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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
Joyous voices sweet and clear
Sing the sad of heart to cheer
Ding, dong, ding, dong,
Christmas bells are ringing.
— Wilha Hutson, from the 1954 song
“Caroling, Caroling”
T
he holiday season is inseparable from its
sounds, and familiar songs and carols are
spilling out generously onto city sidewalks, busy
sidewalks, dressed in holiday style. Many of the
most loved Christmas songs have been part of
celebrations for a century or two, or even longer.
This concert presents a number of traditional
and classical favorites, as well as more contemporary tunes, with the audience invited to join
in the sing-along that concludes the program.
The music of “Good King Wenceslas” was
first printed in a collection titled Piae Cantiones
Ecclesiasticae et Scholasticae (Collection of
Church and Scholastic Songs), published in
Greisswald (near Rostock), Germany, in 1582.
The collection drew mostly on ancient Swedish
songs, and the publication was overseen by a
Finn (Finland and Sweden were a single country at the time). The song was not originally associated with the holiday but was instead a
springtime carol, with a Latin text that began
“Tempus adest floridum” (“It is time for flowering”), and it may well date from as early as the
13th century. English hymn composer John
Mason Neale (apparently assisted by the music
editor Thomas Helmore) produced our familiar
form of the song, which first appeared in the 1853
collection Carols for Christmas-Tide. It involves a
saintly 10th-century Czech aristocratic who, accompanied by his page, braves the winter
weather to present gifts to a peasant on the Feast
of St. Stephen, which is the day after Christmas.
In Christmas a la Valse!, composer and conductor Robert Wendel has created a suite that
links together seven songs associated with
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Christmas or wintertime, all of them in triple
meter: the 16th-century Provençal carol “Bring a
Torch, Jeanette, Isabella”; “We Three Kings,” written in 1857 by John Henry Hopkins, Jr., an Episcopalian cleric, for use in a Christmas pageant in
New York City; The Skaters’ Waltz (originally Les
Patineurs), Op. 183, composed in 1882 by the Strasbourg-born Émile Waldteufel; “Greensleeves,”
about which more anon; “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” a poem by Edmund Sears, a Unitarian minister in Wayland, Massachusetts, here set
to a tune written in 1850 by Richard Storrs Willis;
“Wassail, Wassail,” a song that dates to at least
the 18th century, associated with Christmas revelry in Gloucestershire; and “We Wish You a
Merry Christmas,” a popular carol from the West
Country of England that is said to be ancient, although its ancestry is hazy and it resists tracing
prior to its initial publication, which was in 1935.
“I Saw Three Ships” and “What Child Is
This” are musical cousins, both apparently
being derived from the English tune “Greensleeves” (with liberal adaptation, in the case of
the former). The melody was first printed in A
Booke of New Lessons for the Cithern & Gittern
(1652), but references to the piece became common in the late 16th century. In Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor, written around
1597, Mistress Ford refers to the song twice, and
Falstaff calls out “Let the sky rain potatoes! Let
it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’!” The
lyrics for “I Saw Three Ships” are by the British
lawyer and antiquarian William Sandys, who
published the song in his Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833), drawing at arm’s length
on a poem that had appeared in Cantus, Songs
and Fancies to Three, Four or Five Parts, published in 1666 by the Scotsman John Forbes. The
words for “What Child Is This” are drawn from a
longer poem, “The Manger Throne,” penned in
1865 by a British insurance manager named
William Chatterton Dix.
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“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” must be
the Christmas song most beloved of grammarians, who at this season engage over the question
of whether a comma ought to be inserted and
what effect that would have on the meaning. Assuming that “rest” is used in the antiquated
sense of “keep,” a comma before “merry” would
yield an expression of hope that God would
keep, or watch over, the merry gentlemen,
whereas a comma after “merry” would have us
wish that God might keep the gentlemen merry.
Copy editors have come to blows over lesser
things. At any rate, the words (with no punctuation) date back to about 1770, and the lyrics plus
music appear in a pair of British satirical pam-
phlets from 1820, one titled A Political Christmas
Carol, the other The Man in the Moon. The song
was included in an 1833 anthology, and a decade
later it merited a reference (punctuated) in
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: “…at the
first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen!
May nothing you dismay!’, Scrooge seized the
ruler with such energy of action that the singer
fled in terror.”
