(It. or Lat., diminutive of pastorale).
A church composition for Christmas, found in central Europe from the second half of the 17th century to the 20th century, in Roman Catholic areas. In one or more movements, it is usually for choir or soloists and small orchestra (less often purely instrumental), and usually represents events from a sequence based partly on Luke ii: the announcement of midnight, appearance of angels, awakening and dialogue of shepherds and their offering of gifts (or singing and playing, sometimes of a lullaby) to the Christ child. Some deal with the Magi; some were probably designed as edifying substitutes for an ancient ceremony of rocking the Christ child (Kindelwiegen, kolébání).
A ‘pastorella’, mentioned in 1669 in a letter to Karl Liechtenstein-Castelcorn, Prince Bishop of Olmütz, may be an offertory, Venito, ocyus venito, by J.H. Schmelzer, which formed the basis for a number of later pastorellas, such as a pastoral trio sonata attributed to Schmelzer in the Rost Codex (F-Pn Rés.Vm7 673), and an anonymous Łowicz pastorella of 1699, Parvule pupule. There are early pastorellas by Gottfried Finger (attested in an English source), J.D. Zelenka (like the Schmelzer offertory, attested at Dresden), and Fux. Other early sources include Christmas plays with songs and arias, such as the anonymous (Jesuit?) Rakovník Pastýřská hra o narození Páně (after 1684) and other plays of religious orders; the Harmonia caelestis, a collection of church songs published by Pál Esterházy at Vienna in 1711 but compiled some 10 years earlier (pastorellas continued to be written by Esterházy court composers up to and including Haydn); and quasi-dramatic songs in Cantional such as the Slavíček rajský of J.J. Božan (1719).
From the early 18th century, pastorellas with Latin and vernacular texts spread rapidly within Austria (including the Czech lands), Bavaria, Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe, mainly outside the cities. Baroque pastorellas are ‘pastoral’ by virtue of more or less emphatic allusions to a so-called stylus rusticanus, no doubt based on aspects of contemporary folk music; they are often comic in tone, and were often designed to appear to an unsophisticated audience. Some of the allusions are those used by Corelli or Bach (drone basses, melodies harmonized in 3rds and 6ths), but most are indigenous: they include Scotch snaps, fanfare motifs with duple time signatures (alluding to the tuba pastoralis or alphorn), melodies or harmonies in exotic scales, and sections entirely in unison for chorus and instruments. Many pastorellas feature folk (or toy) instruments such as the pastoral trumpet, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes and cuckoo, and many pastorella texts are in dialect.
A great many pastorellas survive in manuscript from the second-half of the 18th century and the 19th century, a period regarded by Berkovec (1987) as the apogee of the genre. Many of these draw on the ‘tuneful’ style of church music used by composers such as F.X. Brixi. Some are symphonies – a pastoral symphony in this tradition was in effect an instrumental pastorella; some are contrafacta of well-known opera arias (e.g. by Mozart). From the mid-18th century, the Latin Mass Ordinary text was also set in pastoral style in Czech-speaking areas, then Czech vernacular pastorellas were interpolated, and after 1780 the Czech pastoral mass often consisted of a series of vernacular pastorellas entirely replacing the Ordinary, as in the best-known of the Czech Christmas Masses by J.J. Ryba. But the comic tone of Baroque pastorellas became increasingly unacceptable in the second half of the 18th century, and survived mainly only in rural productions; in places aspiring to good taste, the pastorella was often transformed in various ways (for example, by being sentimentalized), and the allusions to the stylus rusticanus were toned down.
The tradition remained popular in Bohemia and Moravia throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Smetana quoted a well-known pastorella melody in Hubička, no doubt for its associations with the folk heritage; Czech historians have emphasized the role of the pastorella during the 17th and 18th centuries in preserving a sense of Czech nationality, through language and music, that nourished the Czech National Revival in the 19th century.
As liturgical music, pastorellas may usually have been intended for the offertory (or gradual) of the Christmas Midnight Mass; but practice varied widely, and it can only be said that pastorellas were almost always performed in church, and between Christmas Eve and the Purification.
See also Pastoral, Pastourelle and Weihnachtslied.
K.M. Klier, ed.: Schatz österreichischer Weihnachtslieder aus den ältesten Quellen mit den Weisen herausgegeben (Klosterneuburg, n.d.)
J. Berkovec, ed.: České vánoční pastorely/Pastorelle boemiche, MAB, xxiii (1955)
G.A. Chew: The Christmas Pastorella in Austria, Bohemia and Moravia and its Antecedents (diss., U. of Manchester, 1968)
A. and Z.M. Szweykowski, eds.: Pastorele staropolskie na zespoły wokalno-instrumentalne [Early Polish pastorellas in vocal-instrumental collections], ŻHMP, xii (1968)
J. Berkovec: České pastorely [Czech pastorellas] (Prague, 1987)
W.M. Marchiwica: Pastorelle gidelskie wobec tradycji pastorelli polskiej (diss., U. of Kraków, 1988)
M. Germer: The Austro-Bohemian Pastorella and Pastoral Mass to c1780 (diss., New York, U., 1989)
G.A. Chew: ‘The Austrian Pastorella and the Stylus Rusticanus: Comic and Pastoral Elements in Austrian Music, 1750–1800’, Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria, ed. D.W. Jones (New York, 1996), 133–93
G.A. Chew: ‘Haydn's Pastorellas: Genre, Dating and Transmission in the Early Church Works’, Studies in Music History Presented to H.C. Robbins Landon, ed. O. Biba and D. Wyn Jones (London, 1996), 21–43
GEOFFREY CHEW