Là Sui Monti Del Est (Over the Hills, Far Away)
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)
from the opera Turandot (1924)
Turandot, Puccini’s last opera, is set in an imaginary version of ancient China. It tells the story of cruel Princess Turandot who likes to behead her suitors; the plot is based on an 18th century play which has its roots in an ancient Persian tale. To her people, Turandot commands unimaginable power, and as she is getting ready for yet another execution, the boys sing of her splendor. The melody is an 18th century folk song, “Mo li hua” (Jasmin flower) – one of the most iconic Chinese songs and still hugely popular all over Asia.
Puccini was just about able to finish the opera before his death. Turandot was first performed in 1926, with Arturo Toscanini conducting.
Excerpt from La Damoiselle Élue (The Blessed Damozel), L. 62 (1887-88)
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Words: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
French translation: Gabriel Sarrazin (1853–1935)
Claude Debussy’s cantata La Damoiselle Élue is based on the poem “The Blessed Damozel” by Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Rosetti in turn took his inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” where a lover mourns the death of his beloved. Rosetti looks at the situation – literally – from the other side: he has the dear departed damozel in heaven, longing for her lover, who is still alive and earthbound. She manages to make her presence felt by leaning on Heaven’s golden barrier and speaking with a voice “like that of the stars.”
Tota pulchra es Maria (You are Wholly Beautiful, Mary)
Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986)
from Quatre Motets sur des Thèmes Grégoriens, Op. 10 (1960)
Maurice Duruflé was introduced to organ music as a chorister at the cathedral in Rouen, Normandy. At age 17, he moved to Paris, where he became the organ assistant at the church of Sainte-Clotilde, at the same time pursuing his studies at the Paris Conservatoire. Duruflé left Sainte-Clotilde to become Louis Vierne’s assistant at Notre-Dame Cathedral. In 1929, he was appointed organist of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont and in 1943, professor at the Conservatoire. After a car accident in 1975, Duruflé gave up performing. He died in 1986 near Paris.
Duruflé was a perfectionist. He was highly critical of his own work and allowed only a handful of compositions ever to be published. He continued to work on pieces even after publication. Tota Pulchra es Maria is one of four motets on Gregorian themes, written in 1960. Duruflé’s setting is in three to four parts, with the voices imitating the Gregorian sequence. A frequent change in metre results in an ethereal, suspended quality. The original prayer dates to the fourth century. It is an antiphon for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, inspired by love lyrics from the Song of Songs and verses from the Book of Judith in the Bible.
Cantate Domino (Sing to the Lord) for four-part a cappella choir
Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1612)
Words: Psalm 96
Hans Leo Hassler was born into a Protestant family in Nuremberg. His father was something of a jack-of-all-trades: Isaak Hassler was active as a musician, as a composer, an organist, and – as a lithotomist, a barber surgeon specializing in the removal of kidney and gallstones. Isaak Hassler ensured that his three sons, Caspar, Hans Leo and Jakob, all received excellent musical training. In 1584, Hans Leo was sent to Venice to study with Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli; he was one of the first German musicians to do so.
Two years later, Hassler returned to Germany. He became chamber organist to the wealthy and hugely influential Fugger Family in Augsburg. Like his father, Hassler was an all-rounder: in addition to his activities as a musician and composer, he built clocks and musical automata. In 1600, Hassler became director of music of the city of Nuremberg, and in 1608, he was appointed chamber organist of the Prince Elector of Saxony in Dresden – one of the most powerful nobles of the Holy Roman Empire.
Hassler's music reflects his cosmopolitan outlook; he wrote for both Protestant and Catholic services. One of his most enduring tunes was later adapted by J.S. Bach for the St. Matthew Passion: the chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.” Hassler’s own contemporaries especially liked his cheerful madrigals, some of which are still popular today. The text of Cantate Domino is based on Psalm 96, which in Biblical times would have been sung at the New Year festival.
Bourrée II
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
From English Suite No. 2 in a minor, BWV 807
Arr. Manuel Huber
Bach wrote his “English” suites – a set of six suites for a keyboard instrument – in Weimar around 1715. Their composition may have been influenced by the keyboard suites of François “Charles” Dieupart (1676–1751), a famous contemporary harpsichord virtuoso. Bach’s instrumental music, never predictable, but always to the point, always in control, and always hugely enjoyable, lends itself to be arranged for a cappella choir. Choirmaster Manuel Huber arranged the Bourrée II for his boys, following a tradition started by the Swingle Singers in the 1960s. There are no words, simply syllables chosen for musical effect.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Serenade in G Major, K. 525
Arr. for a cappella choir: Gerald Wirth
As composer to the Imperial Court, Mozart is one of the musicians closely linked to the history of the Vienna Boys Choir. For its 525th anniversary, the Choir decided to do its own version of Mozart’s K. 525 – one of the most famous and best-loved pieces of classical music. Mozart wrote the Serenade in G Major in the summer of 1787; he himself dubbed it “A Little Night Music”. A serenade is a musical tribute, usually played in the evening or at night, and Mozart scored this piece for a string ensemble. Gerald Wirth, the artistic director of the Vienna Boys Choir, adapted the first movement for the boys, with the sopranos singing the part of first and second violins, and the altos covering the lower parts of viola, cello and bass. There is no text; the voices imitate the instruments.
