The Batshit Classical Holiday Mixtape
John Brown, Bertolt Brecht, and George Michael
In recent years, I have spent more time than any one human probably should with the subgenre of classical Christmas albums in the name of journalism. In 2020, I mixed all of the liquor I had left in my temporary sublet (I was moving the next day) and listened to Jonas Kaufmann’s It’s Christmas! (exclamation point the album’s, not my own). The following year, I undertook the scientific listening and ranking of every extant classical singer’s holiday album, which resulted in a lot of children’s choirs and regret.
This year seems like one in which I ought to set aside old grudges and woes and embrace the season of good cheer. And so, dear reader, I offer you this mixtape of holiday anthems that this industry — and year — richly deserves.
Montserrat Caballé: “Weihnachtsgrüße/Saludo Navideno/Voeux de Noel/Christmas Greetings”
Montserrat Caballé’s 1996 Christmas album (recorded with her daughter, Montserrat Martí) seems underwhelming but inoffensive until you get to the end of the album. There, shoehorned between the last few tracks, is a series of “Christmas Greetings,” which feature Caballé offering multilingual tidings (German, French, Spanish, and English) of the season against the backdrop of children’s choruses and orchestral interludes.
The effect is like the outgoing recordings you’d hear on an answering machine before leaving your message in the ’90s. Which makes a certain amount of sense here as Caballé clearly phoned this album in.
Valentina Naforniţa, Angelika Kirchschlager, Piotr Beczala, Artur Ruciński: “So This Is Christmas”
Christmas in Vienna exemplifies what Susan Sontag in Notes on Camp calls “the discovery of the good taste of bad taste,” and the liberation to be found within that discovery. That said, the sentiment of this song hits different when one of the singers performing it told you in the same year that they believed any Arab refugees arriving in Europe should sign a document stating that they are not a terrorist before being granted asylum.
There again, Moe Meyer described camp as the “apolitical badge of the consumer” so perhaps I’m expecting too much from any of this.
Renate Holm: “Glory, Glory Hallelujah (after ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’)”
I had no idea what to make of this when I first heard it, especially because Holm isn’t singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but rather “John Brown’s Body.” Did Holm, a longstanding star of the Vienna Volksoper and specialist in folkish Wienerlieder, actually understand the lyrics as she sang about John Brown’s body lying mouldering in the grave? Did the puckish children’s choir assembled for what is billed as a Christmas album?
At the beginning of this holiday season, I still had no idea what to make of it. And then Luigi Mangione happened. One essay on Medium was titled “What you say about Luigi Mangione is what you would’ve said about John Brown,” its author describing both figures as “a child of wealthy parents who thought the best way to fight a social evil is to kill.”
“When does the polite habit of acquiescence reach a place and time where a significant portion of the public accepts that the usual means of redress via debate and politics no longer offers relief from intolerable suffering?” questioned another editorial for indie newspaper Common Dreams. “This question had a simple, unquestionable answer for John Brown.”
Suddenly, Holm’s recording fits within in the Christmas pantheon. As Dana Schwartz wrote in 2019, the true meaning of Christmas is “ghosts terrorizing rich people in the middle of the night until they agree to pay their employees more.”
Natalia Ushakova, Vesselina Kasarova, Dmitry Korchak, Sebastian Huppman: “Last Christmas”
“But ‘Last Christmas’ isn’t just about the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with rejection,” writes Rachel Aroesti. “It’s also about the cognitive dissonance of obsessive love.” This read on Wham’s classic is downright Goethe-esque. Who but young Werther would utter (let alone sing) a line like: “Now I know what a fool I've been, but if you kissed me now, I know you’d fool me again”?
This seems to be the dramatic thrust offered to George Michael’s interpreters in this now-infamous medley from the Christmas in Vienna concert series. Baritone Sebastian Huppman is cast as the forlorn lead, the lyrics, once picked up by mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova, shifted: “Last Christmas, he gave you his heart,” as though she were a Greek chorus to Huppman’s amorous misadventures. (The hidden meaning of Kasarova, a brilliant Charlotte in her time, singing this stanza is not lost on the viewer.)
As the platonic ideal of a Romantic tragedy, it shouldn’t surprise us that, despite the narrator’s vow to pass on his heart to someone special, he still focuses on the one who wronged him rather than the one who is special. In this way, George Michael unfortunately seems to be fulfilling the capitalistic promise of Christmas, the longing for more and more rather than what some Marxist-Christian philosophers have seen as the holiday’s radical promise of justice and a more equitable world order.
