The Provencal noels--being some real, or some imagined, incident of the
Nativity told in verse set to a gay or tender air--are the creche
translated into song. The simplest of them are direct renderings of the
Bible narrative. Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their
flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the
very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers:
for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green,
was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while
Saboly still was alive.
But most of the noels--_nouve_, they are called in Provencal--are purely
imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken
from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of
Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life
and of the birth and childhood of her Son. Sometimes, even, the writers
stray away entirely from a religious base and produce mere roistering
catches or topical songs. Such are those Marseille noels which are
nothing more than Pantagruelian lists of succulent dishes proper to
Christmas time--frankly ending, in one case, with the materialistic
query: "What do I care for the future, now that my belly is well lined?"
It was against such "bacchanals of noel" that the worthy Father Cotton
preached in Marseille in the year 1602: but the flesh and the devil
always have had things pretty much their own way in that gay city, and
he preached in vain. And at Aix-en-Provence the most popular noel of all
that were sung in the cathedral was a satirical review of the events of
the year: that as time went on grew to be more and more of a scandal,
until at last the Bishop had to put a stop to it in the year 1653.
The Provencaux have been writing noels for more than four hundred years.
One of the oldest belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century and
is ascribed to Raimond Feraud; the latest are of our own day--by
Roumanille, Crousillat, Mistral, Girard, Gras, and a score more. But
only a few have been written to live. The memory of many once-famous
noel-writers is preserved now either mainly or wholly by a single song.
Thus the Chanoine Puech, who died at Aix almost two hundred and fifty
years ago, lives in the noel of the Christ-Child and the three gypsy
fortune-tellers--which he stole, I am sorry to say, from Lope de Vega.
The Abbe Doumergue, of Aramon, who flourished at about the same period,
is alive because of his "March of the Kings": that has come ringing down
through the ages set to Lulli's magnificent "March of Turenne"; and it
is interesting to note that Lulli is said to have found his noble motive
in a Provencal air. Antoine Peyrol, who lived only a little more than a
century ago, and who "in our good city of Avignon was a carpenter and
wood-seller and a simple-hearted singer of Bethlehem" (as Roumanille
puts it) has fared better, more than a dozen of his noels surviving to
be sung each year when "the nougat bells" (as they call the Christmas
chimes in Avignon) are ringing in his native town. And, on the other
hand, as though to strike a balance between fame and forgottenness,
there are some widely popular noels--as "C'est le bon lever"--of which
the authorship absolutely is unknown; while there are still others--as
the charming "Wild Nightingale"--which belong to no one author, but have
been built up by unknown farm-house poets who have added fresh verses
and so have passed on the amended song.
The one assured immortal among these musical mortalities is Nicolas
Saboly: who was born in Monteux, close by Avignon, in the year 1614; who
for the greater part of his life was chapel-master and organist of the
Avignon church of St. Pierre; who died in the year 1675; and who lies
buried in the choir of the church which for so long he filled with his
own heaven-sweet harmonies. Of his beautiful life-work, Roumanille has
written: "As organist of the church of St. Pierre, Saboly soon won a
great and beautiful renown as a musician; but his fame and his glory
have come to him because of the blessed thought that he had of composing
his marvellous noels. Yet it was not until the year 1658, when he
himself was fifty-four years old, that he decided to tie together and to
publish his first sheaf of them. From that time onward, every year until
his end, a fresh sheaf of from six to a dozen appeared; and, although no
name went with them, all of his townsfolk knew that it was their own
Troubadour of the Nativity who made them so excellent a gift just as the
nougat bells began to ring. The organ of St. Pierre, touched by his
master hand, taught the gay airs to which the new noels were cast. And
all Avignon presently would be singing them, and soon the chorus would
swell throughout the Comtat and Provence. The inimitable Troubadour of
Bethlehem died just as he had tied together the eighth of his little
sheaves.... His noels have been reprinted many times; and, thanks be to
God, they will be printed again and again forever!"[3]
In addition to being a genius, Saboly had the good fortune to live in
one of the periods of fusing and recasting which give to genius its
opportunity. He was born at the very time when Claude Monteverde was
taking those audacious liberties with harmony which cleared the way for
the transition from the old tonality to the new; and he died before the
great modern masters had set up those standards which composers of our
time must either accept or defy. He certainly was influenced by the then
new Italian school; indeed, from the fourteenth century, when music
began to be cultivated in Avignon, the relations between that city and
Italy were so close that the first echoes of Italian musical innovators
naturally would be heard there. Everywhere his work shows, as theirs
does, a searching for new methods in the domain of modulation, and a
defiance of the laws of transformation reverenced by the formal
composers of his time. Yet he did his searching always on his own lines
and in his own way.
