On Dec. 4, Carnegie Hall will host a vacation celebration to learn Ukraine. Compositions by Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Eric Whitacre and others might be performed by choral groups from North America and Europe in honor of the a hundredth anniversary of the Christmas song “Carol of the Bells.” (When you can’t quite place it, “Carol of the Bells” is that earworm-y Christmas carol we hear in one million commercials around the vacations, normally featuring bells playing the identical 4 notes again and again at high speed. Google it and also you’ll understand it immediately.) Proceeds from the event, called Notes From Ukraine, will profit the United24 campaign to rebuild that nation.
How does a Christmas carol rate a celebration at Carnegie Hall? And the way is a song utilized in 100 holiday ads in some way connected to Ukraine? It seems every carol that we sing at Christmas has a story behind it, some inspiring, some strange. Each week in Advent on the America podcast “Hark!” we explore the fascinating stories behind our favourite Christmas songs.
Within the case of “Carol of the Bells,” that tale involves two music teachers, 76 choir singers, a political revolution and, imagine it or not, a murder.
The Music Teacher
Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych was purported to be a priest. Like his father, his grandfather and later his younger brother, Leontovych attended the Kamianets-Podilskyi Theological Seminary in what’s today western Ukraine but was then a part of the Russian Empire, to learn the family trade. He had also grown up around music; his father played a half-dozen instruments and directed Leontovych’s school choir, and his mother was a singer. Leontovych, too, played several instruments, sang and wrote choral arrangements for the seminary. When the choir director died, the seminary put him in charge.
So when it got here time to graduate in 1899 and begin a profession, Leontovych followed a unique set of family footsteps and have become a music teacher, arranger and composer. Although he walked away from a life within the priesthood, he didn’t leave his faith behind. In truth, he would go on to craft the primary Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian liturgy written within the vernacular.
It seems every carol that we sing at Christmas has a story behind it, some inspiring, some strange.
Ukraine has a wealthy history of people songs. Even before the appearance of Christianity they were a component of on a regular basis life, a way of blessing one’s neighbors or worshiping ancient gods, with sometimes quite complex multi-part harmonies sung a capella.
Leontovych believed in the facility of song to bolster people’s spirits. All over the place he worked he created choirs. During strikes and protests against Czar Nicholas II’s leadership in 1905, Leontovych organized a choir of employees to perform at meetings. They might sing arrangements of Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, Polish and Russian folk songs. It got him into trouble. Eventually he was sent back to his home province in what’s now central Ukraine.
In private Leontovych created choral arrangements for these ancient folk songs. But he was a perfectionist and will spend years working on a single arrangement before he let anyone see it. It was not until 1914 that he finally agreed to permit any of his arrangements to be performed.
One such song was an easy four-note melody called “Shchedryk,” or “Bountiful Evening.” Within the song a swallow, whose yearly return to Ukraine signals the break of spring, invites the listener to look out on their property and see the prosperity that spring has brought. “Come out, come out, O master,/ have a look at the sheep pen,” the singers extolled. “There the ewes have given birth/ and the lambkins have been born./ Your goods [livestock] are great, you should have plenty of money by selling them.”
Ukraine had many folks songs like this celebrating the birth of a latest 12 months. But Leontovych’s arrangement had a singular driving energy; the song in some way looked as if it would dance amongst elements of the choir. The Ukrainian conductor Oleksander Koshyts liked it a lot he convinced Leontovych to let him produce it in Kyiv in 1916. It was well received; and three years later, when Koshyts organized the first-ever international tour of a Ukrainian choir, he made “Shchedryk” the choir’s signature piece. Through Koshyts, Leontovych’s melody would eventually find its option to the USA, and unexpectedly, to an entire latest setting at Christmas.
Singing for Independence
But first the Ukrainian people would come to know each tremendous hope and cruel loss. In 1919, Symon Petliura had an issue. Two years earlier, after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Romanov monarchy, he had develop into president of a sovereign Ukrainian nation, the Ukrainian People’s Republic. But its existence remained fragile; the Bolsheviks refused to acknowledge the country’s independence. Meanwhile, within the aftermath of World War I, the world’s great powers were gathering in Paris to find out the brand new borders of Europe.
A former journalist, Petliura saw that he needed a option to generate international support for his fledgling state. In line with the Ukrainian government’s website, Petliura had an idea while listening to a different work from Leontovych at a concert: to create a choir of the country’s best voices and send them on a global tour. They might “sing for the independence of Ukraine.”
Over the subsequent two years the Ukrainian National Chorus performed a whole lot of live shows in 45 cities in 10 European countries, wearing tuxedos and gowns, signaling to the world that the Ukrainian People’s Republic was a contemporary country. All over the place the choir went, they passed out brochures about their nation and sang what would develop into the country’s national anthem. Their efforts were an enormous success. “Ukraine’s cultural maturity must develop into the legitimation of its political independence on this planet,” the Austrian press wrote. In France, people dubbed Leontovych the Ukrainian Bach; his “Shchedryk” recurrently brought the home down.
By 1921 the country that the Ukrainian National Chorus was promoting now not existed.