I’m inclined to believe that we don’t turn to Christmas in Vienna for this type of radical vision. But I can also see a universe in which this performance is meant to illustrate the Wertherian fallacy of unrequited love. As Georg Lukács wrote: “To be sure, young Goethe was no revolutionary… But in a broad and deep historical sense, in the sense of their internal involvement with the basic problems of the bourgeois revolution, the works of young Goethe represent a revolutionary peak of the European Enlightenment, the ideological preparation for the great French Revolution.”
Jessye Norman: “Star of Wonder”
Jessye Norman released no fewer than three Christmas albums, each as over-the-top as Norman was herself, each in different ways. Her live concert at Notre Dame was filmed a year after her billowing and ecumenical performance of “La Marseillaise” on the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day, and carries some of that same stylized grandeur. It is, in effect, grand opera dressed up as holiday music, sung in what was a record-breaking winter with ticketless audiences crammed on the square outside the cathedral to watch a simulcast.
After a procession of Bach’s Magnificat, Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” Brahms’s “Geistliches Wiegenlied,” and Schubert’s “Die Allmacht,” a faint stir comes from the orchestra — almost like the opening bars of Mahler’s First Symphony, redolent with divine mystery. And then, a children’s choir takes over, singing a slow, majestic (almost Marseillaise-like) version of… “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.”
“AM I ON MESCALINE??” I wrote white listening to this in 2021 when I heard Norman herself join in. The song is repeated in French and then, using the same melody, the lyrics lapse into a French version of the alphabet song. So this is what the Jacobins fought for.
Angela Denoke, Vesselina Kasarova, Noah Stewart, Günther Haumer: “Feliz Navidad”
Earlier this year, a video of bright young Germans partying on the island of Sylt circulated. Against techno beach music, and with at least one partygoer giving the Nazi salute while mimicking Hitler’s moustache, the guests of a 150€-a-head nightclub chanted, in as close an approximation to rhythm as they could muster, “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus!” (“Germany for the Germans, foreigners out.”)
It’s not a new sentiment, but it’s one I think about a lot, especially since this song is also a mainstay of Christmas in Vienna programs. A good reminder that Germany (and Austria) wouldn’t survive with the ausländer raus.
Anne Sofie von Otter: “White Christmas”
In 2021, Dave Kindy wrote a piece on Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” for the Washington Post, which ran under the headline “‘White Christmas’ was the song America needed to fight fascism.”
It’s the sort of overblown statement that we look for in American mythology: a scrappy hero and the magic bullet he needs to fight the enemy for the sake of freedom and liberty. That mythology in turn is what Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin in the Siberian city of Tyumen, bought into as a young and equally-scrappy immigrant on New York’s Lower East Side. He wrote “White Christmas” in the aftermath of the attacks on Pearl Harbor (which brought a reluctant United States into World War II). It gained a swift fandom from GIs sent far from home.
Before the end of 1942, poet Carl Sandburg wrote “this latest hit of Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace,” juxtaposing this image with “the Nazi theory and doctrine that man in his blood is naturally warlike, so much so that he should call war a blessing.” What Sandburg couldn’t have predicted when he wrote this was that “White Christmas” would, in 1975, be the signal to launch the American evacuation of Vietnam, resulting in the so-called fall of Saigon.
Listening to Anne Sofie von Otter with this in mind, her cover of the crooning anthem — its subdued opening against a crawling bassline that is soon taken over by jagged, George Crumb-like screeches of strings, and an ending that comes not with a bang but a wheeze — everything makes complete sense. “There’s a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? You can have injustice and have peace,” says Kwame Ture in a widely-circulated clip from Peter Brook’s 1968 Vietnam documentary, Tell Me Lies. “So peace isn’t the answer, liberation is the answer.”
Bryn Terfel: “White Christmas”
About a decade before he recorded “White Christmas,” Bing Crosby laid down “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?,” Yip Harburg’s 1932 Depression-era ballad. (Years later, Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” would become NPR’s number-one song of the 20th Century, followed by “White Christmas” in a close second.)
The two recordings are a study in contrasts. In the Irving Berlin tune, Crosby is in Beverly Hills, the sun shining, the grass green, the orange and palm trees swaying. In Harburg’s, he is the fallen hero, who once built a tower to the sun — a nod to the Empire State Building’s construction and the effusive optimism of the skyscraper era — and now sits in its shadow, a victim of the Great Depression in need of a spare dime.
I go through all of this preamble as a means of making sense of Bryn Terfel’s recording of “White Christmas,” which overlaps with Crosby’s but in a way that makes it sound like your drunk uncle singing over the radio. (The music video doesn’t do it any favors.) But supposing Terfel is like Crosby in reverse: He released his Christmas album in 2010, just as he was embarking on a then-new Ring Cycle for the Met helmed, disastrously, one feels, by Robert Lepage. As Wotan, Terfel seemed lost in the machinery of Lepage’s vision. His character’s Valhalla was a blip on the radar next to Lepage’s, a $16 million, 45-ton behemoth that will soon be replaced after less than two decades. A tower to the sun that went too close to the sun.
