Chorale settings in the pre‑Leipzig and Leipzig cantatas – comparison

It was Alfred Dürr¹ who first demonstrated that 24 of Bach’s completed cantatas were written in an earlier phase of his creative life, primarily in Weimar. We know many of these in their later Leipzig form after Bach had performed them again, and subjected them to revisions of varying degrees. There are further movements which stylistic and paper studies suggest should also be included in this group, although we only find traces of them incorporated into the Leipzig cantatas, for example BWV 70a, 186a and 147a. Of the 153 movements of the 24 complete pre-Leipzig cantatas, 32 contain chor-ales. That is 20.9%, fractionally over a fifth. So on average, each cantata possesses just one chorale since cantatas generally comprise five or six movements. There is nothing surprising about this statistic since we are accustomed to Bach’s cantatas concluding with a simple four-part chorale setting. But this practise is not at all characteristic of the pre-Leipzig cantatas: precisely half (12) do not finish with such a movement.²

There are many cantatas in which there is no chorale at all (BWV 54, 63, 150, 152, 196), or else a movement that contains a chorale setting which is not placed at the end (BWV 131, 182, 199, 71). The last movement of BWV 61 bears witness to an interesting experiment: Bach sets the final four lines of the chorale melody “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” [How beautifully shines the morning star] for chorus and orchestra, with the soprano voice functioning as a cantus firmus. The Weimar version of 21 almost certainly concluded with a motet-like setting of the chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten” [Whoever lets only the dear God reign] which at the end of the piece gives an appropriately emphatic, secure rest for the tormented and helpless believer who features throughout the cantata but finds solace in God. BWV 106, which was written for a funeral service, employs a remarkable number of chorale melodies, and Bach conjures a fugal theme from the last line of the final chorale, meaning that in

1 Alfred Dürr, Studien über die frühen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs (Leipzig: Breitkopf, ²1977 [¹1951]).

2 This is well indicated by the unsettled development of the new church music genre.

practise, the last movement loses its closing chorale character. The 12 cantatas which do conclude with a simple four-part chorale setting cannot be considered schematic ei-ther since Bach often writes a fifth, instrumental voice above the chorale melody which bestows a “halo” (“Heiligenschein”)³ on the ending of the work; these are BWV 12, 31, 161, 172, 185. BWV 4, 18, 155, 161, 172 all conclude with a simple chorale; Bach performed these again in Leipzig and so it cannot be excluded that in 1723−1724 he perhaps wrote a new closing movement in place of an earlier one. Interestingly, in the case of two works, Bach did not write a final movement, but from Salomon Franck’s libretto we can deduce what the missing chorale must have been in the case of BWV 132. With BWV 163, Bach wrote at the end “Chorale. Simplice stylo”, but did not at-tach the melody.⁴

In these early cantatas, Bach treated the chorale melodies in five ways:

Simple, four-part chorale setting

Needless to say, there are more of these than any other – twelve in all – because of their close resemblance to daily congregational hymns with organ accompaniment. Those present may even have joined in.

Hidden chorale setting

This is the second most frequent variety with eleven representatives. It derives from the combination of biblical text and chorale melody, something familiar from motet style. In Bach’s cantatas, this is found in arias or duets, rather than choral movements, and largely involves a Biblical text.⁵ The musical material begins with us having no suspicion of the subsequent emergence of the chorale but our thoughts – similar to an association produced by a text – is finally incarnated in a chorale melody.

A very beautiful vocal example of this occurs in the Actus Tragicus, i. e. canta-ta BWV 106, when the bass (“vox Christi”) sings “Heute, heute wirst du mit mir im Paradies sein” [Today you will be with me in Paradise], then shortly afterwards we hear the alto soloist sing the chorale: “Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin in Gottes willen”

[With peace and joy I go on my way in God’s will].⁶

Even greater demands are placed on our imagination with another variant of chor-ale settings: when a chorchor-ale melody is heard in the form of an instrumental quotation, for example in the final aria of BWV 32. The soprano soloist sings: “Letzte Stunde

3 See Alfred Dürr, Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach. Mit ihren Texten (Kassel: Bärenreiter,

51985 [¹1971]), Bd. 1, 311.