Nor was his original genius lessened by his willingness at times to lay
hands on the desirable property of other people--since his unlawful
acquisitions received always a subtle touch which really made them his
own. He knew well how to take the popular airs of the moment--the
gavotte or minuet or vaudeville which every one was singing: the good
old airs, as we call them now, which then were the newest of the
new--and how to infuse into them his own personality and so to fit them
like a glove to his own noels. Thus, his Twelfth noel is set to an air
composed by Lulli for the drinking song, "Qu'ils sont doux, bouteille
jolie," in Moliere's "Medecin malgre lui"; and those who are familiar
with the music of his time will be both scandalized and set a-laughing
by finding the uses to which he has put airs which began life in far
from seemly company. But his forays were made from choice, not from
necessity, and the best of his noels are his own.
Saboly's music has a "go" and a melodic quality suggestive of the work
of Sir Arthur Sullivan; but it has a more tender, a fresher, a purer
note, even more sparkle, than ever Sullivan has achieved. In his gay
airs the attack is instant, brilliant, overpowering--like a glad
outburst of sweet bells, like the joyous laughter of a child--and
everything goes with a dash and a swing. But while he thus loved to
harmonize a laugh, he also could strike a note of infinite tenderness.
In his pathetic noels he drops into thrillingly plaintive minors which
fairly drag one's heart out--echoes or survivals, possibly (for this
poignant melody is not uncommon in old Provencal music), of the
passionately longing love-songs with which Saracen knights once went
a-serenading beneath castle windows here in Provence.
Nor is his verse, of its curious kind, less excellent than his music. By
turns, as the humour takes him, his noels are sermons, or delicate
religious fancies, or sharp-pointed satires, or whimsical studies of
country-side life. One whole series of seven is a history of the
Nativity (surely the quaintest and the gayest and the tenderest
oratorio that ever was written!) in which, in music and in words, he is
at his very best. Above all, his noels are local. His background always
is his own country; his characters--Micolau the big shepherd, gossip
Guihaumeto, Toni, Christou, and the rest--always are Provencaux: wearing
Provencaux pink-bordered jackets, and white hats bedizened with ribbons,
and marching to Bethlehem to the sound of the _galoubet_ and
_tambourin_. It is from Avignon, out by the Porte Saint Lazare, that the
start for Bethlehem is made by his pilgrim company; the Provencal music
plays to cheer them; they stamp their feet and swing their arms about,
because the mistral is blowing and they are desperately cold. It is a
simplicity half laughable, half pathetic--such as is found in those
Mediaeval pictures which represent the Apostles or the Holy Family in the
garb of the artist's own time and country, and above the walls of
Bethlehem the church spire of his own town.
This naive local twist is not peculiar to Saboly. With very few
exceptions all Provencal noels are packed full of the same delightful
anachronisms. It is to Provencal shepherds that the Herald Angel
appears; it is Provencaux who compose the _bregado_, the pilgrim
company, that starts for Bethlehem; and Bethlehem is a village, always
within easy walking distance, here in Provence. Yet it is not wholly
simplicity that has brought about this shifting of the scene of the
Nativity from the hill country of Judaea to the hill country of
Southeastern France. The life and the look of the two lands have much in
common; and most impressively will their common character be felt by one
who walks here by night beneath the stars.
Here, as in the Holy Land, winding ways pass out from olive-orchards,
and on across dry reaches of upland broken by outcropping rocks and
scattered trees and bushes and sparsely thatched with short dry grass.
Through the silence will come now and then the tinkle of sheep-bells.
Sometimes a flock will be seen, dimly in the starlight, feeding beside
the road; and watching, from an overlooking standpoint on a rock or
little upswelling hill-top, will be its shepherd: a tall muffled figure
showing black against the loom of the sky. And it all is touched, in
the star-haze of those sombre solitudes, with the poetic realism of
unreality; while its deeper meaning is aroused by the stone crosses,
telling of Calvary, which are found at every parting of the ways. Told
to simple dwellers in such a land the Bible story was neither vague nor
remote. They knew its setting because their own surroundings were the
same. They practised the shepherd customs; the ass was their own beast
of burden; the tending of vines and fig-trees and olive-orchards was a
part of their daily lives. And so, naturally, the older noel writers
without any thought of anachronism, and the modern writers by poetic
instinct made complete their translation of the story of the Nativity
into their vernacular by transferring its scene to their own land.