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Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach: An Interactive Companion

Christ lag in Todes Banden BWV 4 / BC A 54

Easter Sunday, April 24, 1707?

The Easter cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden BWV 4 (Christ lay in the bonds of death) belongs to a group of fewer than a dozen works that Johann Sebastian Bach composed using pure, unmodified chorale texts. This technique was hardly his own invention; it appears rather frequently in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and it enjoyed a certain favor among cantors of St. Thomas. Ernst Ludwig Gerber, organist at the court of Sondershausen, writing in his dictionary of composers published in Leipzig in 1790, describes Johann Friedrich Doles, Bach’s second successor at St. Thomas: “For the most part he performs his own compositions in the churches. And in the interest of greater variety, since 1766 he has set entire chorales through in the manner of the famous Kuhnau, occasionally recasting the contents of the strophes as recitatives, arias, duets and choruses, and performed them to great acclaim instead of the usual church cantatas.”1

The year given by Gerber lends his account considerable credence because he matriculated at the University of Leipzig early in the same year. Hence his account apparently reflects the first impressions of music he encountered in the trade-fair city at a time when the young Goethe also frequented the Alma mater Lipsiensis. Moreover, Gerber’s allusion to the Manier of Bach’s predecessor Johann Kuhnau was hardly baseless; the dictionary article states: “He was not the initiator but rather the fortunate follower of the manner of church cantatas in which a chorale serves as text, the content of every strophe worked through. I own the chorale Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten in this style by him.”2 Two centuries later, scholars have supplemented Gerber’s brief accounts with a multitude of names, illustrating the continuity of the procedure, whose roots reach back well into the seventeenth century and whose adherents are still found in the middle of the eighteenth. Later examples such as those by Mendelssohn in the nineteenth century are clearly retrospective in nature. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the most outstanding examples are by the northern German masters Dieterich Buxtehude, Nicolaus Bruhns, and Joachim Gerstenbüttel and in central Germany Johann Philipp Krieger, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, and Johann Pachelbel, as well as the Leipzig cantors of St. Thomas Knüpfer, Schelle, and Kuhnau. What is remarkable in all this is that the lexicographer Gerber, in praising the achievements of Kuhnau and Doles in connection with the chorale cantata, completely neglects the contributions of Johann Sebastian Bach. This is particularly difficult to explain since his father, Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, studied in Leipzig beginning in 1724 and must have heard a large part of Bach’s annual cycle of chorale cantatas—including the performance of the cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden BWV 4.2 at Easter in 1725.

This performance in early 1725 was the conclusion—earlier than planned—of the annual cycle begun in the summer of the previous year. Cantatas performed after Easter of 1725 do not belong to the chorale cantata type. Strictly speaking, the cantata Christ lag in Todes Banden was just a straggler. Only a few days previously, Bach had completed the last newly composed work for his chorale cantata cycle: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern BWV 1 (How brightly shines the morning star) for March 25, the feast day of the Annunciation of Mary. Christ lag in Todes Banden, on the other hand, involved the reperformance of an existing work: it had been heard the year before, the current version having cornet and trombones added to three of the seven vocal movements.

In the context of Bach’s chorale cantata cycle begun in June 1724, the first Leipzig performance of the Easter cantata in April 1724 might be understood as a testing of the waters, so to speak. But there are qualifications: features of the work’s style exclude the possibility that Christ lag in Todes Banden originated in 1724. Its musical diction instead points to the era of the young J. S. Bach. Specifically, the work is comparable to his Mühlhausen cantatas of 1707–8; one might suppose that the work (BWV 4.1) was meant for Easter 1708 and performance at St. Blasius Church. An even more likely hypothesis is that the work was composed a year earlier and served as audition music for Bach’s application to the position of organist at St. Blasius. That Bach’s audition took place on Easter Sunday in 1707 is explicitly attested to by the report of the so-called Eingepfarrten—the city council’s representative for church music.

