Chronicles of Advent, Part Two

Thursday: a Sabbath of Rest

From my arrival home on Wednesday, shortly after midnight, to arising on Friday morning at 3:30 is a bit more than twenty-seven hours. I sleep for twenty-three of them, arising only for two meals and the Daily Office.

It is not enough.

But it is a start, and I am grateful that on the Sabbath, there is no shame in sleeping all day. It is harder every December to get through it. And it is to some degree my own fault. Last week, I desecrated the Sabbath by working; I had to cover for the rehearsal of a children’s choir for its concert, staying until they were done and securing the church, and in turn I stayed up late for said concert on Friday, around 10 pm before I left for home. I did have a day off on Monday, but as I wrote in the previous essay, it was entirely devoted to errands, grocery shopping, and cooking – and again a late night, so that I could serve a proper dinner to my wife when she completed a hard shift at her job.

It is never a good idea to desecrate the Sabbath.

Friday: Crunch time

I am in the darkened church by 6:30; it is not at all clear to me how I can squeeze in sufficient practice today and tomorrow.

I hesitate; there is no time for the piano. Not with all of that Bach staring me in the face. But I remove the cover from the Steinway, raise the lid, and begin. Just twenty minutes today, but it is good that I begin in this manner; as it did on Wednesday, it sets the spiritual context for the day’s work. And it is time to be working toward tomorrow’s early service.

Some years, there is time for a short piano prelude before the 5 pm Christmas Eve, the service with the largest attendance of the year in this parish, with youth choir and children’s pageant. Some years, I am scrambling around until the last moment and there is no prelude. And in any event, no one listens; it is typically a large, talkative crowd. For the years in which I have played, I have never prepared anything. This year, I will give at least a little thought to it:

D major, the dominant of the opening hymn, and based on it – “O come, all ye faithful,” Adeste fidelis. I make a beginning… then comes Stille Nacht – still with wrong notes in the tune. As a coda, a quiet first line of Antioch, “Joy to the world.” I am in tears.

Over to the organ. I work on the Bach Variations until the 10:00 pageant rehearsal, and for another hour in the afternoon before the 3:00 liturgical rehearsal. It is not enough.

Christmas Eve: Something old, something new

Very likely, Old Bach could improvise two-voice counterpoint as easily as most of us play scales. He could surely weave it around a chorale tune in the pedals. Probably, he could improvise something like the First Variation: the chorale in the pedals, a delightful little canon at the octave in the manuals.

But even Bach probably could not improvise something like the Fifth Variation – an augmentation canon. The two voices begin together and are identical, except one goes half the speed of the other, and of course the chorale is there, too, in the pedals.

I wrote somewhere that in his mature organ works, there is hardly any virtuosity for its own sake. But he was proud of his contrapuntal skill – rightfully, for no one before or since has matched it. In this sense, the Fifth Variation, quiet and beautiful as it is, is a place where Bach is showing off.

But when he was young, Bach reveled in his keyboard virtuosity. I am learning his youthful setting of “In dulci jubilo” (BWV 729), written when he was at Arnstadt and in his late teens or early twenties. It is an interesting pairing with the Variations, which were written near the end of his life; “In dulci jubilo” is exuberant, full of energy and delight.

It will be even more interesting if I can actually play it. I fingered it last Sunday after the youth caroling, and worked on it at the piano at odd moments through the week; its first proper workout at the organ is today, 2:30 pm on Christmas Eve. I work at it a little too long, and the choristers are arriving for their 4:15 rehearsal before I have set up the choir room for them.

There is time for a piano prelude, almost ten minutes of it; I play, not well at all. At least no one is listening, so far as I can tell. The liturgy goes well; the youth choir does very well, especially with their two movements from the Ceremony of Carols (though afterwards, a parishioner compares us unfavorably with the recording he listens to every year by a well-known British boy choir. He is right; we are not at that level. But we are here, and that other choir isn't.) I put things away, and it is back on the bench; a second workout on “In dulci jubilo,” plus the hymnody for the Midnight Mass, and the fourth and fifth Variations.

And it is time for another service; the adult choristers begin arriving for their 10 pm rehearsal. Many years we barely can field a choir for Midnight Mass so I have learned to select easy music for the service; this year, there are fifteen choristers.

Jean was at the earlier service, singing with the youth choir and assisting; she returns for the late service and turns pages for the Bach Variations. There are places that do not go well, but it is not for lack of preparation – the mistakes are “new” ones, all of them at places that had been trouble-free all week, and the difficult Third Variation goes very well. The mistakes are possibly from fatigue, for I have been on the bench a long time today, since 8:00 this morning with two half-hour breaks for meals. That is too much to expect to be fresh and play well at the end of it.

But the choir sings well, the hymnody goes well, and the “In dulci jubilo” postlude mostly goes well – in that case, the one place where I went astray was indeed due to lack of preparation.

And it is done; Advent is over.

If the Lord wills, I hope to play the “In dulci jubilo” again, perhaps next Christmas. And I would love to play the Canonic Variations again; I had hoped that this second playing, two years after the first, would be better than it turned out. It is great music, some of the best that we have from this greatest of composers, and I do not think that it is often played, especially with the congregational singing of the chorale. It was good to live with it this week.

O dearest Jesus, holy child,
Prepare a bed, soft, undefiled,
A holy shrine, within my heart,
That you and I need never part.

My heart for very joy now leaps;
My voice no longer silence keeps;
I too must join the angel-throng
To sing with joy his cradle-song:

Afterword: Know the Tune

Bach is always a teacher. Even in the most abstract of his late works -- and the Canonic Variations belong in this group, alongside the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue -- he is always pointing the way, for those who somehow make it this far up the path. Beethoven, for one; it would be hard to imagine the Grosse Fugue for string quartet, or for that matter the great fugal passages from the Ode to Joy and certain passages in the late piano sonatas, without Bach's Art of Fugue.

The context of the Variations as they come to us in Bach's revision is what we now call the Leipzig Chorales, his last exploration of how an organist (or any musician) is to approach the Tunes of the church. Many of the chorales are set multiple times, as if to say "here is one way to play this Tune, and here is another" (for example, Komm, heiliger Geist, with two very different settings at the beginning of the collection).

Or in the terms I have used in this blog: Know the Tune.

We are now far beyond the levels I am exploring in my work, such as the basics of simply controlling the notes in Stille Nacht, or struggling to put one's ideas into a form. And, I think, even beyond T. Monk's advice to play the Tune for two hours without losing the groove, though I think he was pointing in the same direction as Bach in this matter.

Perhaps Bach is saying "This is how to use the contrapuntal tools to reach the theological center of the Tune." In the first Variation, it is still a child's tune, which is how Luther conceived it, writing the hymn for his children. Thus, we have such stanzas as the one I quoted the other day:

Look, look, dear friends, look over there!
What lies within that manger bare?
Who is that lovely little one?
The baby Jesus, God’s dear Son.

By the Fourth and Fifth Variations in the arrangement in which Bach put them in this final version, we are much deeper into the theology of the Incarnation -- yet, still with childlike innocence.

And, with these Variations, we are almost at the end. In the Leipzig Chorales, they are the next-to-last item, following seventeen large-scale chorale preludes. After the Variations, only one remains: Vor deinen Thron tret' ich.

Soli Deo gloria.