 | ||
Johann Sebastian Bach's chorale harmonisations, alternatively named four-part chorales, are Lutheran hymn settings that characteristically conform to the following:
Contents
- History
- 1760s
- Kirnberger
- C P E Bachs edition for Breitkopf
- Bach Gesellschaft edition
- 20th century
- Chorale harmonisations
- References
In Bach's extant autographs such chorale harmonisations are usually part of a larger vocal work, most typically one of his chorale cantatas, or at least part of a set or collection such as D-B Mus. ms. Bach St 123, a set of three wedding chorales. Most autographs also show a colla parte instrumentation and/or a figured bass accompaniment for Bach's chorale settings.
Yet Chapter 5 of the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis and Series F of the Bach Compendium list around two hundred of these chorale harmonisations as separate compositions without apparent instrumental accompaniment. This results from the history of these chorale settings between their composition in the first half of the 18th century and the publication of most of them in the second half of that century.
Apart from the four-part homophonic SATB chorus settings, Bach's Lutheran hymn harmonisations also appear as:
History
The compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach that had been printed during his lifetime were nearly exclusively instrumental works. Moreover, by the time Bach died in 1750 it was forgotten that a few of his vocal works (BWV 71, BWV 439–507,...) had indeed been printed in the first half of the 18th century. In the period between the publication of The Art of Fugue in the early 1750s, and the publication of further works from 1900, only one group of Bach's works was published: his four-part chorales.
The most complete 18th century publication of chorales by J. S. Bach is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's edition in four volumes, published by Breitkopf from 1784 to 1787. About half of the chorale harmonisations in this collection have their origin in other extant works by Bach. This collection went through four more editions and countless reprintings until 1897. Several other collections of chorales by J. S. Bach were published, some of these using the original C-clef or different texts.
The loss of musical material from Bach's death to the first printings of chorale collections may have been substantial. Not only are many works the chorales were extracted from no longer extant but there is no way of knowing how much of all the harmonisations that were once compiled the current collections include. For example, there is no way of knowing how many of the 150 harmonisations first proposed for sale in 1764 also appear in Princess Anna Amalia's manuscript which ultimately forms the basis of the Breitkopf edition. As to the chorale melodies with figured bass, current collections include less than one hundred of them whereas those proposed for sale in 1764 numbered 240.
The chorale harmonisations BWV 250–438 were probably all extracted from lost larger vocal works. For six of them the work they have been derived from has been identified. Bach's chorale harmonisations are all for a four-part choir (SATB), but Riemenschneider's and Terry's collections contain one 5-part SSATB choral harmonisation (Welt, ade! ich bin dein müde, Riemenscheider No. 150, Terry No. 365), not actually by Bach, but used by Bach as the concluding chorale to cantata Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende? BWV 27.
1760s
The first record of the existence and sale of groups of collected chorale harmonisations and chorale melodies with figured bass extracted from larger works by J.S. Bach is from 1764, fourteen years after Bach's death. In that year the firm Breitkopf und Sohn announced for sale manuscript copies of 150 chorale harmonisations and 240 chorale melodies with figured bass by J.S. Bach.
In 1765 F. W. Birnstiel published 100 chorales in Berlin. The edition had been initiated by F. W. Marpurg and completed, edited and supplemented with a preface and a list of errata by C. P. E. Bach. A second volume of 100 was issued by the same publisher in 1769, edited by J. F. Agricola. C. P. E. Bach criticised this publication as being full of mistakes in an article which was published in Hamburg in the Staats- und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyeschen Correspondenten on May 30, 1769, where he also claimed that some of the chorale harmonisations included in the volume had not been composed by his father.
Kirnberger
In 1777 Johann Kirnberger started an active letter campaign to induce Breitkopf to publish a complete set of chorale harmonisations. Kirnberger's letters emphasize his motivation to have the chorales printed in order to preserve them for the benefit of future generations. The manuscript to be used once belonged to C. P. E. Bach, who sold it through Kirnberger to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia (for twelve louis d'or). It is presumed that this manuscript contained neither the text of the chorales nor any reference to the larger works from which the harmonisations had been taken. The manuscript's harmonisations extracted only the vocal parts and ignored the instrumental parts and the continuo, even though all of Bach's chorale settings included both instrumental parts and continuo. The instrumental parts were either independent, so called obbligato instrumental parts, or mostly doubled the vocal parts sometimes separating from it for a very few beats, and the continuo had its bass mostly double the vocal bass at the lower octave, but could also separate from it for a very few beats. Finally in some cases, for reasons unknown, whoever extracted the chorale from the larger work, changed the key of the setting.
C. P. E. Bach's edition for Breitkopf
After Kirnberger died in 1783, C. P. E. Bach became Breitkopfs's editor for these chorales, which he then published in four parts: 1784: nos. 1–96, 1785: nos. 97–194, 1786: 195–283, 1787: 283–370. The number 283 was mistakenly used for two different chorales which became 283a and 283b: this numbering error was corrected from the 1831 dritte Auflage on. So the collection contained ostensibly 371 chorales, but it were in fact only 348.
This collection was republished in 1804 ("neue Auflage"), in 1831 ("dritte Auflage", by Breitkopf & Härtel, preface by C. F. Becker), in 1885 ("vierte Auflage", also edited by C. F. Becker) and in 1897 (edited by Ernst Naumann).
Bach Gesellschaft edition
The Bach Gesellschaft published the original 371 chorales from the C. P. E. Bach edition in volume 39 of their Complete Works in 1892.
20th century
Published in 1929, Charles Sanford Terry's J. S. Bach's Four-Part Chorales contains 405 chorale harmonisations and 95 melodies with figured bass. The collection was reprinted 1964, with a foreword by Walter Emery.
Albert Riemenschneider's collection of 371 chorales was published in 1941. In some cases Riemenschneider restores some information about obbligato instrumental parts when the larger work is extant, e.g. his No. 270 from cantata BWV 161, or about the continuo bass line if this does not exactly coincide with the vocal bass, e.g. his No. 29 from cantata BWV 32 and his No. 35 from the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248.
Riemenschneider does however not restore the original key even if the larger work is extant but instead keeps the chorale in the key in which it is found in the Breitkopf collection, e.g. his No. 22, in E-flat major comes from cantata BWV 180 where it is in F major. At times the key signature in Riemenschneider's edition does not correspond to the key, for instance No. 19, in G minor but written with a "Dorian" G key signature. This too is presumably reproduced from the Breitkopf edition, which would have followed a common 17th- and 18th-century practice.
Chorale harmonisations
The table cross references BWV numbers of the listed chorales with numberings found in some of the major chorale publications. For a cross-reference with Bach Compendium numbers see scores:List of works by Johann Sebastian Bach#Four-Part Chorales (250–438). A cross-reference between Lutheran hymns, their Zahn number, and their appearance in compositions by Bach (including, but not limited to, the chorale harmonizations) can be found pp. 471–481 of BWV2a.