Happy Christmas with Beethoven!!!

Beethoven did not write Christmas music specifically. However, the world often listens or performs “Ode to Joy” at this high holy season, especially in Japan. Here is a wonderful story about this tradition that involves thousands, if not millions of people across the nation and their annual tradition of gathering and performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This holiday season I’ve been obsessively listening to this version of Handel’s Messiah performed by the Academy of Ancient Music and Voces8 in Cambridge, England last year. Give it a listen, especially if you’ve only seen and heard it performed with massive choirs and orchestras. It is a much smaller ensemble with period instruments, crisper, cleaner, and easier to hear all the parts and individual instruments.

As I listen, I often think that THIS is The Messiah that Beethoven fell in love with. That he loved Handel and his magnificent oratorio, there is no doubt.  When asked to name who he thought was the greatest composer Beethoven said “Handel, to him I bow the knee.” And further, “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived… I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.” Even when near death, our hero was quoted as speaking of The Messiah, “There is the truth.”

Scholars have claimed that Handel had an impact upon his massive choral piece, Missa Solemnis, and used identical wording in the final “Gloria” section that was in Handel’s “Amen” chorus. After listening to both several times, the connection seems true! If you’d like to listen to both conclusions of these magnificent celebrations of joy, the video above can be forwarded to 1 hour 25 minutes near the end, and below is Beethoven’s “Gloria” from the Missa Solemnis. It is a fun version with the sheet music so you can follow and sing along, and is a beautiful recording made at The BBC Proms in 2014.

To accompany all these glories and amens is a beauty of a little poem, written by a very young man who died shortly after in WWI. Like all poetry, this one still works and connects one hundred years later in ways he could have never anticipated.

Wartime Christmas

By Joyce Kilmer

Led by a star, a golden star,
The youngest star, an olden star,
Here the kings and the shepherds are,
Akneeling on the ground.
What did they come to the inn to see?
God in the Highest, and this is He,
A baby asleep on His mother’s knee
And with her kisses crowned.

Now is the earth a dreary place,
A troubled place, a weary place.
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet the sun, through the war-cloud, sees
Babies asleep on their mother’s knees.
While there are love and home—and these—
There shall be Christmas Day.

So dear readers near and far, this is my Christmas wish for you. Despite political divides, pandemics, and global discord, may you find glory and an amen to your prayers, with the surety that in homes around the world, babies sleep on mother’s knees and the sun rises anew, bringing a better new year.

With love and gratitude for you all,

The Tone Poet