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Flakes commercials. In the adaptation of Dr.
Seuss’s 1957 book, the wicked Grinch tries to destroy the Christmas spirit of Whoville, but ends
up transformed by the goodwill of the season.
From the realm of light classical music come a
handful of orchestral favorites. Today, The Nutcracker is a holiday ritual at ballet companies
throughout the land, but Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky held out little hope for its success following its premiere in 1892 in St. Petersburg.
Although he had accepted a commission from
the Mariinsky Theatre in that city, Tchaikovsy
was not drawn to the scenario about a little girl
who receives a nutcracker as a Christmas gift,
breaks it in the course of horseplay, and then
gets swept up in late-night revelry in which toys
come alive, a Mouse King falls dead in a conflict
with the Nutcracker (who is now a general), and
she travels with the Nutcracker to the domain of
the Sugar Plum Fairy, where they enjoy a variety
show. (One early critic complained, “In The Nutcracker there is no subject whatever.”) The work
did not reach the United States until 1940, when
Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo introduced a oneact version in New York City. The San Francisco
Ballet gave The Nutcracker its first full-length
American airing in 1944, and George Balanchine’s celebrated version for New York City
Ballet followed a decade later. By then, however, Tchaikovsky’s score had gained in popularity, thanks to The Nutcracker Suite he had
drawn from its pages, a grouping that includes
all four of the excerpts played in this concert.
Leroy Anderson displayed the most distinctive voice of mid-century “semi-classical”
composers. He acquired a thorough foundation
in music theory and composition at Harvard
(Walter Piston and Georges Enescu were among
his composition teachers) and went on to become a gifted melodist, naturally adept at composition of orchestral miniatures. He wrote
“Sleigh Ride” in 1948 for conductor Arthur
Fiedler and the Boston Pops, where he was
then principal arranger. It was an early entry in
a catalogue that would soon bulge with such
Taste of Christmas Past
“Christmas music is special because of the fact that Christmas is special — such an important religious holiday — so naturally anything associated with it has a special place in our lives and, of course, music even more
so because music has the most special and the most personal place in our lives,” Leroy Anderson said in a
1960s radio interview. For him, the season evoked strong memories of his childhood in a Swedish-American
household. Anderson recalled:
For dinner we would have the hog head’s cheese
and the pickled herring, and the pickled beets and
various kinds of sausage and other things you
usually find on a smorgasbord. Then, of course,
the rice pudding for dessert, and in the rice pudding they always put an almond and whoever
gets the almond, you see, is supposed to have
good luck during the next year; of course, it always happens that the youngest child happens
to get the almond, they’d arrange it that way. Then
on early Christmas morning about 5 o’clock,
everyone gets up and goes to church — the early
morning Christmas service — those are the things
I remember, everyone has different memories.
— The Editors
Cover art for the 1959 Decca recording of
Anderson’s holiday music
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pops-concert classics as Serenata, The Typewriter, Belle of the Ball, and Blue Tango. As was
often the case with Anderson’s compositions,
“Sleigh Ride,” gained in popularity after it was
fitted with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. The cheerful song makes no particular mention of Christmas, but both its instrumental and vocal
versions have become holiday classics
Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel
and Gretel boasts stage settings that include a
candy house, which jibes comfortably with gastronomic ideals of the season. Humperdinck,
who was a professor at the prestigious Hoch
Conservatory in Berlin, set out merely to write
a few numbers to accompany a Hansel and Gretel puppet play his nieces were devising, but the
project kept growing. His sister, Adelheid Wette,
crafted the libretto out of the well-known tale
by the Brothers Grimm. The opera was actually
premiered at Christmastime — on December 23,
1893, at the Weimar Court Theatre, conducted
by no less a personage than Richard Strauss,
who called it “a masterpiece of the highest quality.” Ensuing productions have also tended to
gravitate toward this time of year. The Evening
Prayer and Dream Pantomime falls at the
point in the opera where the children, lost in
the woods, kneel to offer their bedtime prayer
and then fall asleep, dreaming in safety as they
are guarded by angels that hover overhead.
An Irishman from Dublin, Victor Herbert
was mostly raised in Germany and began his career as a cellist, performing as soloist in the Vienna dance orchestra of Eduard Strauss (who
had taken over the group’s leadership from his
brother Johann II). In 1886 he emigrated to the
United States, appearing as principal cellist
with The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, playing
in the New York String Quartet, helping out as
assistant conductor for Anton Seidl’s summer
concerts at Brighton Beach, and (beginning in
1893) serving as director of the 22nd Regiment
Band. From 1898 to 1904 he was director of the
Pittsburgh Symphony, but by the time his
tenure there ended, he was spending more and
more of his time composing operettas. His first
major hit was Babes in Toyland (1903), which
wove characters and story lines from various
Mother Goose tales into a Christmas extravaganza. The initial New York production ran for
192 performances and made him one of the
most famous composers in his adopted country,
not to be eclipsed until European-style operetta
grew passé around the time of World War I.
Hansel and Gretel and the Gingerbread House
While the making of gingerbread dates to at least Medieval Europe, if not to ancient Rome or even earlier, the tradition of gingerbread houses is most clearly linked to Nuremberg, Germany, where, by the 17 th century, master
bakers were known for constructing intricate works of art from tasty Lebkuchen. By the time the Brothers Grimm
published Hansel and Gretel in 1812, this art form would have been widely known, and food historians believe
that either the first gingerbread houses were inspired
by the tale’s edible house, or that they already existed
and the Grimms turned the sweet treat into a witch’s
trap. Regardless, Hansel and Gretel likely helped the
popularity of decorated fairy-tale cottages take off, and
despite the darkness of the Grimms’s tale, gingerbread
houses quickly became linked with Christmas. The tradition came to America via German immigrants, and ultimately transformed into one of our most delectably
beautiful treats of the season.
— The Editors
Big enough for Hansel and Gretel — a full-scale
gingerbread house in Stockholm
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