PROGRAM NOTES

Johann Sebastian Bach put together his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, sometime in the fall of 1734 for the coming Christmas season. Judging by the autograph score, he was working fast. He borrowed the music for the opening chorus from another cantata, but forgot and copied the old words into the score, which he then had to cross out. In other movements, sketches were hastily abandoned after they were begun, something that almost never happens in a Bach autograph. This was a big project: the entire production of six cantatas is a sacred drama spread over all twelve days of Christmas, ending with the arrival of the Three Kings on Epiphany. Although this cycle originally took nearly two weeks to perform, Bach specifies on his title-page that this is a single oratorio that comes in six parts.  (Unlike Handel, Bach reserves the term “oratorio” for a series of cantatas linked by a sacred plot-line.)  Tonight, we’ll be hearing only the first half of this huge project, since the whole oratorio takes a lot more time than we’re used to spend in a concert hall—though probably not much longer than church services went on every Sunday morning in Leipzig!  This oratorio, Bach’s first new large-scale production in some time for the two big Leipzig churches, was an important chance for him to consolidate much of the music he had composed in the previous two years, music which was first intended for ephemeral political celebrations.

There was a good reason for this uncharacteristic flood of secular cantatas. By 1733, Bach had become increasingly interested in the possibilities offered by the court at Dresden. He had finished enough full cycles of cantatas for the church year that he didn’t need to concentrate on providing music for Sunday morning. His attempts to reform the musical situation at the church by getting better students at the Thomasschule only mired him in endless bureaucratic battles. He had found one new creative outlet in directing the collegium musicum at Leipzig, a weekly society of students and amateurs, but the vision of working with the resources of a great court like Dresden must have held an enormous attraction for him. The Mass in B Minor was one result of this effort to attract royal patronage; the series of cantatas he wrote for various court anniversaries was another. These occasions ranged from birthdays (Prince Friedrich Christoph on September 5) to coronation anniversaries (August III on October 5).  In keeping with the tastes of opera-going Dresdeners, Bach’s music for these celebrations tends to be uncomplicated and “modern,” with clear structures and colorful orchestral colors.

About a third of the Christmas Oratorio is taken from these secular cantatas, and their exuberant freshness gives the Oratorio its distinctively festive sound. Since these choruses and arias were originally intended for royal birthdays and anniversaries, enshrining the music in a lengthy work celebrating the birth of Christ the King makes perfect sense (and, for a composer in a hurry, provided a lot of material for a large-scale work). But all this secular music has made the Oratorio something of a problem in past years to many Bach scholars. Bach’s use of the technique known as “parody” (reworking earlier music by setting new text to it) is upsetting to some because it implies that the new work is somehow tainted by a lack of originality, that it is “inauthentic” in some deep sense. And when the original setting is overtly secular, in fact political, its reuse in a sacred context made many nineteenth-century scholars uncomfortable. But in Bach’s world, a gesture of praise and homage was the same, whether for God or for his royal representatives on earth.

Parody can raise some practical problems, though, if the original text suggested a vivid musical image whose point is lost when set to different words. The very opening of the whole Christmas Oratorio is perhaps the best example of this: it started as a secular cantata that begins “Sound forth, you drums,” which would explain the timpani fanfare that follows. But Bach doesn’t usually rely on such explicit word-painting, and most of his re-worked movements accommodate their new text comfortably. (More comfortably, indeed, than Handel’s re-workings: the odd text-accents of “For unto us a child is born” in Messiah make a lot more sense in his original Italian duet.) And luckily Bach’s political cantatas use generic texts of praise and celebration, so they don’t elicit too much in the way of overt musical illustration anyway. But why—apart from reasons of sheer time-saving as he worked against a deadline—would Bach have chosen to re-use these works? Perhaps the most telling explanation for Bach’s recycling of the year’s crop of secular cantatas was a pragmatic concern for their survival: after all, Christmas comes around every year, but who now remembers Electress Maria Josepha?

Re-using these secular choruses and arias also meant that a huge six-part work would keep a certain stylistic coherence. Bach was obviously concerned with finding a way to unify this huge oratorio. Most importantly, he provided an overall tonal structure by setting the whole work in a cycle of keys. Of course, over thirteen days, not much sense of key contrast can register, but this ensures that each cantata has its own distinctive orchestral color. The first and third cantatas, which we’ll hear tonight, are in D Major, and gleam with the sound of trumpets and drums to celebrate the glory of Christ the King. The opening of the first cantata, in particular, displays all the instrumental colors of Bach’s orchestra. In contrast, the second cantata, in G major, sets the airy sounds of strings and flutes against the earthiness of oboes—in the first movement Bach even adds the dark alto sounds of oboes d’amore and oboes da caccia—to create a vivid picture of the angels joining the shepherds in praise. And Bach reinforces this sense of a prevailing orchestral color by bringing back each cantata’s opening material at its close, transformed into a chorale setting.

Unlike the tremendously dramatic St. Matthew Passion, where even the chorus takes on several roles, nothing much happens in the Christmas Oratorio. Or rather, what does happen is not particularly staged. Mostly the biblical narrative is delivered in straightforward recitative. This puts the focus instead on the arias and choruses, which meditate upon the images and metaphors raised by the bible verses. More lyric than epic, the libretto dwells upon the contrasts inherent in an all-powerful King of Heaven appearing as a small, defenseless baby, and by extension the miracle of God being born in each of us. Two other related images recur throughout the cycle: the star appearing in the night sky, providing illumination and guidance in a dark world, and the intimate union between the soul and Christ as bride and groom, which is derived from the Song of Songs.

The drama is in the contrasts these images contain: at the same time light and dark, great and small, intimate and universal. To convey these meditations, Bach uses all the possibilities offered by the cantata form. Along with the usual elements of a festive cantata—the large-scale opening “concerto” or chorus, the aria where voice and instrument reflect upon a particular image, and the closing chorale with all its Lutheran associations of the people speaking as one—Bach introduces magnificent variations upon all these forms. The chorus will suddenly interrupt an aria with a chorale, or an aria will weave in and out of an accompanied recitative, or the full orchestra will break into the final chorale,  echoing some earlier movement. The effect of all this variety in such a capacious work is to give us a different kind of drama, one which is less about getting caught up in a dramatic narrative and more about the pleasure of absorbing ourselves in the images and associations unfolding from the Christmas story.

-Robert Mealy