ORANGES and peppermint candy, fruitcake long in the making but swift enough in the eating, with a little Bourbon whiskey poured over it. A chill in the air, if not the snow of dreams, and the dusty whiffs, at that woebegone time, of soft coal burning in the grate—this was Kentucky long ago, when we sat with our father at the upright piano and each night of Christmas week sang the hymns and the old songs of Christmas, many with their dog-trot rhymes of bed and head, night and bright.
Later, in New York, I collected Christmas records, and each year I play them. The most beautiful are the oldest: Caruso singing “Cantique de Noël” in 1916, before electrical recording, and reclaimed in early mono LPs. In spite of the great tenor’s range and notable volume, what we know as “O Holy Night” seems to come from a distance, from the star in the East, a pastoral world in antiquity—or perhaps it’s only the hum and scratch of the twenty-six-year-old album, A Golden Age Christmas. Eliot’s poem on the Magi begins, “A cold coming we had of it,” and the sentiment is not alien to “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” as sung by the matchless contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, in a tempo slower than that heard in the churches. She brings to the rather banal hymn a gravity and solemnity that might, if you like, foretell the strange future of the babe in the crib. My recordings of Christmas hymns sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Joan Sutherland, and others possess a jubilate accent indeed appropriate for a time of celebration, but not more fitting than the long-dead voices of a simpler, less opulent, and less spendthrift time.
In the notes to the old recording, I learned that during the twenties and thirties the tenor Giovanni Martinelli would rise up in the choir loft at St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the Midnight Mass to sing, without previous announcement, “Gesù Bambino.” What reciprocity can be imagined here? Perhaps the ring of a few coins tossed in the poor box.
1998