But yeah, I still don’t understand his “White Christmas.”
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: “Das Paket des lieben Gottes”
I was very disappointed to learn that Fischer-Dieskau actually did record a proper Christmas album (with pianist Jörg Demus for Deutsche Grammophon). While it’s predictably beautiful, I like to think that “Nacht, Heller als der Tag: Weihnacht mit Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau” was his sole contribution to an overcrowded genre, one that has become crassly capitalistic.
Instead of any songs, Fischer-Dieskau reads from works by John Milton, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Hans Christian Andersen. As I wrote of the recording in 2021, it’s the equivalent of your dad pulling into the McDonald’s drive-through only to order a single black coffee. In this vein, the most entertaining name to see come up on the track listing is that of the one poet we all associate with Christmas: noted atheist Bertolt Brecht.
It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a singer who spent four Christmases as a Wehrmacht draftee, first on the Russian front, then in Bologna, and finally in a POW prison (while the Nazis systematically starved his physically and mentally-impaired brother to death). In his memoir, Fischer-Dieskau, “in despair about my failed life, about people who think only of material things, about the political future, which is entirely black,” takes solace in the Advent season of 1945 in his company commander, a poet, philosopher, and musician. One can imagine how easily Brecht, whose own works dealt with black political futures, failed lives, and the tyranny of material things, would fit into Fischer-Dieskau’s Christmastide.
And despite Brecht’s own antipathy towards organized religion, he was able to locate a reason for the season in “The Package of God,” a short work set in a bar (located, in turn, in a slaughterhouse) in Chicago on Christmas Eve, 1908. At around 10pm, two or three men enter and buy a round of watered-down whiskeys for the house. It creates a distinctly malevolent atmosphere, “the pressure to accept gifts,” as Brecht describes it, followed by a larger endeavor of exchanging presents.
In the absence of any real gift options, the patrons “focused less on gits that had direct value and more on gifts that were appropriate for the recipient, perhaps even with a deeper meaning.” The bartender gets a bucket of filthy snow water to further dilute his whiskey. The waiter gets a broken tin can (presumably from the slaughterhouse) so that he can finally have a decent piece of serveware.
Then came a man who sat in the corner of the bar every night. The regulars knew little about him except that he was clearly not in a good place and had a fear of police. (Relatable on both counts.) The group tears a few pages out of an old address book with listings for police stations and wrap them carefully in a bit of old newspaper. Silence descends on the bar as they present the man with this gift, which elicits a slow, “chalky” smile. Before he even opens the package, the man’s eyes fall on the newspaper. “Never, neither before nor since, have I ever seen a person read like that. He simply devoured what he read,” Brecht writes. “And then he looked up, and again, never, neither before nor since, have I seen anyone look as radiant as this man.”
“I’ve just read in the paper,” the man tells the group, “that the whole thing has long since been cleared up. Everyone in Ohio knows that I had nothing at all to do with the whole business.” The real gift they had given this stranger was the gift of him learning (by pure, almost godless, happenstance) that he had been exonerated of a crime he hadn’t committed.
Brecht refuses to paint anyone in this story as heroes, offering the credit instead to God for guiding his half-drunk barflies to that particular scrap of newspaper. It calls to mind an exchange from his 1939 play, Life of Galileo: “Unhappy is the land that has no heroes,” says one character. “No,” Galileo shoots back. “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.”
One might counter this with a contemporary of Brecht’s, Yip Harburg:
“Lives of great men all remind us greatness takes no easy way.
All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.
Socrates and Galileo, John Brown, Thoreau, Christ, and Debs
Heard the night cry ‘Down with traitors,’ and the dawn shout ‘Up the reds.’”
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau reciting Brecht may not be the hero of Christmas we asked for, but it’s the one we need — now, at this very moment. Who was Christ if not a hero of tomorrow and a heretic of today? What is the best any of us can do besides fumble towards divinity and divination?
Natalie Dessay: “Au royaume de Saucissonbourg”
In an adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker written by her sister-in-law, Natalie Dessay describes the wedding anniversary of the king and queen of Saucissonbourg, or Sausage-Town. The multi-course meal features sausage, sausage, and more sausage.
Eat the rich.
you are AWESOME, the Fischer-Dieskau Brecht talk is so so good...
Best thing I've read this holiday season. The listening... changed me XD