4 Probably he only wrote out the harmonisation upon the now lost solo parts.

5 There is just one exception: BWV 185/1.

6 Further examples: BWV 131/2, 131/4, 71/2, 12/6

brich herein” [Final hour, break now forth], while in the aria, surreptitiously in violin and viola unison, we hear the chorale “Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist” [If the hour of my death is at hand].⁷

Choral cantus firmus setting

These four movements largely follow the motet tradition, being colla parte or on oc-casion with separately introduced orchestral voices. In BWV 4, we find both types: in the first movement the two violins have their own parts, while the two violas are only independent during the two orchestral interludes. We do not find instrumental parts in the Versus IV; if they were played in the original version, they will certainly have pro-gressed colla parte.⁸ In the case of BWV 182 and 21, the setting of the cantus firmus has an archaic character with strict colla parte parts.

Organ-like chorale setting

This type of setting is characterised by three part writing and the chorale melody sur-rounded by rich ornamentation and interludes. One example is in BWV 199⁹ the other in BWV 4.

Experimental chorale settings combining different compositional techniques

All three examples are quite different in their own right, so we cannot describe them as representing a “type”. Cantata 61¹⁰ was written for the first Sunday of Advent, the first day of the church year and so Bach deemed a French overture appropriate to open the new year. The first two lines of the chorale are heard separately, line by line, in the slow, dotted rhythm of the first section, expanded many times (first soprano and alto, then tenor and bass, and finally tutti). Then in the triple-time section of the French overture, the third line of the chorale is introduced, which the composer sets freely in imitation mode. Following this, he incorporates the fourth line of the chorale back into the recapitulation of the dotted, slow section, creating a four-part texture.

A similar experiment combining different compositional techniques is found in the closing movement of BWV 106, which is the richest in chorales of all the early cantatas.

The first line of chorale is heard following the five bar orchestral prelude in a simple

7 Further examples: BWV 4/6, 106/2, 161/1, 172/5, 185/1 (exceptionally not a Biblical text but a poem by Salomon Franck).

8 We know this work from material intended for a performance in Leipzig, so it is quite conceivable – and there are numerous similar examples – that Bach altered the orchestration to local requirements.

9 Of the chorale settings for organ, this most closely resembles BWV 734 (“Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein”). The key is even the same.

10 Which we can regard as the member of a third group (choral cantus firmus settings), too.

homophonic four-part form with further orchestral accompaniment, then the orchestra rounds off the chorale line with an ornamental closing figure. This occurs after each line of the chorale with a slightly different emphasis each time. This continues until the finale line of the chorale which Bach chooses to open up into an expansive fugue.

The third example, BWV 18, combines a Lutheran litany melody with recitative.

Due to the recitativo accompagnato, Bach’s music is remarkably rich in its powerful madrigal character. After each of the four texts, we hear the line belonging to the litany:

the soprano soloist intones it, then the choir repeats the prayer, rather like a church congregation it. It is interesting how this movement closely resembles the cantatas of Johann Kuhnau, written roughly at the same time.¹¹

Having completed this review of how Bach set chorales in his pre-Leipzig cantatas, let us now consider to what degree these same perspectives can be found in the Leipzig cantatas. And can we observe a conscious change of approach?

Of the 1061 movements from the 164 cantatas Bach wrote in Leipzig, we can iden-tify 272 in which the chorale text is heard in its original melody and in its full length.

This represents 25.6% of all the movements, i.e. fractionally over a quarter. The fig-ures are skewed partly because of the secular cantatas that were recast with minimal reworking; in these there is either no chorale (BWV 134, 34, 173) or at most a simple four-part setting (BWV 66, 30, 184). We should also remember that the solo cantatas of later years, for reasons of genre, dispense with a chorale (BWV 35, 82, 170) or contain only a simple four-part setting (BWV 52, 55, 56, 84, 169).¹² However, when we compare it with the cantatas Bach wrote in his first two years in Leipzig, then the difference becomes very relevant.¹³ Of the 639 movements from the 90 cantatas written in those first two years, 196 have movements with chorales, which is 30.7%, so almost a third. This demonstrates statistically how Bach’s practises in setting chorales grew in the early Leipzig years – from a fifth of all movements to a third – which is almost cer-tainly attributable to the intensive influence of the new environment (a few years later and this influence was nowhere near as strong.) We might consider the influence of chorale settings Bach would have found in the music library of the Thomaskirche and we would not be far wrong. But we should take into account other factors; for example in Weimar Bach was composing for the congregation of the prince’s court chapel who were rather different in their demands than the social strata attending church in a com-mercial town like Leipzig. In Weimar, Bach primarily set the texts of the court poet, Salomon Franck, a follower of Erdmann Neumeister. Neumeister reformed the texts of the cantata genre: the combination of biblical text and chorale, which held sway in the

11 Particularly to the fifth movement of Kuhnau’s catata Sei mir gnädig.

12 BWV 51 is an exception because it contains an organ-like chorale setting (although it differs in

be-ing four-voice).

