Music for December 22, 2019 + Advent IV

Vocal Music

• Maria Walks Amid the Thorn – Hugo Distler (1908-1942)

Instrumental Music

• Ave Maria – Gerald Near (b. 1942)
• Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 & 661 – J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew.)

• Hymn 66 - Come, thou long expected Jesus (STUTTGART)
• Hymn 54 - Savior of the nations, come! (NUN KOMM, DER HEIDEN HEILAND)
• Hymn 475  - God himself is with us (TYSK)
• Hymn R 26 - Jesus, name above all names (HEARN)
• Hymn 56 - O come, O come, Emmanuel (VENI EMMANUEL)
• Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 (setting by Thomas Pavlechko)

This Sunday the choir is really stretching themselves and singing a (hopefully) unaccompanied setting of a German folk song, "Maria durch ein Dornwald ging" (English: "Maria walks amid the thorns", arranged by the 20th century German composer, Hugo Distler.

Hugo Distler

The carol comes from sixteenth century Germany (although it is probably much older) and commemorates the barrenness of the the Old Testament, the longing and waiting, and the flowering of sanctity and joy with the coming of the Messiah. It describes the walk of Mary with the child "under her heart," referring to the story of the visit of Mary to Elizabeth as recorded in the Gospel of Luke, Luke 1:39–56. It ends with the motif of the dead thornwood, a symbol of fertility and death, which begins to bloom during pass of Mary with the divine child.

Hugo Distler is at once one of the more promising and yet most tragic of the German composers of the first half of the twentieth century. John Lienhard, of Houston Public Radio's "Engines of Our Ingenuity," talked about Distler on one of those episodes. I will include his remarks below. (You can listen to it here, in case you'd rather do that - just NOT in church!)

As I listened to a piece by German composer Hugo Distler yesterday, it struck me how remarkable his music was. Distler wrote primarily for chorus and organ, and, if you know his work, you're aware of an utterly distinctive musical flavor.

Hugo Distler was born in Nuremberg in 1908. His high-school years were those of the Weimar Republic and the intense flowering of high German culture that followed WW-I. He studied music at Leipzig Conservatory. The sound of hobnail boots was being heard in the streets of Bavaria, but the sound still seemed far away.

 Just a few years later, Hitler came to power, and the great minds of that period began scattering out of Germany -- people like Albert Einstein, Theodore von Kármán, Paul Tillich, and Bruno Walter. Goebbels named composer Paul Hindemith a cultural Bolshevist and a spiritual non-Aryan in 1934. Hindemith wound up at Yale, Einstein at Princeton, and von Kármán at Cal Tech.

 But Distler was only 25 when Hitler took over -- the newest musical talent of his age. He'd just been made head of the chamber music department at Lübeck Conservatory, and he was still too young to be a target. Yet he was driven by spiritual imperatives that cast a whole new light on traditional church music.

 He brought the declamatory joy of baroque composers like Heinrich Schütz to the foursquare old melodies of the German Reformation. His music was quirky but beautiful, tonal yet chromatic. He made the old melodies dance with delight. It is a sound utterly unlike any other. Once you hear it, you don't forget it.

 But it was a sound heard in the wrong place at the wrong time. A trip I took in 1978 reminds me of what Distler faced. A Polish colleague, driving me down the valley from Silesia to Krakow, stopped to show me Auschwitz. What a chamber of horrors! A sign on one wall explained how the exterminations were scheduled. Jews were allowed to starve for months as they waited their turn in the gas chambers. But clergy were rushed to the head of the line. They were considered too dangerous to keep around.

 Suppressing the established German church was dicey business for the Nazis. But suppress it they would. Distler represented religious intensity the Nazis couldn't tolerate. They told him he was trouble and his music was degenerate. He would be taken from his church post and shipped off to the Wehrmacht! Conscientious objection was treason punishable by death, and Distler could never support the war. So, disillusioned and depressed, he put his head in his own gas oven and ended his life at the age of 34.

He lived not even as long as Mozart, and he worked in a far more hostile climate. His brilliance was a side road that never properly joined the mainstream of twentieth-century musical evolution. Music would not sound the same today if it had. I'll never forget my sense of pure surprise the first time I sang Distler.