Ronde (Roundelay) from Trois Chansons No. 3 (1916)
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Ravel wrote his Trois Chansons in the months immediately following the end of World War I; they were intended as pure escapism into a fairy world, with lyrics by the composer himself. No. 3 is a roundelay, which has different groups singing at each other. The old women and old men address a group of young people, warning them to stay away from the dangerous woods, teeming with all manner of magical creatures, some alluring, others mysterious, and not all of them altogether pleasant – precisely why the young people would want to go.
Ravel had asked his friends Georges Jean-Aubry and Alexis Roland-Manuel, both music critics, to collect all the names of forest creatures and demons that they could find. It is both a musical joke and a tongue-twisting play on words; in the very best tradition of French Renaissance chansons.
Bunte Schlangen, Zweigezüngt!
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847)
(You spotted snakes, with double tongues)
Text: August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), after William Shakespeare
Elves' chorus, from Ein Sommernachtstraum (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Op. 61/4 (1842)
Felix Mendelssohn grew up surrounded by culture. His family was wealthy and generous with it. They traveled widely, and had a large house where they entertained many prominent visitors, among them Goethe, Humboldt and Hegel. The Mendelssohns, members of the assimilated German-Jewish aristocracy, converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1816.
The Mendelssohns saw to it that their four children had every possibility to learn. Felix, the second child, studied piano with Ludwig Berger and theory and composition with Karl Friedrich Zelter. At the age of nine, he gave his first public recital; at the age of ten, he became a member of the Berliner Singakademie. He was eleven when his own first compositions were publicly perfomed. A year later, he met Goethe, Carl Maria von Weber and Cherubini. Thereafter, he turned out sonatas, concertos, string symphonies, piano quartets and Singspiele which revealed his increasing mastery of counterpoint and form.
In 1829, at the ripe old age of 20, he directed a pioneering performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie (with a reported chorus of 600 singers): this one performance (an ‘event’) put Bach firmly on the repertoire list for choirs. Mendelssohn was also famous as a festival organiser, he was associated especially with the Lower Rhine and Birmingham music festivals. Mendelssohn’s most significant achievements as a conductor and organizer were in Leipzig (1835-47), where he conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra to great acclaim. In 1843, he founded the Leipzig Conservatory and managed to recruit Robert Schumann and Moritz Hauptmann as teachers. His death at the age of 38, after a series of strokes, was mourned internationally.
Mendelssohn’s music shows influences of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. He clearly liked to be inspired by his surroundings; his music often has literary, artistic, historical, geographical or emotional connotations; the underlying ideas are easily accessible. In 1826, 17-year-old Mendelssohn read Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare’s famous play; this prompted him to compose an overture for the piece. The other ten movements of incidental music for the play (including the famous Wedding March) were written in 1842, commissioned by King Frederick William IV of Prussia.
No One Is Alone | Children Will Listen
Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021)
from the musical Into the Woods (1986)
Into the Woods tells the story of a baker and his wife who, while trying to start a family, get drawn into several fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and meet, among others, characters from Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood. The musical won three Tony Awards (Best Score, Best Book, and Best Actress in a musical). On their 2023 tour of the USA, the Vienna Boys Choir performs the two final songs from Sondheim’s musical. “No One Is Alone” has the four lead characters pondering the consequences of their wishes, only to discover that no one is truly alone, and that people are there to help each other “through the woods.”
La Sui Monti Del Est (Over the Hills, Far Away)
From Turandot
Giaccomo Puccini
Andachtsjodler (Devotional Yodel) Christmas Yodel from the Austrian Alps
Yodels are one of the chief elements of Alpine folk music. Initially used as a means of communication across the valleys, they literally reflect the Alps. The echoes added by the mountains lead to elaborate, spur-of-the-moment variations. Yodels have no text; instead, singers use various similar-sounding syllables which match their feelings — syllables which generate a good echo. This ancient devotional yodel consists of only eight bars, which can be repeated ad libitum. It is slow and introspective, designed to invite contemplation. It was sung by the congregation during the main Christmas Day service probably as early as the 17th century and has recently regained popularity.
