This week Your Morning Bach will draw from Bach's rich catalogue of Christmas music. Tune in each weekday at 7:30 am to hear his holiday music with Jeff Spurgeon, your Host of Christmas Past.
For much of his life Johann Sebastian Bach worked as a church composer, writing music to accompany services through the year. The joy of the Christmas season inspired some of his most brilliant compositions for chorus, organ, orchestra and more. Here's a list of some of our favorites.
Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
Bach composed the Christmas Oratorio in 1734 for the churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas in Leipzig. With a running time of nearly three hours, the Christmas Oratorio is by far the longest work Bach wrote for the holiday season. Luckily for his parishioners (the pews of St.Thomas were not known for their lumbar support!), Bach intended the work to be performed in six installments, each corresponding to a different part of the Nativity story.
The Oratorio is also a prime example of musical parody— a technique in which new text is adapted to existing music - which Bach routinely employed. Ironically, most of the music in the Oratorio was originally written to celebrate the birthdays of a local queen and prince, but it may be even more glorious outside of its secular context.
Magnificat in E-flat Major, BWV 243a
The Magnificat was the first major work Bach wrote after winning the position of music director of St. Thomas in 1723. With its splendorous fanfares, tender arias, and elaborate choral writing, the Magnificat sounds like the work of a man eager to make an indelible first impression. Although it was originally written for the Feast of the Visitation (which occurs in July), Bach cleverly appended four Christmas hymns to the original text, so that he could reuse it in Yuletide festivities later that year. Talk about starting your Christmas shopping early ....
Cantata BWV 110, "Unser Mund sei voll Lachens"
Like the Christmas Oratorio, the opening chorus of the cantata “Unser Mund sei voll Lachens” (written for Christmas Day at St. Thomas in 1725) is an instance of musical parody, based on the Overture to Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4. Bach shows off his elegance as an orchestrator in the cantata’s three central arias, framing each as a dialogue between the vocal soloist and a different obbligato wind instrument — the tenor with a pair of flutes, the alto with an oboe, and the bass with trumpets — that make for poignant sonic juxtaposition.
Cantata BWV 191, “Gloria in excelsis Deo”
This cantata is unusual for several reasons: it’s the only one of Bach’s more than two hundred extant cantatas written in Latin instead of German. It’s scored for a five-part chorus (with a dual soprano part) instead of Bach’s customary four, and was written for Christmas Day, in 1745, despite containing little that specifically links it to the Nativity story. Again, enter musical parody. Three years later, Bach adapted much of the music from this cantata for the Gloria section of his monumental Mass in B Minor, suggesting other motives for this cantata’s quirks.
In Dulci Jublio, BWV 729 & Jesu Christus, unser Heiland, BWV 665
Not all of the work Bach wrote for Christmas is choral. He was particularly fond of the hymn “In Dulci Jublio,” which set a number of times, most notably for organ (which has been used to conclude the famed Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge since 1938) and Martin Luther’s hymn “Jesu Christus, unser Heiland,” which he likely would have played during Christmas services at St. Thomas.