Arcangelo Corelli’s “Christmas Concerto”

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Arcangelo Corelli was a giant of the Baroque era of Western music and, though it might be easy to forget today, one of the most historically important and popular composers who ever lived. His “Christmas Concerto” has endured as Corelli’s most popular work and one of the great classical pieces for the Christmas season.

When I was 12 years old, my mother took me to a concert at the Kennedy Center featuring I Musici, the celebrated Italian string orchestra. The program was devoted to Italian Baroque music—the ensemble’s specialty—and the opening work, appropriate for a concert in December, was Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto grosso Opus 6 No. 8, known as the Christmas Concerto. I was then a violin student of some four years, and already loved Baroque music above any other, but nothing prepared me for the opening chord that I Musici played. That G-minor chord—stark and direct yet at the same time plush and velvety, unanimous in attack and blend—was the most electrifying sound I had yet heard in music, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Following this austere introduction was a slow, majestic polyphony of overlapping string entries, gradually unfolding as part of the opening movement of Corelli’s concerto. It is our induction into the awe and mystery of the Nativity. The following sequence of movements—a balanced alternation of slow and fast tempos—culminated in the lovely and gentle Pastorale, evoking the shepherds in Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve.

Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was a giant of the Baroque era of Western music and, though it might be easy to forget today, one of the most historically important and popular composers who ever lived. He was a master violinist during the era when the violin was coming into its own as a premier instrument of European music. Corelli gained renown both for his soulful violin playing and his beautiful, perfectly proportioned compositions, all of them involving his chosen instrument. Uniquely among Italian composers of his era, Corelli wrote no opera or vocal works at all, concentrating exclusively on music for string instruments. His career celebrates the new independence that instrumental music had in the Baroque era, breaking free from its status as a mere backup to voices. Corelli played a key role in the development of the violin sonata, the trio sonata, and the concerto grosso (“big concerto,” on which more later), and he decisively influenced other Italian Baroque composers such as Albinoni and Vivaldi.

“Archangel” he was named, and archangel he remained. Corelli exuded serenity, moderation, and balance, both in his person and in his music. He moved away from the spontaneous, wild, and unpredictable “Fantastic Style” of the earlier Baroque (think of composers like Biber and Buxtehude, wonderful in their own right) and toward the more restrained, classically ordered style we know as the High Baroque—the style of Bach and Handel among others. The essence of the style, as codified by Corelli, was a steady spinning out of musical phrases, representing a kind of logical flow of thought.

According to a commentator for Washington’s National Gallery of Art, “Renaissance architects had sought to engage the intellect, with their focus on divine sources of geometry, while their successors aimed to overwhelm the senses and emotions.” And in music, Corelli harmonized the two: intellect with emotion, passion with proportion. Corelli was actually one of the pivotal composers of Western music, in that he established standard tonal harmonic progressions and principles of musical structure that would remain standard for centuries to come.

Corelli lived in an age in which composers published, not individual pieces, but collections of pieces, each collection bearing an opus number. The pieces in these collections were fairly short, and the movements or sections that made them up were also short. Later, in the Romantic era, musical works grew longer and more involved, and composers came to prize originality—meaning that each work had to be a unique creation, not merely an instance of a type.

Yet in an era in which composers typically produced pieces by the cartload to fulfill various functions of public and private life, Corelli set himself apart by publishing very little. His entire published output consists of six collections or opus numbers, consisting of sonatas for violin and basso continuo, trio sonatas, and concerti grossi. Corelli’s lack of prolificity spoke to his restraint, high standards, and exacting craftsmanship. Because he didn’t need to churn out music to survive, Corelli had the luxury of polishing his compositions to perfection before sharing them with the public. And the greater facility in printing music in the early 18^th century meant that there was a ready market for Corelli’s works. He was a musical bestseller and remained so for generations afterward. With Corelli, quality trumps quantity, and less is truly more.

Corelli was born in Fusignano, a town in north-central Italy near Bologna, but spent most of his life in Rome. The Eternal City in the 1600s was still proud of its imperial heritage and dignity, with a great flowering of artists and architects like Bernini and Caravaggio. Roman musicians found plentiful work for ecclesiastical patrons, who in addition to running the church were avid patrons of the arts. Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, the nephew of a pope, served as Corelli’s employer for years. Ottoboni held Monday night concerts at which Corelli and his regular band of musicians played both his own and other composers’ music.

In his own work Corelli began to break up the rigid distinction between sacred and secular music, designating some of his instrumental pieces as da chiesa (for church—perhaps serving as interludes during Mass) and other as da camera (for the chamber, or convivial musical gatherings in the home). Typically, the “secular” pieces would contain dances and references to folk roots; but the borders are not clear-cut, and a work like the Christmas Concerto has elements of both church and chamber.

Composing was only a part of Corelli’s musical life. He was a star violinist, of a magnetic presence. According to an eyewitness, “it was usual for his countenance to be distorted, his eyes to become as red as fire, and his eyeballs to roll as if in agony.” Yet when not playing the violin he was, according to another observer, “remarkable for the mildness of his temper and the modesty of his deportment.” Like Handel, Beethoven, and Brahms, Corelli never married. He remained devoted to his art, being seen as a kind of aristocrat of music.