13 Among them the second chorale-cantata cycle, so each cantata sets the chorale melody in at least

two different ways.

earliest phase of cantata history¹⁴ and would play a prevalent role in the genre of the motet until the start of the 18th century, virtually disappearing in his verses. Instead we find forms taken from Italian opera: da capo arias and recitatives took centre stage.

By contrast, in Leipzig, where there was a very strong tradition for chorale setting and singing, Bach had to adapt to local expectations which perhaps was not alien to his temperament and predilection for the archaic in music. Possibly through Kuhnau¹⁵ Bach learned about the musical principals to be followed and found them in harmony with his own thoughts, although he was exceptionally susceptible to new possibilities for setting chorales. In princely courts, where they preferred to follow new fashions, Bach would never have written such old fashioned pieces. But in more than one musi-cal genre, Bach proved he was willing to draw on the heritage of earlier forgotten com-posers whom he respected.¹⁶

I shall now examine to what degree his methods of chorale setting developed, how much they changed and were refined compared to the early pre-Leipzig years.

Simple four-part chorale settings

Naturally these are also in the majority adding up to 146 movements. There are only a bare handful where Bach has written a fifth upper voice (BWV 95/6, 136/6), also few from the group in which he supplements the four-part texture with instrumental groups:

two horns, timpani (BWV 79/6, 91/6, 195/6 with timpani, 52/6, 112/5, 128/5 without timpani), three trumpets, timpani (BWV 19/7, 29/8, 41/6, 69/6, 130/6, 137/5, 149/7, 171/6, 190/7), or three recorders (BWV 175/7) or three oboes (BWV 80/8, 194/6 and 12) and sometimes the string section receives its own parts (BWV 59/3, 70/11, 97/9, 105/6).¹⁷ We can see that a new variety of “halo” appears in just 15% of the simple four-part chorale settings, while the old “halo” that characterised the Weimar closing chorales¹⁸ has almost entirely disappeared. In addition, certain movements from the two cantatas which evoke Weimar style (BWV 95, 136) are demonstrably derived from an early Weimar version, so we can assert that Bach totally gave up this style of com-pos ition in Leipzig; in very special cases, he uses a new type of “halo” orchestrated with far greater forces. For example, always in the conclusions to St Michael’s day cantatas (BWV 19, 130, 149), frequently in closing movement to the council election

14 Fine examples are BWV 106 and 131.

15 They certainly met at the 1716 organ inspection in Halle.

16 Such a work is The Art of Fugue. Also characteristic of Bach were 17th-century works by relatives,

collected in Alt-Bachisches Archiv.

17 Because of its unique harmonic effects, it is worth mentioning here two consecutive cantatas from

the first cycle, BWV 60 and 90. In the first opens with an augmented fifth and an incredibly har-monic scheme, in the other the sudden appearance of the sixth degree of the minor scale is quite astonishing for the listener.

18 We found it in nearly a half.

cantatas (BWV 29, 69), and also often in the new year cantatas (BWV 41, 171 190) or when he just wanted an astounding effect to illustrate a text (BWV 150).¹⁹

The closing chorale of BWV 105 – which from many points of view is unique – repre-sents a transition between two different styles of setting, so I shall deal with this further below as a sixth type. Bach therefore expands the sonority of chorales not with solo instruments but with consort music that looks back to Renaissance traditions, proving that since the time of Johann Rosenmüller the Leipzig musical guilds, the Kunstgeiger and the Stadtpfeifer were constantly present in the city’s church music.

