Bach: The Master of the Baroque
Christmas Oratorio
The Christmas Oratorio (German: Weihnachtsoratorium), BWV 248, is an oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach intended for performance in church during the Christmas season. It is in six parts, each part a cantata intended for performance in a church service on a feast day of the Christmas period. It was written for the Christmas season of 1734 and incorporates music from earlier compositions, including three secular cantatas written during 1733 and 1734 and a largely lost church cantata, BWV 248a. The date is confirmed in Bach's autograph manuscript. The next complete public performance was not until 17 December 1857 by the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin under Eduard Grell. The Christmas Oratorio is a particularly sophisticated example of parody music. The author of the text is unknown, although a likely collaborator was Christian Friedrich Henrici (Picander). (Wikipedia)
Bach “Up-Scaling” Earlier Music
In this background video on the Christmas Oratorio - recorded for All of Bach in the Geertekerk Utrecht and Grote Kerk Naarden - violinist and leader Shunske Sato takes the viewer back to eighteenth-century Germany and the Christmas traditions of the time. How does Bach's Christmas Oratorio fits within these traditions? Using musical examples, played on the spot by the ensemble, you will learn more about Bach's great Christmas work and Sato's take on it. (Below)
In this first cantata of the Christmas Oratorio – recorded here for All of Bach under direction of Shunske Sato – Bach attains a perfect balance between the jubilant celebration of the birth of Jesus and the serious, sad undertone that points to his fate on the cross. From the orchestral firework show of the opening chorus, via the sensual aria ‘Bereite dich Sion’, to the simple prayer of the final choral, surrounded by the royal sound of the timpani and trumpets.
In the second cantata of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio we are with the shepherds in the field. In a colourful patchwork of recitatives, arias, choruses, chorales and even an instrumental section, Bach tells how a host of angels appears to a group of shepherds tending their flocks in the field. Just for a moment in the biblical narrative by Luke, Jesus is not the main character. Instead, the focus is on a group of ordinary people who are receiving the tidings of the birth of Jesus.
The third cantate from the Christmas Oratorio is the closing piece of what you might call the first cycle of Bach’s oratorio. This first cycle consists of the first three out of six cantatas of the Christmas Oratorio and follow a single narrative line quoted directly from the gospel of Luke. In cantata 3 the shepherds come to Bethlehem and bring the glad tidings of the birth of Jesus to the people for the first time. Highlights in this cantata are undoubtedly the duet for alto and bass, ‘Herr, dein Mitleid’, and the alto aria ‘Schließe, mein Herze’.
The Mass in B-Minor
(Article Excerpt from BBC Music Magazine, Paul Riley)
Like Monteverdi’s equally compendious Vespers of 1610, the Bach B minor Mass started life as a sort of elevated job application. Perennially status-conscious and increasingly ground down by the machinations of Leipzig life, Bach spotted an opportunity with the death of the Elector of Saxony in 1733.
Hoping at very least to obtain an honorary title with which to bolster his authority, Bach composed an elaborate ‘Missa’ (a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria) to present to the new ruler. With its weather eye on the Court’s penchant for extravagant Neapolitan-style Mass settings rich in quasi-operatic solo vocal writing, and mindful of the exceptional instrumental forces available, the new work had ‘Dresden’ written all over it.
Dispatching a set of parts, Bach added a fulsome dedication commending ‘a small sample of the kind of scholarship I have attained in musique’. Whether it was performed in the Saxon capital is open to speculation and, in any event, three years would elapse before a title finally came his way.
Nonetheless, emerging at the end of the decade a further four conspicuously more intimate ‘Missae’ suggest the idea had seeded itself – a bridge to that all-embracing ‘sample’ of Bach’s most exacting ‘scholarship’: the B minor Mass.
Bach's obsession with his legacy
During the 1740s, Bach became increasingly obsessed with what today would be called his ‘legacy’. Works such as the Art of Fugue, the Goldberg Variations or the Musical Offering were designed to showcase, in the most comprehensive way, his mastery of counterpoint. How similarly to enshrine his achievements in the sphere of sacred music?
All too aware of changing fashions surrounding cantata poetry, he perhaps felt that the text of the Mass would remain a timeless anchor forever above the vicissitudes of popular taste. Moreover, a setting of the entirety, its scale determined by the 1733 Missa, would give huge scope for the encyclopaedic enterprise envisaged. By dusting down a Sanctus dating back to Christmas 1724 he was already well on the way, relying on the refashioning of existing material and minimal original composition to fill the admittedly considerable gaps.
The Credo’s Crucifixus, for example, revisits a cantata movement from 1714 Weimar (the earliest music to be ‘foraged’) while the re-fashioning of the Et incarnatus – a late addition – probably represents, alongside the Confiteor, the last choral music Bach ever wrote. The change of heart was to accommodate a searing (ultimately jubilant) choral triptych underscoring the centrality of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection.
'As always with Bach, variety rules supreme'
Indeed, almost looking forward to Mozart’s Requiem and evidently touched by Bach’s recent acquaintance with Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, the tenderness of the Et incarnatus points up a stark contrast with the ‘stile antico’ austerity of, say, the second Kyrie fugue; the concerto-like brilliance of the Gloria’s explosive opening goes hand-in-hand with the granite plainsong cantus firmus of the Confiteor, while the skirling soprano Laudamus te glances towards the opera house. As always with Bach, variety rules supreme.
It’s a variety, though, always at the service of a rigorous theological interrogation in which artful architectural strategies make room for cunning numerological conceits. And Bach the miracle-worker fuses the disparate into a whole, overwhelming in its cumulative effect.
When CPE Bach directed the Credo during a charity concert in 1786, the Hamburger Correspondent reported that it was ‘one of the most splendid musical works that has ever been heard’. Extended to the Bach B minor Mass in its entirety, nearly a quarter of a millennium on, ‘Amen’ to that!
(Paul Riley)