Program Notes Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach took the job that would come to define his career: Cantor at St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. The post handed him overall responsibility for the music not just in that church, but in all the Saxon city’s major churches. Bach would remain in the job for 27 years. It was a productive and transformative if not entirely happy arrangement. But then, Bach was a natural dissident—impatient in the face of bureaucracy and philistinism, driven by a creative ambition that frequently outstretched the resources available to him, despite his occasional pragmatism. Still, Bach was determined to make the very best of those resources. In Leipzig, he hit the ground running and set out his stall from the start. From 30 May 1723—which that year formed the First Sunday of Trinity in the Lutheran church’s calendar— he started writing a series of bespoke cantatas for each Sunday and Feast Day of the ecclesiastical year, tailored to St Thomas’s Church’s musicians. Later in the 1720s, the project would be complemented by a further cycle and by musical settings of the Passion—the story of Christ’s final days on earth. Bach often considered his daily work at St Thomas’s an uphill struggle, and just as often complained of a lack of support. The more frustrated he became with the limitations and leadership attitudes at St Thomas’s Church, the more he sought stimulation elsewhere. He involved himself in a student music society in Leipzig that allowed him to write plenty of secular and purely instrumental music. By the 1730s, no longer feeling the pressure to write weekly cantatas for St Thomas’s (those he had written already could simply be re-used), Bach started to think on a bigger scale. Prompted partly by his work on the Passions, he considered the creation of grand new works, on a large scale, that could incorporate and refine music he had already written. Bach’s tidy mind was naturally drawn to large forms neatly divisible into modular parts—structures whose individual sections could stand alone, but would resonate more when brought together or treated as a single cycle or journey. In 1734, Bach turned his mind to one such project. He designed an oratorio in six parts, the performance of which would span the two weeks from Christmas to Epiphany. So, Bach’s so-called Christmas Oratorio, rather like Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen—would not originally have been heard in one sitting. Its opening chapter was performed on Christmas Day, 1734, with Parts 2 and 3 following on the 26 and 27
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PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE ORCHESTRA & CHORALE
