Christopher Dawes

"FROM HEAVEN ON HIGH"
THE MOST POPULAR CHRISTMAS CAROL YOU NEVER SING!

By the time of today’s recital our shopping malls, radios, churches and schools are already resounding with the tunes of the season. Sacred, secular, profound or trivial, the songs of Christmas are an inevitable and indispensable part of the season and the many hearts it invites into it, each year again.

With a very few exceptions the carols that have ascended to the top of the charts of public opinion in the English speaking west were penned, words, music or both, in the 19th century, and not surprisingly, in English. Many more recent secular tunes have joined the shopping mall canon, and a few more ancient items, such as Veni Emmanuel (‘O Come, o come, Emmanuel’) and In dulci jubilo (‘Good Christians, all rejoice’) have also done well in translation. Likewise, one 19th century carol from Germany, Stille nacht (‘Silent night’) dwells deeply in the hearts and minds of most English-speaking Christmas souls.

But today, we examine a German carol, penned in the 1530s by none other than Martin Luther that, breaking all the rules, appears frequently in hymn books all over the world to this day – but it seems to have languished in relative obscurity until about the time a certain century’s worth of organ composers came along... All six composers came into and left this world within the century from the 1650s to the 1750s, each leaving at least one setting, and together they outline what was perhaps the organ’s golden age in Germany.