Die Natali: Chorale Preludes for Christmas, is Samuel Barber's only numbered work (Op. 37) not to use original material for its composition: it is in fact an arrangement of several popular Christmas carols, done with a level of ingenuity close to what one would expect from a composer of Barber's stature. (The Latin title means "Christmastide.") Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it was premiered by that orchestra on (appropriately) December 22, 1960, with Charles Münch conducting. It is scored for an orchestra of double winds, with auxiliary players added (except contrabasson), a brass section with three trumpets, timpani, celesta, harp, a standard sized percussion battery, and strings. It lasts about sixteen minutes.

Right from the beginning—O Come, O Come Emmanuel—we can see examples of Barber's love of classical contrapuntal tricks, examples of which abound: the melody, at a steady pace, is stated in the first trumpet, shadowed not only by a canon a fifth below in solo trombone but by an augmentation of the tune at the double octave in pizzicato cellos and basses. The other carols used include Lo, how a rose e'er blooming, We three kings of Orient are, God rest you merry, gentlemen, Good King Wenceslas, and Silent Night, which bring the work to a tranquil close. A variety of devices are used to vary the material: brief variations of the tunes, antiphonal use of instrumental groups, strong textural contrasts (the portly Wenceslas tune is set against scampering violin runs), piquant use of unexpected metrical shifts, a stirring climax with harp and bells (on Joy to the World, naturally) and the frequent key changes typical of the medley genre.

Other features are not so ordinary: in We three kings of Orient are, each king gets to speak the tune with a different instrument, which the composer names after Caspar (bass clarinet), Melchior (two bassoons) and Balthazar (tuba). (This has a double resonance. Barber was doubtless inspired by the example of Hugo Wolf's song Epiphanias, a miniature Magi-scene which, as a Lieder classic, he must have known; and of course by the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors by his companion Gian Carlo Menotti, a universally acknowledged treatment of the theme.) While admitting later that the piece had "both good and bad places," Barber was fond enough of the Silent Night variations that he later arranged them for organ.

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