Author Archives: Julian O. Long

Tidings of comfort and joy . . .

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“O Magnum Mysterium” is one of the responsories in the Gregorian liturgy of Christmas and as such is much older than “In Dulci Jubilo,” which dates from the early fourteenth century. “O Magnum Mysterium” has about it a formality and high seriousness that one writer refers to the irony of the Incarnation, “the fact that the field animals—mere beasts of burden trying to sleep in the same manger—would witness the birth of the holy Christ child.” “In Dulci Jubilo,” in which we are asked to sing and be merry around the manger, is less formal but also bears the signs of liturgical trope. Both texts depend upon the “in praesepio,” theme from Luke’s gospel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne leit in praesepio.

. . . ut animalia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio.

. . . et venerunt festinantes et invenerunt Mariam et Ioseph et infantem positum in praesepio.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

It’s a lovely story, taken all together, the holy birth surrounded by signs and portents, the plain circumstances suffused with swarms of angels and the the swagger of magician kings. And it’s part of a larger story that one could wish were true even in the face of certain conviction to the contrary, As professor Tolkien has put it:

There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.1

The text of the story surely came first, but I love this image of Giotto’s that foregrounds the animalia,2 with its wonderful donkey and the angels hiding in the attic. “O Magnum Mysterium” foregrounds the mystery, but “In Dulci Jubilo” seems to address the Christ child, himself, much as Dante addressed Beatrice on the margin of the earthly paradise, Alpha es et O, “Blessed are you who come.”

1See “On Fairy Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Erdmans, 1966 [1947].
2The original is in the Scrovegny Chapel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne

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We’re sending this letter to family members and as many friends as we can find this season. If you’re a Facebook friend or someone who reads this blog occasionally, we wish you the same happiness we wish others. We are persuaded that one can never have too many friends.

I posted Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” at Christmas a couple of years ago, but that performance has disappeared from You Tube. Here’s a link to another performance I like a lot, this one by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

And while I’m posting music, here’s Chanticleer performing what has become a signature piece for them, the “Ave Maria” of Franz Biebl. My favorite Chanticleer album is still their 1992 Christmas album, Our Heart’s Joy, which was remastered and re-released in 2004 (I have the earlier CD). Here’s a performance of the carol that gave that album it’s title, though this is a performance by a later instantiation of Chanticleer, from their 2003 Portrait CD.

We used to call verse that mixed vernacular and Latin text Macaronics. It’s interesting, to me at least, that translations and paraphrases of this carol, perhaps the Macaronic original, like the fairly well-known though not very good 1837 paraphrase by Robert Pearsall, retain the Latin untranslated (except “Good Christian Men, Rejoice”). Of course one loses the effect of the Macaronic if the whole is translated; though I expect the real reason for the practice is that any educated person, before our own benighted time, could rede the Latin text, perhaps even understand that in German Latin, dulci is “dultsi.”

—Happy Christmas to all. In dulci jubilo!

Not a great place to keep Christmas, Ebeneezer . . .

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There’s not much good news in Missouri this holiday season. As the salvationists appear outside local businesses ringing their bells and the papers carry the usual stories of needy folk in line for help from local philanthropy, there’s a good deal else that suggests the coarseness of life in this place.

Towing scandal: The ringleaders of a crooked towing company, whose exposure triggered the resignation of a former St. Louis police chief and suggested a deep vein of corruption in the St. Louis police department, have all been given sweetheart sentences by a federal judge this week. Bill McClellan has written two columns about it, here, and here. As McClellan complains about one case, “Citizens have lost their cars, the city has been cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and the man supposedly behind all of this gets 10 months. Talk about throwing the pamphlet at a guy.”

Racism continues: To make matters worse, New census data have been released that appear to show that St. Louis “is among the most racially separated regions of the nation,” according to another Post-Dispatch story. John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, is quoted to the effect that these data “suggest that all the talk about a postracial society means nothing at the level of neighborhood.” In ethnically mixed neighborhoods like my own, one is aware of racial hostility and suspicion, aware of racial gangs, aware that most reported crime is racially attributed. Racism is institutionalized in this city, as apparently in other cities in the nation’s so-called “ghetto belt.”

Institutional closings: And there’s bad news too for the institutionalized disabled all across Missouri, as the legislature debates closing all state facilities for the disabled and forcing patients into home care regardless of hardship. Of course many of these facilities were pretty dangerous places for their clients before budget cutting targeted them, but it looks as though Scrooge has the votes in Jeff City to close them now, as he usually does when it comes to harming the weak in this state. The cruelty of this thing is so flagrant that decent folk shouldn’t tolerate it. But I’ll bet they do. After all, we’re famous in Missouri for denying Medicaid to thousands of children and for resisting the new federal health care program.

We can’t afford care for the disabled in Missouri, and apparently we can’t afford safe highways any more, either; but the St. Louis Cardinals still think the city of St. Louis can afford to help them finance the dubious Ballpark Village. So as I wrap packages and try to think benevolent thoughts this year, I think I’ll increase my disability insurance and forget about those baseball games I’d like to attend next summer: that, and stay off the roads in bad weather.

—which is what I’m doing today.

Sidney Homer’s “Requiem” Op. 15

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Sidney Homer

I knew next to nothing about Sidney Homer before I read around a bit. He was a contemporary of Charles Ives, more or less. But unlike Ives he made his career as a musician: as a professor at the New England Conservatory and as a composer, mostly of songs. His compositions were popularly successful in an era when sheet music purchases were an index of popularity and people still entertained themselves by making music in their parlors.

Wikipedia doesn’t carry much information beyond this wonderful picture. There’s more about him at this PBS site. He was Samuel Barber’s uncle, and the kinship shows in Barber’s songs, I think. Homer was married to the Philadelphia contralto, Louise Beatty, a Metropolitan Opera star for many years during the company’s golden age. Beatty recorded Homer’s “Requiem,” in 1912. You can hear just a fragment here. In the 1950s, when I was entering the Texas Interscholastic League singing competitions, this song was a staple, and Homer’s reputation as a composer remained sturdy. That changed over the next few decades, and Homer is all but forgotten now. Baritone Jeffrey Snider, chair of the vocal studies program at the University of North Texas, performs a number of Homer songs and at one time had some on his website. I wish him success in reviving interest in Homer.

I thought I remembered that John Charles Thomas had recorded Homer’s “Requiem” but failed to find it at YouTube. I had decided that my memory must have been faulty or that nobody had yet posted the song, when my son, Julian, sent me a link to this Thomas performance of “Under the Wide Starry Sky.” It would be interesting to know if Homer did the orchestration and choral background—it’s a little cheesy but somehow right, as my son said when he sent me the link. I think I still like the song better with voice and piano, but there’s no denying the authenticity of Thomas’s performance. This was his kind of song.