In 1994 the British conductor Paul McCreesh reconstructed a Lutheran Mass as it might have been sung on Christmas Morning 1620. The music was mostly by Michael Praetorius, with some by Samuel Scheidt and Johann Hermann Schein.
He recorded it in Roskilde Cathedral, Norway.
The 1640 organ at Roskilde
Praetorius is better-known for his secular and deliciously sexy Terpsichore, a collection of Renaissance dance music. This shows his other side, as a composer who delightedly embraced the new opportunities of Lutheranism. The recording is an astounding achievement -- certainly for me one of the finest recordings of the 20th century of anything, by anyone -- and a marvellous corrective to the seasonal sludge of sleighbells and hooting, viscous carols. Whether or not the Incarnation celebrated at Christmas was in any sense true, or whether the religion whose heart it lies at has any claim to validity, Praetorius's music and McCreesh's flawless and joyful interpretation make it all too clear why so many wanted, and want, to believe it. If the final In Dulci Jubilo -- a "macaronic" hymn which swings between the German vernacular and the pre-Lutheran Latin, and which, in doing so, sums up the spirit of Martin Luther's reforms, does not leave your heart singing, then there is no life in you. Imagine the cold morning, the filled church, the town trumpeters waiting (by Praetorius's own recommendation) outside in the snow, and then the doors thrown open, and the sound flooding in on a tide of light as they sing of heaven
Where the angels sing
New songs
And the bells ring
In the court of the King
Oh! to be there; Oh, to be there!
Bah? Possibly. Humbug? Perhaps. But a wonder all the same.
(And faintly, though unseasonally, pleasant to think that General Pinochet probably never heard it, nor ever will, even if there is no purgatory waiting to scour him or hell to gape.)
