‘Tis the season to hear opera stars bellow out Yuletide melodies in oddly accented English. Beyond issues of pronunciation, opera often translates to overblown vocalising which clashes with the essence of Christmas carols. Many of these songs originally derived from carols sung by ordinary people on the streets of medieval towns. Christmas is a time for the message to take centre stage in a carol, not for the diva or divo.
It would be Scrooge-like to name the worst offenders, so instead let’s relish exceptional operatic performers who actually managed to scale their vocalising to the message of the carol.
Ideally, Christmas songs inspire what the sociologist Émile Durkheim termed a “collective effervescence” by uniting listeners spiritually. They are written for everyday voices in terms of vocal range and musical ability, to be widely shared and appreciated in performance – and not just for listening.
Operatic voices are trained to emit vast pillars of sound, but Christmas songs are different. To render them suitably, singers must be aware of sacred contexts, as the Irish tenor John McCormack was. His renditions of Christmas carols were concentrated, and expressed his own personal faith. Yet at the same time, he triumphed in large-scale Italian and French operas, particularly those of Verdi, Puccini, Mozart and Donizetti.
But McCormack never mistook carols for arias. He recorded Adeste Fideles months after the Christmas Truce of 1914: that series of widespread, unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front. British and German soldiers in trenches sang carols at each other; one German soldier began with a rendering of From Heaven to Earth a Son is given.
McCormack’s voice was a compelling call to the faithful. By no coincidence, after gracing international opera stages, the tenor would receive the title of Papal Count.
The Teutonic traditions embedded in Christmas carols were most famously rendered in Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, written in 1818 by the Austrian composer Franz Xaver Gruber. Discographers claim that Silent Night has been recorded in 137,000 versions over the years. One of these was a straightforward, notably unflorid version in 1908 by the operatic contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, daughter of an Austrian Catholic shoemaker, better known as a Wagnerian.
Devoid of the flourishes of her Bayreuth stage roles, Madame Schumann-Heink would rerecord the same carol in 1926 with sobriety and directness. Likewise, Schumann-Heink’s 1921 record of O Come All Ye Faithful, sung in English, has a restrained use of vibrato that separates the world of the stage from that of domestic and ecclesiastical piety.
Similarly, in 1916 the ultimate opera superstar Enrico Caruso was able to tame his mighty vocal timbre to offer O Holy Night in its original language. In French, Cantique de Noël is a Gallic doctrinal sermon on the anniversary of the Saviour’s birth about the meaning of midnight to all Christians (Minuit, chrétiens…).
Caruso would later recall that he started singing liturgical music aged ten to support his family. In 1916, he might have chosen to perform O Holy Night in French to express solidarity with a nation that had experienced hundreds of thousands of casualties at the battles of Verdun and the Somme earlier that year.
As composed by the Frenchman Adolphe Adam, O Holy Night is essentially an opera aria with climactic top notes, which explains why so many parish soloists and choirs have some iffy moments when performing it. The aria’s innate showiness requires restraint to avoid being overdone. Among Catholic successors to Caruso’s version, the tenor Georges Thill and baritone Camille Maurane, both Frenchmen, and the Canadian tenor Pierre Boutet are especially noteworthy.
Preserving a sanctified message by completely avoiding stagey display is impossible for some artists. In 1932, the Hungarian soprano Maria Ivogün recorded the traditional Silesian folk tune On the Mountain, the Wind is Blowing (Maria auf dem Berge) in which the Virgin tries to warm her child as she rocks him to sleep. Ivogün sang with a uniformly appealing tone teetering on twee. Yet this delicate precedent was fumbled by Ivogün’s pupil, the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Her 1957 recording of Maria auf dem Berge is diva-like.
For full-fledged artistry among opera stars singing Christmas songs, explore the rich discography of the Catalan mezzo-soprano Victoria de los Ángeles, a sincere Catholic. In a career marked by successful incarnations of most of the soprano and mezzo-soprano roles in the repertoire, she refused to perform Puccini’s Tosca because she felt that the eponymous heroine was unrealistic – as no Catholic woman who had killed a man, even the villainous Baron Scarpia, would touch a crucifix only a few instants later.
De los Ángeles herself displayed a career-long investigative spirit when it came to exploring songs from the early Middle Ages and Renaissance, enlivening them with warm exuberance. One example is Icy December (El Desembre congelat) in which contemplation of the Nativity scene inspires the advice: “If we have no other treasure [to offer the baby Jesus] / Let's give him our hearts.”
Another faith-filled recording is The Song of the Birds (El cant dels ocells). This traditional Catalan lullaby tells of nature's delight at learning of the birth of Jesus. Avian musings include a linnet trilling: “Oh, how lovely and beautiful / Is the child of Mary!”
And let’s not forget New Zealander Kiri Te Kanawa, educated at St Mary's College, Auckland, where she was taught operatic singing by Sister Mary Leo Niccol, a celebrated pedagogue and conductor of the Sisters' Choir. Dame Kiri’s highly communicative version of Silent Night was part of a 1995 program of carols from Coventry Cathedral.
And if she did not always banish divadom from her other performances, Kiri Te Kanawa still deserves mention alongside those other opera singers above, who were capable of putting themselves at the service of the message of the carols – not the other way round.
Playlist of opera singers (successfully) performing carols:
John McCormack – Adeste fideles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwGo1thfxSk&list=RDjwGo1thfxSk&start_radio=1
Ernestine Schumann-Heink - Silent Night (1908)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBghzZPnPPA
Ernestine Schumann-Heink - Silent Night (1926)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUhcpd0beic&list=RDNUhcpd0beic&start_radio=1
Ernestine Schumann Heink - O Come All Ye Faithful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA6oM-N9wHE
Enrico Caruso – O Holy Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFKrQ41oDLM&list=RDxFKrQ41oDLM&start_radio=1
Georges Thill - O Holy Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjrkjVx_Rqw&list=RDWjrkjVx_Rqw&start_radio=1
Camille Maurane - O Holy Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZOCDqhkLhc
Pierre Boutet - O Holy Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh3h2AF-Q08
Maria Ivogün - On the Mountain, the Wind is Blowing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5TiiEDyk1w&list=RDt5TiiEDyk1w&start_radio=1
Victoria de los Ángeles - The Icy Decemberhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tY6t4VRJmM
Victoria de los Ángeles - The Song of the Birds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1prQrhokfc&list=RDP1prQrhokfc&start_radio=1
Kiri Te Kanawa - Silent Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u62XHZnRcFw&list=PL8ld2LoKhQqxKxBXJlQd7TQpC0OTXl2SP&index=12