Es Wird Scho Glei Dumpa (It Will Be Dark Soon)
Anton Reidinger (1839–1912)
Sacred lullaby from Upper Austria;
Arr. Gerald Wirth
This particular carol takes the form of a lullaby for Jesus; it would have been sung in the Alps by carollers dressed as shepherds and as part of a Christmas pageant performed in church, allowing both listeners and singers to feel part of the Christmas story: the Biblical shepherds are “simple” people, yet their gifts are as important as the gifts from the three kings. In short, Christmas is for everyone. Anton Reidinger was Dean of several rural parishes in Upper Austria; he wrote this carol in the local dialect for his parishioners. It has since become (and still is) one of the most popular carols in Austria and Southern Germany.
Les Patineurs (The Skaters), Waltz, Op. 183
Emile Waldteufel (1837–1915)
Words: Tina Breckwoldt;
Arr. Manuel Huber
People have been skating at least since the Neolithic, when they first strapped animal bones to their feet in order to cross frozen bodies of water quickly and safely. Later, the Dutch went in for speed skating along their icy canals; in Sankt Petersburg, the tsarina had entire castles carved out of the ice on the Neva. Skating as a hobby exploded in the 18th century, and even the aristocracy would spend days on the ice. Treatises were written, techniques analyzed and debated. In Germany, poets composed entire odes to skating, even Goethe, who loved the sport, wrote a short poem called “Eis-Lebens-Lied” (Ice-Life-Song) and was known to put off other engagements in favor of skating. William Wordsworth included a passage on skating in The Prelude, published posthumously in 1850.
Emile Waldteufel was born into a family of musicians in Strasbourg; he received his first music lessons from his parents. When he was five, the family moved to Paris. Waldteufel was an accomplished pianist; he started giving lessons as a teenager. At the same time, he wrote his first compositions, which caught the attention of Charles Gounod. Waldteufel went on to study at the Paris Conservatoire; Georges Bizet and Jules Massenet were his contemporaries. Most of Waldteufel’s works are dances: Les Patineurs, the skaters, is his most famous composition. Choirmaster Manuel Huber arranged the piece to suit the choirboys’ voices, and the words are intended to reflect the landscape and the whole gamut of feelings experienced on the ice.
Tundra
Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978)
Words: Charles Anthony Silvestri (b. 1965)
Ola Gjeilo is one of the most popular choral composers around. Born in Norway, Gjeilo was educated at the Conservatory in Oslo, the Royal College of Music in London and The Juilliard School in New York. His music shows influences of classical, jazz, folk and pop, as well as film scores. Additionally, he feels inspired by Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny as well as architect Frank Gehry among others.
The lyrics for Tundra were written by American poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, a frequent collaborator. The words are inspired by the Hardanger Plateau (Hardangervidda) in Norway, the composer’s childhood landscape. Hardangervidda has been occupied since the Neolithic; today, much of it is protected as a National Park. The landscape is barren and beautiful at the same time – Henrik Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken is partly set there; and the Hoth sequences in The Empire Strikes Back were shot on the Hardangerjøkulen glacier.
Carol of the Bells (Shchedryk)
Mykola Leontovych (1877–1921)
English words & arr.: Peter J. Wilhousky (1902–1978)
Carol of the Bells started life as a Ukrainian shchedrivka, a New Year’s carol, written by Mykola Leontovych and traditionally sung on the Ukrainian New Year’s Eve (January 13). The original Ukrainian song, Shchedryk, looks into the year ahead, as a sort of horoscope, hoping for an early spring, a wife for the farmer and a rich harvest. It was first performed in Kiev in 1916; in the 1920s, Leontovych toured Europe and North America with his choir, and the song soon became popular. In 1936, Peter J. Wilhousky, a New York-based composer and choral conductor of Ukrainian descent, provided it with English lyrics and a new name.
Cradle Hymn
Kim André Arnesen (b. 1980)
Christmas Lullaby
Words: Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
Isaac Watts was a nonconformist theologian. Born into a nonconformist household, Watts showed early on a talent for poetry. He had an excellent sense of rhythm and rhyme and a way with words. As a Congregational minister, he found singing gloomy psalms rather unhelpful; this prompted him to write his own verses. Watts explained that he liked to add the lighter imagery of faith, love and hope to the mix, and grace, glory and life eternal feature prominently in his writing. He wrote well over 700 hymns; most of them are found in modern hymnals. “Joy to the World” is doubtless his most famous work. The Church of England and the Lutheran Church remember Watts in the Calendar of Saints on November 25.