But by 1921 the country that the Ukrainian National Chorus was promoting now not existed. The Bolsheviks had completely overrun the state. They sent in 1000’s of secret police to root out “counter-revolutionaries,” which in practice meant not only political opponents but intellectuals, religious leaders and members of the bourgeoisie.
One among their targets was Mykola Leontovych. In a cruel twist on the Nativity story, a person approached Leontovych’s parents while Leontovych was visiting them throughout the Eastern Orthodox celebration of Christmas, wondering in the event that they might need a room for him for the night. They opened their doors to the stranger, who spent the night sleeping in the identical room as their son. At dawn the agent pulled out a rifle and shot him. Leontovych was later declared a martyr of the Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian Church.
The Hit in Our Repertoire
Though the Ukrainian People’s Republic now not existed, the tour of the Ukrainian National Chorus didn’t end. The famed American impresario Max Rabinoff, who was originally from Russia, heard the choir perform in Paris and arranged the continuation of their tour from 1922 to 1924 through seven countries of the Americas. The choir would do 400 live shows in 150 cities, including 115 cities in 36 states in the USA. Additionally they recorded a lot of their songs, including “Shchedryk.” As in Europe, all over the place the choir went people called for encores of Leontovych’s song. In his memoir Koshyts would write, “Shchedryk was the true hit in our repertoire.”
On Oct. 5, 1922, the choir performed at Carnegie Hall. The story is commonly told that in the group that autumn night was a 20-year-old music student named Peter J. Wilhousky. Born in Passaic, N.J., he, too, got here from an Eastern European family keen about music. He and all seven of his siblings had attended the Russian Cathedral Choir School in Recent York.
After his graduation from the Damrosch Institute of Musical Arts (which might later develop into the Juilliard School), he also became a well known and successful choir director and arranger of music. The Harvard geologist and author Stephen Jay Gould was a highschool student within the chorus that Wilhousky created and managed. In a 1988 remembrance, Gould recalls Wilhousky’s generosity: “He was one in every of the best choral conductors in America, yet he selected to spend every Saturday morning with high-school kids.” He also remembers Wilhousky’s perfectionism and the impact it had on him: “His only rule, tacit but pervasive, proclaimed: ‘No compromises,’” Gould wrote. “The thought, nevertheless, is infectious. As I worked with Wilhousky, I slowly personalized the dream that excellence in a single activity may be prolonged to develop into the pattern, or not less than the goal, of an actual life.”
After the radio show performance, Wilhousky received so many requests for the music that he published it, in 1936, under the title “Carol of the Bells. Ukrainian Carol.”
Amongst his many roles, Wilhousky made choral arrangements for Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra radio broadcasts. And there got here a moment, based on a letter that Wilhousky sent to the Ukrainian musicologist Roman Savytsky, when he found himself in need of a brief number to fill out a program starring a highschool choir. Contrary to the legend that he heard the unique concert at Carnegie Hall, Wilhousky tells Saytsky within the letter that he had only recently heard “Shchedryk” performed.
Though he had a duplicate of the music, there was no way his students were going to have the opportunity to sing the song in Ukrainian. The song reminded him of bells, so he set out to write down latest lyrics along those lines. “Hark! How the bells,” the song begins, and in three verses imagines bells pealing all across the land, announcing “Christmas is here/ bringing good cheer.”
After the radio show performance, Wilhousky received so many requests for the music that he published it, in 1936, under the title “Carol of the Bells. Ukrainian Carol,” with attribution to himself and Leontovych.
In music, an ostinato is a phrase—a set of notes—that gets passed around amongst different instruments. Leontovych and Wilhousky never knew one another, perhaps never even knew anything about each other. Yet their lives, like an ostinato, echo with similarities. So, too, did their hopes for “Shchedryk.” “Throw cares away,” Wilhouksy writes, to an audience enduring the Great Depression. “Bountiful, bountiful,” Leontovych’s swallow guarantees listeners on the conclusion of “Shchedryk,” at a time when Ukrainians wondered in the event that they would ever have the opportunity to have a nation of their very own.
When you visit the web site for the nation of Ukraine, one can find a statue of a person holding a cross standing high above the Dnipro River. The person is Volodymyr the Great, otherwise generally known as St. Volodymyr, who first consolidated the region right into a state of its own and made it a Christian nation. There may be snow on the statue and the trees around it, but that has nothing to do with the winter season we’re approaching. “On February 24, 2022,” the homepage reads, “The atypical life in Ukraine stopped…. Ukrainians ‘froze’ at the top of winter on that terrifying February morning.”
And spring, the positioning goes on, “has not come to Ukraine yet.”
Little question we are going to hear “Carol of the Bells” in our parishes this 12 months, and on the radio, and possibly in one million commercials, too. Though the words we hear will speak of bells, perhaps as we listen we will solid a thought back to this beautiful, haunting song’s origins, and send the people of Ukraine our prayers that they could soon know spring, latest life and peace.
For more concerning the origins of “Carol of the Bells” and other Christmas carols, hearken to America’s podcast “Hark!”