“Adeste Fideles” (widely sung to the words
“O Come, All Ye Faithful”) is occasionally
referred to as the Portuguese Hymn, which is
probably a specious moniker. The English text
was first printed in the 1760 edition of The
Evening Office of the Church in Latin and English,
Sources and Inspirations
Émile Waldteufel was reportedly inspired to write The Skaters Waltz, a tune heard in Christmas a la Valse!,
after watching Parisians gliding around one of that city’s ice rinks. It’s no wonder: ice skating was a favorite
pastime in the late 1800s, considered a proper exercise for all ages, as well as being a chance to socialize. Here
in New York, skaters flocked to Central Park, where a red ball was raised on a tower to signal that the ice was
safe. Nighttime skating parties, lit by lamps or bonfires, were a particularly popular invitation to fairly unchaperoned courtship. According to an 1880s guidebook, “Many a young fellow has lost his heart, and skated himself into matrimony, on the Central Park pond.” The tradition continues today, with a spin around the rinks at
Rockefeller Center, Central Park, and Bryant Park a welcome part of the holidays for many.
— The Editors
Central Park Winter:The Skaters Pond, a Currier and Ives print, from 1862
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and the music was first to be found in Samuel
Webbe’s An Essay on the Church Plain Chant
(1782). The Latin version of the poem appears to
have preceded the English, and both the tune
and that text may have been created around
1750 by John Francis Wade — or, as he wrote in
the Latin manuscript he penned at that time,
Joannes Franciscus Wade.
The composition of Christmas songs flourished
among American songwriters of the 1940s and
’50s. Two songs in this concert date from the
years of World War II, when many families were
torn asunder during a season more associated
with cherished togetherness. “I’ll Be Home for
Christmas,” with music by Walter Kent and
lyrics by Kim Gannon, was cast as a letter
home from a faraway soldier and the song became a huge hit when Bing Crosby recorded it
in 1943. It quickly became the most requested
song at U.S.O. Christmas shows, although it was
banned from BBC broadcasts for fear that it
might prove disheartening to British troops.
“Happy Holiday” is another Bing Crosby
Christmas classic, from the 1942 film Holiday Inn,
in which, at a resort open only for various holidays, a singer (Crosby) and a dancer (Fred Astaire) vie for the affections of an ingenue intent
on breaking into showbiz (Marjorie Reynolds).
The movie is rather an embarrassment — it
even incorporates a painful blackface minstrel
number — but it does offer a sound track rich in
Irving Berlin songs, including “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “Let’s Start the New
Year Right,” and “Happy Holiday.” Songwriter
Sammy Cahn remarked of Berlin, “Somebody
once said you couldn’t have a holiday without
his permission.” Here, Berlin’s classic undergoes a mash-up with the recent hit “Happy,”
by American singer, songwriter, rapper, and
producer Pharrell Williams. His irresistibly
catchy recording was released as a single in
2013, but also figured the following year on his
album G I R L; buoyed by ubiquitous airplay, it
became the top-selling song of 2014.
Also from the pop world comes “All I Want
for Christmas Is You,” an up-tempo seasonal
number co-written and produced by Mariah
Carey (with co-composer Walter Afanasieff),
released in 1994 and placed as the lead song on
her holiday album Merry Christmas. The song
has been one of the few recent Christmas recordings to achieve the status of a contemporary holiday standard, and has been recorded and
performed by a number of artists.
“You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” was written by composer Albert Hague to lyrics by
Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss), for the
1966 animated special Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch
Stole Christmas!, in which it was sung by Thurl
Ravenscroft, a performer also remembered as
the voice of Tony the Tiger from Kellogg’s Frosted
Behind the Grinch
The wordplay of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” is unmistakably Seussian,
with lyrics written by Dr. Seuss himself (a.k.a Theodor Seuss Geisel). Still, the
song’s indelible impression can be linked to its equally unforgettable, dark yet
bouncy music. Composer Albert Hague had won a Tony in 1959 for the musical Redhead, but had not yet worked in television when he was contacted to
audition for the job of creating a score to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Against his agent’s advice, Hague insisted that Geisel come to his house, saying, “Don’t make him come to my house because I’m more important, make
him come here because I have the better piano. And that will be understood.”
He played just one quirky tune composed for the meeting. “Afterward,” Hague
later recalled, “Seuss looked up and said, ‘Anyone who slides an octave on the
word Grinch gets the job.’ The whole thing took three minutes.” Hague’s own
Santa-like countenance may be remembered by fans of the film and television
series Fame, in which he played the music teacher Mr. Shorofsky.
Albert Hague
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— The Editors