Grammy-nominated composer Kim André Arnesen was educated at the Music Conservatory in Trondheim in his native Norway. He has strong ties to Trondheim’s Nidaros Cathedral where many of his works were first performed; his “Cradle Hymn” was written for the Cathedral’s Girls Choir in 2010.
O Holy Night (Cantique de Noël), 1847
Adolphe Adam (1803–1856)
English words: John Sullivan Dwight (1812–1893), c. 1850
Cantique de Noël was composed as a Christmas carol – its poet was an atheist, its composer a Jew. In December of 1847, the curate of a village church in Roquemaure (Côtes-du-Rhône, France) asked Placide Cappeau, resident free-thinker (an atheist, no less) and part-time poet, to write a Christmas poem for a fundraiser to finance the church’s stained-glass windows. A singer named Emily Laurey, who happened to be staying in the village, came across the poem and gave it to her friend Adolphe Adam to set to music, and the rest, as they say, is history. The audience loved the sweeping tune; today, Cantique is firmly associated with Christmas.
The song’s two authors took a more general approach; Cappeau kept wanting to change the words to something more pantheistic, and Adam referred to the piece as a “religious Marseillaise”. For years, most of the French clergy loathed it passionately; and theologians and musicologists wrote spiteful articles condemning the performance in a church – some of them appeared as late as the 1930s, almost a century after Cantique was first performed. The English version of the text was written in the 1850s, by American clergyman John Sullivan Dwight.
Let It Snow!
Jule Styne (1905–1994)
Words: Sammy Cahn (1913–1993); arr. Kirby Shaw
In 1942, Jule Styne (Julius K. Stein) and Sammy Cahn (Samuel Cohen) formed a very productive partnership; they collaborated on numerous songs, musicals and film scores. They wrote the score for several Sinatra films, such as Step Lively (1942), Anchors Aweigh (1945) and It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), as well as films starring Danny Kay, Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe (The Seven Year Itch, 1955). “Let It Snow” was written in the 1940s and first sung by Vaughn Monroe.
Hava Nagila (Let Us Rejoice)
Jewish folk song / Hasidic niggun
Words based on Psalm 118:24;
Attributed to Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1982–1938),
Arr. Manuel Huber
Hava Nagila started life as a niggun, a spiritual, wordless chant sung by the Hasidim from Sadhora, modern Ukraine. The musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1892–1938) probably encountered the melody c. 1915, when he was cataloguing Jewish music. Idelsohn and his student Moshe Nathanson (1899–1981) added the words and changed the rhythm of the original niggun – and Hava Nagila was born.
The celebratory feel-good song is a fixture at Jewish weddings, bar and bat mitvah rituals, and it is firmly entrenched in popular culture. There are famous versions by Harry Belafonte, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan and Danny Kaye. It is sung by fans of Ajax Amsterdam and Tottenham Hotspur, and – less surprising – it features prominently among fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team.
El burrito de Belén (The Little Donkey from Bethlehem)
Hugo Blanco (1940-2015)
Villancico from Venezuela
Hugo Blanco composed his “Villancico“ carol in 1972. The cheerful little song about a boy and his little donkey is extremely popular in Latin America, possibly due its bouncy merengue rhythm. “Cuatrico“ is a diminutive for the cuatro, a type of four-stringed guitar used in Venezuelan folk music. Blanco is best known for his songs, among them “Moliendo Café,“ sung by football fans around the world, and “La Vecina“ (The Neighbor), which was used in an episode of Miami Vice.
Hail, Holy Queen
Arr. Marc Shaiman (b. 1959);
Adapted by Roger Emerson from the movie Sister Act (1992)
Hail, Holy Queen from the movie Sister Act is a choral favorite, bound to make the audience smile. Starting as a demure chant, it soon explodes into a jubilant choir with rhythmic clapping. In the film, a group of nuns performs them under the direction of Whoopi Goldberg, who plays a Las Vegas singer hiding from organized crime. She manages to transform the languishing nunnery choir into a spectacular ensemble singing with such pizzazz they manage to fill the hitherto empty church.
The solo interjections, “Mater ad mater inter marata” and “Virgo respice” are not Classical Latin, and somewhat lacking in grammar, but then so are quite a few medieval texts. The first line might be rendered “Mother among mothers” (which should really be “Mater inter matres;” if “ad” were correct, it would require the accusative “matrem”). However, perhaps it should just be understood as an exclamation, “Ah,” Mother, oh, Mother.” “Marata” is not a word at all; it may be a typo for either merata/meraca “pure,” or “murata” (“walled”) - “inter murata” might then mean “surrounded by walls,” as in a nunnery. As the words were written for the movie, and the character who comes up with them is a Las Vegas singer, they were perhaps not meant to be taken too seriously.
Notes © Tina Breckwoldt