and that human tradition is formed more by repetition of emotion than by cold logic. Now, will more recent efforts to turn, say, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into a Christmas song be likewise successful? I somewhat doubt it…but I don’t rule it out, either. Human tradition is strange and it does strange things. Who among us doesn’t have a specific family tradition that makes zero sense to people outside it?
Somehow I never knew that Franz Liszt wrote a suite of piano pieces called Weihnachtsbaum, which translates to “Christmas Tree”. It’s definitely not one of Liszt’s famous pieces; apparently its partially-seasonal nature combined with its general lack of virtuosic fireworks (well, comparatively so, for a piece by Liszt) have led to its obscurity in Liszt’s output. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating and lovely listen. Liszt wrote the work for his granddaughter Daniela, who apparently gave the first performance; as she was a quite young pianist at the time, this may explain why Liszt didn’t write the piece to be as demanding for the soloist as his general work would have seemed to prompt. (Liszt, if you are unfamiliar, was one of the greatest pianists of all time, and he wrote music that is fiendishly demanding of the soloist, which in his time was usually himself.)
The suite is not entirely Christmas-based, with several of the pieces apparently being autobiographical in nature, but that’s fine, because after all, a big part of Christmas is remembering, isn’t it?
Unlike many in the Western world, for some reason “Fairytale of New York” has only been on my radar for a few years. I’m not sure how it so thoroughly eluded me, other than to note that this kind of music doesn’t generally form the backbone of my music listening. It’s not the easiest song in the world to love, that’s to be sure, but I always think it’s important to acknowledge the difficult emotions that Christmas always makes us feel, in the dark moments when we’re alone with our memories.
This is a lovely cover I found while looking for Christmas music featuring Uilleann pipes.
Somehow I made it to just the other day (as you’re reading this) without knowing that in 1983 David Bowie starred in a Japanese war film about the individuals living in a POW camp. The film’s English title is Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and the film’s score, by Ryuichi Sakamoto, is highly regarded, possibly moreso even than the film. (I only know this by reading the film’s Wikipedia entry.) The movie doesn’t appear to have any specifically Christmas subtext, except that one of the Japanese characters wishes Mr. Lawrence, one of the non-Japanese characters, a Merry Christmas several times throughout the film. Nevertheless, the title track from the film has apparently become a Christmas standard in Japan. Listening to it now, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it before, but I’m not super familiar with it.
Cascading fountain, Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens
Continuing our series exploring classical music about or inspired by water, in one way or another, we have one of the most evocative tone poems of all time: The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. Respighi lived 1879-1936, and his gift for using the orchestra for illustrative effect is nearly unparalleled. His music sings with pictorial clarity that recalls Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, and echoes Richard Strauss, albeit with an Italian flavor. His scores are shot through with brilliant light.
Fountains is perhaps a bit more introspective than Respighi’s other famous showpiece, The Pines of Rome, but it contains its own moments of showpiece brilliance. One device that Respighi uses frequently, to great effect, is his off-setting of the beat; he also makes great use of a “shimmering” sound in the strings. More than any other composer, Respighi’s music always seems to have a visible “sheen” to it.
Fountains is also in four movements, each representing one of Rome’s fountains at a different time of day. The opening movement depicts the Valle Giulia at dawn. Now enveloped in the suburbs north of Rome, the Valle Giulia was, during Respighi’s lifetime, a pastoral landscape. The orchestra gradually awakens, murmuring strings joined by plaintive oboes and English horn as cattle pass through the mists in the distance.
In the second movement, the majestic Triton Fountain on the Piazza Barberini springs to life in the morning light. The fountain was created by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and his work – and Respighi’s as well – was inspired by the story of the end of the flood from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “The ruler of the seas sets his trident aside, smoothes the billows, and summons the sea-blue Triton who towers up over the depths… and commands him to blow into his sounding shell and by his signal recall the waters and the rivers.”
The third movement represents what is undoubtedly the grandest of Rome’s fountains, the Trevi Fountain, at midday. Respighi’s majestic writing for brass over swirling strings and cresting waves of percussion captures the fountain’s sheer scale, with its central depiction of Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch.
The finale depicts the modest fountain in front of the Villa Medici, which sits atop a hill overlooking St. Peter’s, at dusk. Respighi’s orchestra provides the rich atmosphere of graceful birdsong, gentle evening breezes, and twinkling stars through a combination of sumptuous writing for strings and woodwinds and his use of percussion instruments such as the celesta and the orchestra bells. The work ends as gently as it began.
Here is The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Resphigi.
