LUNSFORD COLUMN: The comfort of old hymns and a new star | Opinion newsandtribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsandtribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The First Performance of ‘Silent Night’
A recital took place at the church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf in Salzburg, on the evening of 24 December 1818.
Silent Night, or
Stille Nacht in its original German, is one of the best known songs in the world, but few know anything of its authors.
Its lyrics were written in 1816 by a somewhat loose-living Austrian priest named Joseph Mohr. On Christmas Eve 1818, Mohr – then at St Nicholas in Oberndorf in Salzburg – handed the words to Franz Gruber, the church’s organist, and asked him to write a melody for two voices, accompanied by a guitar, for that same evening.
I grew up with a beautiful Solstice tradition: the Blue Christmas service. Each year, on or near the darkest night, our churches would offer a ceremony to remember those who had passed that year and hold space for the specific pain of holidays without loved ones we so sorely miss. Christmas itself named a broader pain, of injustice, of our many earthly wounds, and it offered a word of hope, of healing: a vision and promise of justpeace for all Creation. But Blue Christmas was different.
Blue Christmas said, sure – there is much work to do. If we really want to be vessels of a mighty Spirit of Love, we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get to work! But… not tonight. Tonight, our work is to pause. To look away from the holy preparations of Advent, from the festive and the merry, and from the coming cruciform Birth. To be still. To turn toward pain we do not want to face. To allow ourselves to rest a moment, in Mighty Arms of Love. And to light a candle.
Christmas Oratorio. Ensemble Resonanz presents Bach s
Christmas Oratorio as Hausmusik among friends. With a small cast and no large choir, the ensemble has arranged 30 arias, recitatives, choruses, and chorales from Bach s masterpiece in its own version. The score remains untouched, but electric guitar and Hammond organ sound in the continuo, there’s only one trumpet, and the whole ensemble joins in the chorales. View here.
Delibes’s
Sylvia. Conductor: Kevin Rhodes, choreography: Manuel Legris after Louis Mérante. With Kiyoka Hashimoto, Masayu Kimoto, and Davide Dato. Production from November 2018. Register for free and view here.
2 pm ET: VOCES8 Live from London presents
When All Is Said And Done It Really Is A Wonderful Life – Eugene Daily News eugenedailynews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eugenedailynews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.