As organist at Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach was
charged with providing a harmonic underpinning for the
singing of Lutheran chorale tunes chosen for each day.
Bach wrote out many of these harmonizations, in part as
instruction for younger composers (they are still used
for this purpose). A derivation of this practice,
Bach's conception of the organ chorale, as manifested
in the chorale preludes, dates from 1713 -1714, about
the time he became familiar with Vivaldi's
concertos.
Bach's Or...(+)
As organist at Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach was
charged with providing a harmonic underpinning for the
singing of Lutheran chorale tunes chosen for each day.
Bach wrote out many of these harmonizations, in part as
instruction for younger composers (they are still used
for this purpose). A derivation of this practice,
Bach's conception of the organ chorale, as manifested
in the chorale preludes, dates from 1713 -1714, about
the time he became familiar with Vivaldi's
concertos.
Bach's Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) contains
chorale preludes for the church year written during the
composer's service at Weimar (1708 - 1717). In about
1713, Bach began assembling the Orgel-Büchlein, and
his earliest entries seem to be Her Christ, der ein'ge
Gottes-Sohn, BWV 601, In dulci jubilo, BWV 608, Christ
ist erstanden, BWV 627, and Heut' triumphieret Gottes
Sohn, BWV 630. These were very original compositions,
highly expressive miniatures based on a chorale melody,
supported with refined counterpoint, and featuring
highly condensed motivic writing.
Bach's Orgelbüchlein was essentially complete by 1716.
Only the fragment O Traurigkeit and the chorale
prelude, Helft mir Gottes Güte preisen, BWV 613, were
added later. "Complete" is used with some reservation
here, because Bach originally projected 164 pieces but
completed fewer than 50. In Bach's manuscript, pages
with finished pieces alternate with blank ones intended
for other chorale preludes. The later pieces differ
from Bach's earlier chorale elaborations, in that they
contain only one statement of the melody and are
intended to demonstrate how to accompany a chorale with
contrapuntally proper figurations that support the
meaning of the text.
It is frequently the task of musicologists and
serious-minded performers, when dealing with so
extensive a musical output as J. S. Bach's (not only an
extensive output but also one produced before the
advent of copyright laws or even reliable publication
and whose works were thus subject to all sorts of
changes and rewrites as they got transmitted down from
one manuscript to another over the decades), to sort
through all the many versions of a given piece that
exist and to try, at the end of all this digging, to
come up with what might reasonably be called the
"authentic" version of that piece. Very often in the
case of Bach and other high-profile composers, the task
is impossible, but sometimes the evidence in favor of
one version or another is strong enough for the myriad
individually-minded scholars to reach a consensus and
the catalog of works to be altered to reflect the new
agreement. This is more or less what has happened over
the years regarding Bach's organ chorale prelude on
"Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gemein." The prelude,
thought to have been composed sometime during Bach's
years as court organist in Weimar (1708-1717), survives
in two versions, sometimes cataloged as BWV 734 and BWV
734a. In the one version of the piece, the original
Lutheran chorale melody (the cantus firmus, it is
called) on which Bach's elaboration is based is played
by the hands on the organ manuals; in the other version
the cantus firmus is found in the organ pedals, with a
few minor but, when dealing with so important a part of
the repertoire as Bach, vital changes to the music of
the other voices. Neither version survives in a truly
authoritative source, but over time and for a variety
of reasons, the version with the cantus firmus in the
pedals has fallen somewhat into scholarly disfavor and
more often than not been labeled "inauthentic," leaving
the manual-only version of "Nun freut euch, lieben
Christen gemein" as the sole heir to the heading BWV
734.
The melody of "Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gemein"
is one of the earliest Lutheran hymn tunes, having been
derived by Martin Luther himself in 1524 (the tune was
also associated, from 1682 on, with the text "Es ist
gewisslich an der Zeit," and one will occasionally find
BWV 734 under that title). Bach puts this cantus firmus
in the tenor voice, to be played by the inner fingers
of the left hand while the bass moves along in steady
eighth notes and the right hand indulges in a florid
sixteenth-note obbligato whose opening tones subtly
foreshadow, in outline, the first five or six notes of
the tenor's cantus firmus melody. As in the original
hymn, the first pair of phrases are repeated; the final
three phrases make for one long push towards the final
G major cadence, richly extended (in Bach's usual
plagal/subdominant way) by the running bass and treble
obbligato under the umbrella of the tenor's sustained G
pedal tone.
Source: Allmusic
(http://www.allmusic.com/composition/nun-freut-euch-lie
ben-christen-gmein-i-chorale-prelude-for-organ-bwv-734-
bc-k125-mc0002390635).
Although originally written for Pipe Organ, I created
this Arrangement of the Chorale Prelude (BWV 734) "Nun
freut euch, lieben Christen gemein" (Dear Christians,
One and All, Rejoice) for Piano.