There are certainly problems with these hypotheses as well. Strictly speaking, the stylistic attributes that point to Bach’s early style pertain only from the first movement through the next to the last; the concluding movement is a four-part chorale setting typical of Bach’s Leipzig compositional style. If one wanted to postulate a Mühlhausen early version (and very little speaks against such an endeavor), then one would have to consider a completely different concluding movement, of which no trace remains.

Bach’s first Leipzig performance of the cantata—possibly with a replacement for the last movement—was a part of the bicentennial celebration of Luther’s hymn. It first appeared in 1524, a particularly significant year for the Lutheran Reformation, in a collection printed in Wittenberg entitled Geystlichen gesangk Buchleyn, as well as in Erfurt under the title Enchiridion Oder eyn Handbüchlein. The oldest version of the hymn appears beneath the heading “Christ ist erstanden, gebessert” (Christ is arisen, improved). In fact, both text and melody go back to the pre-Reformation era, in particular to the sequence traced to the eleventh century, Victimae paschali laudes, to the Gregorian Easter Alleluia Christus resurgens ex mortuis, and to the twelfth-century Easter hymn Christ ist erstanden.3 However, these are not the only sources that nourish the vivid scenario of Luther’s hymn. Essential to Luther’s language are, in addition, direct reference to the Bible, on the one hand, and the centuries-old tradition of Easter plays with their transfer of Passion and resurrection to the everyday language of the waning Middle Ages, on the other.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition transposes this textual and liturgical connection into the musical realm by clothing the cantata in the regalia of the chorale partita. In keeping to the same key in all movements and in its succession of different movement characters, the chorale partita is the coun- terpart of the secular variation suite. At the time of the cantata’s presumed origin, the chorale partita was already in its final stages. It remains debatable whether the young Bach was aware of this historical development when he was occupied with Luther’s chorale. If the work was indeed an audition piece, he may have decided that he could place many facets of his compositional art on display and in particular make clear that the close connection between strophic content and musical form was of paramount concern to him.

The palette of models on display ranges from ostinato variation, to trio texture with lively obbligato parts, to canon and alternatim forms, to motet with fugal treatment of individual chorale lines.4 Viewed superficially, the results of his compositional effort resemble organ writing. But in contrast to the instrumental chorale partita, which can pursue purely musical objectives, the cantata in the form of a chorale partita is strictly bound by the sequence of strophes and their contents. The manner in which the composer met this challenge demonstrates how absorbed the young Bach was in mastering complicated, multidimensional tasks. The quality of the result is shown simply by the fact that the composer himself, after nearly two decades, felt it appropriate to include the work almost without change in the ambitious project of the chorale cantata annual cycle.

Footnotes

  1. “Er führt größtentheils seine eigenen Kompositionen in den Kirchen auf. Un dum mehrere Abwechslung willen setzte er seit 1766 Chorale ganz durch, in der Manierdes berühmten Kuhnau, nach Gelegenheit des Inhalts der Strophen in Rezitative, Arien, Duette und Chöre, und führte sie mit unter mit vielem Beifalle auf, statt der gewöhnlichen Kirchencantaten.”—Trans.↵
  2. “Er war wo nicht der Anfänger, doch der glücklicher Fortsetzer der Manier von Kirchenkantaten, zu welchen ein Choral als Text, jede Strophe nach ihrem Inhalte, ganz durchgearbeitet wird. Ich besitze auf diese Weise den Choral ‘Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten’ von ihm.”—Trans.↵
  3. In medieval music, a sequence was a type of addition to the official liturgical chant of the Latin church. It was generally sung after the Alleluia.—Trans.↵
  4. The alternatim is the practice of two or more contrasting forces taking turns in performing music for a liturgical text, each taking only one verse or short section at a time. NHDM, s.v. “Alternatim,” by Bruce Gustafson.—Trans.↵

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