Such was the respect, even veneration, toward him that when he died in 1713, just shy of his 60^th birthday, he was buried in Rome’s Pantheon, an honor accorded to Italy’s kings as well as her artists; his tomb is placed next to that of Raphael. The French composer Lully wrote an Apotheosis of Corelli which imagined the Italian composer being wafted up to Mount Parnassus. To this day there are violinists who can trace their pedagogical “lineage” back to Corelli himself.

Corelli’s music was beloved throughout Europe: its formal dignity and restraint endeared it to the British, and it quickly crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies, where our violin-playing third president Thomas Jefferson had a good deal of Corelli in his music collection at Monticello.

The Christmas Concerto has endured as Corelli’s most popular work and one of the great classical pieces for the Christmas season. As mentioned above, it is a concerto grosso: a typically Baroque genre involving lively contrast and interplay between a small group of soloists and the full string orchestra of which they are a part. Headed fatto per la notte di natale (made for Christmas Night), the concerto may have figured in a Christmas Eve Mass or concert at the cardinal’s palace.

A number of Baroque composers wrote Christmas concertos, a genre whose distinguishing feature is the pastoral movement. Our industrial society may no longer have a sense of what “pastoral music” meant in earlier times. Essentially it is the sort of music the shepherds would play on pipes and other wind instruments to while away the time in the field—shepherding naturally being a profession of static and lonely hours. It is the music of arcadian paradise, and also the music of the shepherds of Bethlehem. Pastoral music was typically in a lilting triple time, with gently rolling or undulating rhythms. With its association with shepherds, this kind of music played a part in folk traditions marking the Christmas season. There was an old tradition in Italy of shepherds coming down from the hills into town to mimic the shepherds of Bethlehem serenading the baby Jesus. They played the piva and the zampogna, types of bagpipes which provided a bass drone under a melody, a device you can hear imitated in Corelli’s piece. Rome undoubtedly was host to such folk musicians from the surrounding Campagna. The siciliano is a characteristic type of lilting pastoral music, much imitated by Baroque composers. A part of Western culture from ancient times, the idea of “pastoral music” was still alive as recently as 200 years ago: when Beethoven made use of the tradition in his Sixth (“Pastoral”) Symphony, he could count on it resonating with listeners’ lived experience. The Industrial Revolution made of it a quaint cultural relic. A good thing that we can still time-travel with Beethoven and Corelli.

Corelli chose to place his Pastorale at the end of his concerto. It occupies the place that in an ordinary concerto would be occupied by a giga, another folk genre, a cousin to the British jig. The Pastorale tells us that we are not dealing with an ordinary concerto but one for a special and sacred occasion.

And listen to how Corelli leads up to it. The preceding allegro (the fifth of the concerto’s six movements) leaps about like a frisky lamb—the Bethlehem countryside blurs into the Roman Campagna once again. At the end of the movement Corelli makes the music stop dead in its tracks, joining it to the Pastorale without a break, and in the process changing from the minor mode to the major, a wonderful and unexpected harmonic brightening.

The Pastorale is music of peace, innocence, radiance. But it is not the only jewel in this work. It is impossible not to love the concerto’s third movement: a lovely and moving adagio in the relative major key to the concerto’s main tonality of G minor, with graceful intertwining arabesques in the violins. To me this music evokes the presepio or Christmas creche, another beloved Italian seasonal tradition. But here again Corelli undermines our expectations. This lovely slow music is interrupted by an allegro in agitated 16^th notes, like a minor earthquake breaking in as a mother cradles her child to sleep. This builds to a peak…then just as abruptly breaks off, and returns to the tender opening music. Before long the music swells with a harmonic fullness and unutterable majesty such as only Corelli could write, but which the likes of Handel (whose Messiah also has a scene-setting “Pastoral Symphony”) would strive to emulate. After this sublime music come a minuet, one of the defining courtly dances of the era, and an allegro which provides the concerto’s liveliest music. The entire work lasts around 15 minutes, a model of chiseled economy.

For years, playing an arrangement of Corelli’s Pastorale for violin and organ has been a must for me at my parish church on Christmas Eve, as a prelude to Mass. And in general, this composer has taken on a greater importance in my life as I have come to cherish his work and legacy. Corelli coaxed out the lyrical, expressive voice of the violin as perhaps no one before had done, cementing its place in Western music. He was a model of integrity, and his music reflects the soul of Italian creativity through the ages. The classical repertoire commonly heard always conveys a particular cultural atmosphere, and it is more often than not that of Vienna and Germany in the late 18^th through the 19^th centuries. There is nothing wrong with that, not at all. But the music of Corelli conveys a different aesthetic world, and I propose that Baroque Rome might also offer just as rich and distinctive an experience for us today.

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The featured image is “The Nativity” (1480s) by Antoniazzo Romano, and is in the public domain. courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of “Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), Composer” (between 1697 and 1698) by Hugh Howard, is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.