Leonard Bernstein, from The Joy of Music:

BACH!

A colossal syllable, one which makes composers tremble, brings performers to their knees, beatifies, the Bach-lover, and apparently bores the daylights out of everyone else. How can this be? How can vibrant, thrilling music like that bore anyone? Still, it’s true; many of you find Bach dull. No–don’t deny it; there’s nothing to be ashamed of, because the boredom comes only from the fact that it’s not very easy music to know, and you must know it to love it. (…) And knowing Bach doesn’t mean knowing that he died in Leipzig in 1750 and that he had two wives and twenty-one children. It means knowing the music…and that’s also the challenge, because once you do get to know Bach well enough to love him, you will love him more than any other composer. I know this because I went through the same process myself.

I have to confess that I have never actually done the work to really get to know Bach and his music, and that’s my loss, not Bach’s. But it’s not that I dislike Bach; to dislike Bach is simply a bizarre kind of thought that I can’t believe anyone actually entertaining. It’s that he exists beyond my general understanding of music and how I respond to it. What Bernstein says above, in that excerpt from the teleplay to one of his Omnibus television programs back in the day, is really true: Bach’s music is sufficiently beyond what modern ears are accustomed to, in terms of sonics and the way emotional content in the music is presented, that his music for many requires real, sustained effort.

Today’s work, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, is a giant work of liturgical music. And it is truly giant: a performance lasts over two and one half hours, longer than any Mahler or Bruckner symphony, and approaching operatic length. To my ears the sound is definitely that of a church setting, which may be unfair as Bach did not only write sacred music in his lifetime. In fact, to that end he actually incorporated bits of earlier compositions of his into the Christmas Oratorio, including several previously secular works. I spent time yesterday listening to the Christmas Oratorio in its entirety, and I found myself–as I do whenever I listen to one of Bach’s longer works–drawn into a sound world that I admit I do not fully understand. But it’s such a fascinating sound world indeed, one that puts me in mind of other great sacred works like Handel’s Messiah (which I refuse to associate with Christmas–for me, that work is all about Easter). The liturgical exaltation of the Almighty pervades the entire work, and I found myself wondering, as I always do when listening to Bach’s sacred music, what it must have been like to attend services in those churches of his day and hear, as part of the worship liturgy, music written by one of the greatest geniuses in the history of human art.

Here is David Dubal, from The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

As the vast quantity of [Bach’s] work was finally published [Bach’s music was mostly forgotten for decades after his death, until Felix Mendelssohn and others began shining new light on him in the early to mid-1800s], it became apparent that this humble craftsman lived in the climate of the sublime–not at rare moments or in a few masterowrks but throughout a lifetime of boundless creation. No other composer celebrates human potential the way Bach does–potential that is, for him, ruled by the eternal presence of God.

The performance featured below is a compromise, because the live performance I wanted to feature is not embeddable. Stop doing that, music folk of YouTube! Sheesh!

I’ll have more to say about the Las Vegas band The Killers in a few weeks when I write my annual Yearly Summation post. For now, I’ll just note that while I’ve enjoyed The Killers for years, this was a year in which I did a lot more active listening to them. And yet, for all that, I had no idea they recorded a Christmas single (in 2006) until I spotted it in a “Rock and Roll Christmas” playlist on YouTube Music (my streaming service of choice).

The song, “A Great Big Sled”, is basically a paean to the idea that we, as adults, wish for nothing so much as a return to the simpler, more magical view of Christmas that we had as kids. The chorus is particularly evocative:

I wanna roll around like a kid in the snow
I wanna relearn what I already know
Just let me take flight
dressed in red through the night on a great big sled

I love that: “I wanna relearn what I already know.” What did he already know? I’m thinking he already knew about the magic and wonder in the world that we all seem to lose once we end up “working our fingers to the bone”, as he says elsewhere in the song. That’s a very real feeling, isn’t it? We all know people for whom Christmas is anything but a time of wonder, but a thing to dread and grit our teeth as we just try to get through it. I’m not there yet–and I pray I never do get there–but I can’t help noticing that the bittersweet and sad parts of Christmas never get any smaller, do they? But there is the part of me that wants to roll around like a kid in the snow, and I most definitely always want to relearn what I already know.

I’m glad I found this song. It’s gonna be a keeper. Here are The Killers (joined by Toni Halliday).

Today, several musical takes on sleigh rides! First, Mozart:

Next, here’s Leroy Anderson’s classic, played by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra:

Finally, here’s the Leroy Anderson again…but this time with the Three Tenors. Remember when that was a thing? You couldn’t get through a PBS pledge drive without those guys.

Yeah, I don’t know about that last one either, but they gave it a shot, didn’t they?

NOTE: If you’re wondering why this is running so late in the day, it’s because I forgot to change the ‘PM’ to ‘AM’ when I scheduled the post, and I’m now leaving it that way because…well, no reason, since changing the time and publishing would take less time and effort than typing all of this out…but maybe it’s just so I can ramble a bit longer in a post for which I don’t have much to say other than presenting the artists. So…here are the artists.

May I present Johnny and June Carter Cash:

Growing up, there were musical artists who always turned up on teevee commercials hawking an album of their greatest hits for just $19.95! Call the 1-800 number, and allow 6 weeks for delivery. One of these artists was a guy named Zamfir, who played a strange instrument that looked like a series of single-pitch flutes flipped on end. Well, this instrument is a real one, called the Pan flute, and it turns out that Zamfir himself is a respected master of this particular instrument. Who knew! Certainly not me at the time. There was a sense back then that a recording artist who showed up on those commercials wasn’t to be taken seriously, but honestly, that’s not the case at all. I wonder sometimes how that marketing strategy came to be, though.

This selection doesn’t feature Zamfir himself (he did record Christmas music, but…honestly I didn’t like it all that much), but I do like the Pan flute, which has a slightly other-worldly sound to it, so here’s someone else: Fabian Salazar, a Native American musician. It is a lovely instrument, if somewhat limited.

A repost, because I have nothing new to add about this wonderful piece!

Today, a suite from an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov! The opera is called Christmas Eve, and its plot involves a scheme by the Devil to steal the moon. Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas have suffered an unusual curse: they are well-loved and highly regarded by those who know them, but because they’re in Russian, a language that most singers don’t learn (and because singing operas in translation is out of fashion), they remain shrouded in obscurity, only known if at all through orchestral suites and excerpts like this.

David Dubal writes, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

Some of the best of Rimsky-Korsakov is contained in his fifteen operas, with their supernatural, pan-Slavic, mythological, and pantheistic symbolism. Unfortunately these operas remain unfamiliar to the vast majority of music lovers. They form an encyclopedic source of a lost, legendary, wild, and exotic Russia. According to the writer V.V. Yastrebsev, Rimsky-Korsakov confided, “You would scarcely find anyone in the world who believes less in everything supernatural, fantastic, or lying beyond the boundaries of death than I do. Yet as an artist, I love this sort of thing above all else. And religious ceremony? What could be more intolerable? But with what love have I expressed such ceremonial customs in music! No, I am actually of the opinion that art is essentially the most enchanting, intoxicating lie.”

It does surprise me that Rimsky-Korsakov, with his often beguiling melodies, magnficient orchestrations (few composers have ever wielded the full palate of the modern orchestra like Rimsky-Korsakov), and enchanting subject matter in many of his compositions nevertheless does not command a stronger position in the classical canon. I always enjoy listening to him, whether it’s something less familiar to me or a return to Scheherazade, one of my favorite classical works of all time.

So here’s a bit of Russian Christmas lore, depicted in the music of one of Russia’s great masters.