Hidden chorale setting

Since the basis for this type of setting is exclusively the combination of Biblical text and chorale, it survived with only slight alteration in the Leipzig cantatas. Compared to the Weimar cantatas, these 11 movements represents a significant drop in numbers;

although we find 11 examples in the Weimar cantatas, this is drawn a sample of 32 chorale based movements (34%), compared to the 272 of Leipzig (4%). When Bach utilises this type in an opening chorus (BWV 25/1, 48/1, 77/1), the original constella-tion of texts remains;²⁰ on three occasions, Bach separates them with an instrumental quotation to provoke further thought. But in none of these movements do we find a simple chorale quotation. In cantata 25, a trombone chorus²¹ expounds the chorale in four voices, creating a 12-part texture from this already very dense contrapuntal move-ment. In BWV 48 trumpet and oboe play the chorale in a canon at the fifth, while in BWV 77, a freely-treated augmented canon is created between the slide trumpet and the bass. When Bach uses these techniques in his cantata’s interior movement, there will be a different type of text: in BWV 10/5 he retains the Biblical text,²² in BWV 137/4 and 93/4 he sets a chorale to music while in BWV 19/5 he sets paraphrase verse.

The situation is no different when a chorale quotation is heard vocally: in BWV 158/2 and 159/2, free verse forms the basis of the duet. We find a quite special case in BWV

19 It is worth mentioning the study of Andreas Glöckner in which he examines the Leipzig manuscript

of a New Year cantata by Johann Friedrich Fasch. Graphological studies show that three three trom-bone and timpani parts were added to the closing chorale by a Leipzig hand. The work was performed in the Neukirche, conducted by Gerlach. This demonstrates how strong the Leipzig traditions were:

the New Year cantata would not dispense with three trumpets and timpani, even in a church which followed more modern trends than the main church. Andreas Glöckner, “In Fine Intrada con Trombe e Tamburi”, in Bach-Jahrbuch 2002, hrsg. von Peter Wollny (Lipcse: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2002), 201–207.

20 In BWV 25 it is the fourth verse of Psalm 38. In BWV 48 there is an exact from Paul’s letter to the

Romans, in BWV 77 a sentence from the Gospel of St. Luke.

21 Zinc and three trombones.

22 A verse from St. Luke’s Gospel is heard, from the Magnificat.

5/4 where the chorale emerges before us as a recitative style instrumental quotation.²³ Naturally this can only be a poem, an adaptation of verses 5–7 that forms the basis of the whole cantata. Bach places this special effect at the emotional turning point of the cantata, when the mood of the music changes from bitterness to consolation – this movement also forms the mirror axis of the work.²⁴ Finally, there is also a purely instru-mental chorale setting in the first of the cantatas Bach composed in Leipzig, BWV 75, as the instrumental opening of the second part of the cantata.

In summary we can say that the 30% decline mentioned above demonstrates how this style of treatment was phased out in Bach’s art. Of the 11 examples discussed above, four are from the first annual cycle, four from the second, while the remain-ing three are from the ensuremain-ing years, none later than 1729. This decreasremain-ing tendency is clear to see. Because the text combinations of the early cantatas could no longer be used, it is very interesting to observe how Bach tried to rescue this dying musical genre in the Leipzig cantatas – using poetry in traditionally Biblical movements²⁵ – but in the last 21 years of his life, he completely abandoned this style.²⁶ The disappearance of the hidden chorale settings in Bach’s work can perhaps be attributed to a general change in musical styles in the 18th century, rather than any particular Leipzig-based factor.²⁷

Choral cantus firmus settings

This is the typical opening movement of the Leipzig chorale cantatas, the most frequent variety after the simple four-part settings. Of the 57 movements of this type, only six do not belong to the annual cantata cycles. The early cantatas mentioned above are each prototypes for Leipzig chorale setting practises: the motet style, the concerto style and those employing special effects.

The motet style setting, the most representative examples of which being the fifth central movement of BWV 4, the first movements of BWV 2, 14, 38, 80 and 121, and in the second movement of cantata 28. So six instances in all. Compared to the early compositions, the principal difference is that in the Leipzig works, Bach elects to use

23 Bach uses this and similar effects in cantata 23 where the chorale melody is in the recitativo

accom-pagnato upper voice. This work will be discussed separately with BWV 22.

24 Dürr, Die Kantaten von Johann Sebastian Bach, 487.

25 Bach attempted another generic rescue with the publication of the six Schübler chorales in 1746.

Each work is an organ transcription of a cantata movement; of these two, BWV 10/5 and 93/4 follow the discussed type.

26 It must be said that with the performance of works, the picture is more shaded since church cantatas

were not performed for a concrete celebration in the year of their composition but could be

were not performed for a concrete celebration in the year of their composition but could be

In document Space, time, tradition (Pldal 73-84)