Johann Sebastian Bach
Born: March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany
Died: July 28, 1750, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
Weihnachtsoratorium (“Christmas Oratorio”), BWV 248
- Composed: 1734
- Premiere: Cantata I on December 25, 1734, at the Thomaskirche, Leipzig; Cantata III on December 27, 1734, at the Nikolaikirche, Leipzig; and Cantata VI on January 6, 1735, at the Thomaskirche. The composer conducted in every case.
- CSO Notable Performances:
- First & Most Recent: December 1958 conducted by Max Rudolf with Cathedral Choir, Mount Saint Joseph Choir, Our Lady of Cincinnati College Chorus (Musica Sacra), Seminary Choir, Cathedral Basilica Boy’s Choir, soprano Saramae Endich, mezzo-soprano Frances Bible, tenor David Llyod, and bass Kenneth Smith
- Instrumentation: SATB soloists, SATB chorus, 2 flutes, 2 oboes (incl. 2 oboes d’amore), bassoon, 3 trumpets, timpani, harpsichord, organ, strings
- Duration: approx. 85 minutes
“Air” for String Orchestra from Orchestral Suite No. 3
- Composed: c. 1730
- Premiere: Unknown
- CSO Notable Performances:
- First: November 1920 conducted by Modeste Alloo at a Young People’s Concert
- First CSO Subscription: January 1964 conducted by Max Rudolf
- Most Recent: January 2014 conducted by Louis Langrée
- Instrumentation: strings
- Duration: approx. 4 minutes
Johann Sebastian Bach unveiled his Christmas Oratorio in the last week of 1734 and the first week of 1735, with each of its six constituent cantatas being offered on a different day during the 13-day span that connected Christmas Day (December 25) to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). No music-loving Lutheran in Leipzig would have wanted to miss any of the installments. During those two weeks, those listeners might not have heard music performed outside of church services, so the six cantatas’ evolving narrative would have stuck in their minds more easily than it would over such a period today, when we are bombarded with music almost constantly.
Bach was 49 years old and in his 11th year as music director at Leipzig’s principal churches and of the musicians at the city’s prestigious St. Thomas choir-school. Apart from his official obligations composing and directing liturgical music, he developed a freelance sideline leading the Collegium Musicum, a semi-professional assemblage of university students and music aficionados. He led the group from 1729 through 1741, except for a sabbatical from 1737 to 1739. This provided supplemental income that was most welcome, given that he had a large family to support; he fathered 20 children from 1708 to 1742, half of whom lived to adulthood. Then, too, he sometimes got involved in organizing special entertainments for municipal events, some of which included vocal and instrumental performances. He led the Collegium Musicum in two such celebratory cantatas in September and December 1733 for occasions extolling local rulers (the Electress of Saxony, who was also Queen of Poland, and her son, the Crown Prince), and in October 1744 he followed up with a further congratulatory cantata for the Elector of Saxony/King of Poland, giving an open-air performance following a torchlight procession outside the Elector’s palace in Leipzig. The ephemeral nature of these events pretty much ensured that the cantatas would be performed once and then forgotten—though not by Bach, who was a practical musician.
He apparently started thinking about writing his Christmas Oratorio in the autumn of 1734, but his schedule of church services and teaching didn’t leave much time in which to realize the project. He therefore pillaged his three recent cantatas, retrofitting new sacred texts to much of the music from those secular compositions. For example, a choral exhortation to play trumpets and drums to herald the birthday of Electress Maria Josepha becomes the opening number of the Christmas Oratorio, now offering a more generalized call to celebration and still enriched with the brass and percussion; and the lines of that same movement where the choir originally sang “Long live the Queen! This is the wish of the Saxons, May the Queen live and flourish and prosper!” now proclaim “Serve the Highest with glorious choirs, Let us honor the name of our ruler!” These were not Bach’s only self-borrowed sources. Other movements in the Christmas Oratorio were recast from pieces now lost but possible to imagine through musicological clues—two further cantatas plus a St. Mark Passion. We don’t know for sure who penned the new texts, but the leading candidate is Christian Friedrich Henrici, who, writing under the pen name Picander, provided quite a few cantata librettos for Bach.
Most of the arias and choruses in the Christmas Oratorio were recycled, but no eyebrows would have been raised about this at the time. Later generations viewed this as cheating in some way, but self-borrowing was a fact of musical life in the late Baroque. It was a time-saver for composers who were expected to be ridiculously productive and a way to freshen up good pieces and keep them in the active repertoire. To be sure, there is another body of music in the Christmas Oratorio that is also not entirely original: the chorales. These were hymn-tunes, most of them standard fixtures of Lutheran worship, some composed by Martin Luther himself in the 16th century. But although their melodies already existed, Bach made these movements his own through his peerless harmonizations. These were considered so central to Bach’s works that, in the 1780s, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach edited a four-volume collection of his father’s harmonized chorales, which still stand as exemplars of voice-leading—how an individual part proceeds elegantly from one note to the next within the landscape of all the other moving parts. Wrote C.P.E. in his preface, “Those connoisseurs of the art of harmonizing and composing settings will…not withhold their praise when they observe with appropriate attentiveness the very unusual manner my father uses to set up harmony in these settings, the natural flow of the inner voices as well as the bass, factors which set these chorale settings apart from any others.”
The six Christmas Oratorio cantatas are sometimes given in a single performance, but it makes for a marathon event. Bach certainly did not envision his piece being encountered in that way. It is not uncommon for the first, third and sixth cantatas to be given in a single concert, as here. All three center on the key of D major—the remaining three are set in other keys—and they share instrumentation, including the brilliant sounds of three trumpets and timpani that are absent from the other cantatas. Together, they recount the salient plot-points of the Christmas story as recounted in the Gospels of Luke (Cantatas I and III) and Matthew (Cantata VI), with the Gospel texts mostly being delivered as recitatives by the tenor soloist (the Evangelist). Cantata I recounts the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; Cantata III involves the shepherds (having been alerted by angels) traveling to see the newborn child and spreading word of the miracle; and Cantata VI portrays the Wise Men arriving to worship the baby and foiling villainous Herod’s attempt to pinpoint the child’s whereabouts.
We do not know if Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, whether its individual cantatas or the whole cycle, was ever presented during the composer’s lifetime after the Feast of Christmas in 1734–35, but it did fade into oblivion and went unheard for more than a century following the composer’s death. Even after Felix Mendelssohn launched the Bach revival with his performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, the Christmas Oratorio would wait nearly three more decades to be rediscovered through a complete performance, also in Berlin, in 1857. It appears not to have reached the United States until 1894, when portions of it were presented in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by the Moravian Church Choir, a precursor to the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, which would play a critical role in introducing the composer’s works to modern America.
This weekend we also hear, as a prelude to Cantata VI, the much-loved Air from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, a piece he composed for his Collegium Musicum in about 1730. Orchestral suites (or overtures, as they were often called) were immensely popular in Germany during the second quarter of the 18th century. That a number of them were identified by their composers as Tafelmusik (“table music”) underscores the role they sometimes played at formal banquets. Bach wrote only four—at least that is how many survive. The Third is typical in that it opens with an overture “in the French style” and then comprises a series of courtly dance-movements. But in the Suite No. 3 those elements are separated by the Air, a beautifully poised achievement for string orchestra in which a “walking bass line” keeps the momentum from being slowed by the subtle interweaving of inner lines.
—James M. Keller
James M. Keller, the longtime Program Annotator of the San Francisco Symphony and for 25 years Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic, is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford University Press).