Easter Oratorio

Background In 1723, Bach was appointed Thomaskantor (director of church music) in Leipzig, where he was responsible for the music at four churches, and for the training and education of boys singing in the Thomanerchor. He took office in the middle of the liturgical year, on the first Sunday after Trinity, 30 May 1723. Bach decided to compose cantatas for almost all liturgical events for the first twelve months in office; they became his first cantata cycle. The occasions were Sundays, except for the silent times of Advent (before Christmas) and Lent (before Easter), and additional feast days; several feasts of saints were observed in Leipzig, and each of the high holidays was celebrated three days in a row. The Holy Week and Easter were thus the busiest times. For Good Friday of 1724 Bach composed the St John Passion, an extended dramatic sacred oratorio. For Easter that year, he performed on Sunday , which he had composed much earlier in his career, and on the following two days Easter cantatas that he could derive from congratulatory cantatas for the court of Köthen by just underlaying the music with new text, , from the serenata and , from , a cantata to celebrate the New Year's Day of 1719 in Köthen. The following year, Bach went on to write a second cantata cycle, now basing each on a Lutheran hymn. Christoph Wolff described the endeavour as "a most promising project of great homogeneity, whose scope he was able to define himself". Bach kept the format until Palm Sunday of 1725, which fell on the Feast of the Annunciation that year and therefore required a cantata. He composed and performed for the occasion just one week before the Easter music. Five days later, on Good Friday, he performed the second revised version of the St John Passion. Secular model, BWV 249.1 In 1725, approaching his second Easter in office, Bach composed a congratulatory cantata, , more commonly known as the Shepherd Cantata, for the 43rd birthday of his patron, Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. During Lent, he had the free time to write an extended festive composition, reconnecting to the court. The librettist of the Shepherd Cantata was Picander, in his first documented collaboration with Bach. It seems likely that Bach had intended from the start to use most of the music for an Easter cantata as well, and that Picander also wrote the text for that purpose. Picander would write in 1728 about their collaboration: "I flatter myself that the lack of poetic charm may be compensated for by the loveliness of the music of our incomparable Kapellmeister Bach, and that these songs may be sung in the main churches of our pious Leipzig." They also collaborated on the 1727 St Matthew Passion, described by Wolff as Picander's "finest piece of sacred poetry", and several sacred and secular cantatas. Picander wrote the text for a in which two shepherds and two shepherdesses interact. The names of the men, Menalcas and Damoetas, appear in the Idylls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, while the names of the women, Doris and Sylvia, are found in works from the 17th century. Picander published the libretto in 1727, under the title ('Table music for His Serene Highness of Weissenfels's birthday on 23 February 1725'), which records the circumstances of its performance; scholars suggest that it happened, possibly at the Duke's palace, Schloss Neu-Augustusburg as a musical pastoral play in costumes at a banquet. Easter cantata, BWV 249.3 (1725) Bach used the music of the Shepherd Cantata in its exact sequence, composing only new recitatives, for a church cantata for Easter Sunday the same year; its title was first ('Come, go and hurry'), but it was soon changed to ('Come, flee and hurry'). The festive nature of the original material was well suited to the celebration of Easter. Several scholars note that the work can be seen as an Easter play; Alfred Dürr pointed out that this follows a custom of "scenic representation of the Easter story". It seems likely that Picander, who wrote the libretto for the Shepherd Cantata, also wrote the text for the Easter cantata. Both texts share the same metrical pattern in order to use the arias and the chorus without modifications. The librettist possibly based his work on an Easter narrative that the theologian Johannes Bugenhagen had compiled from the four Gospels. The librettist created text for dialogues and arias involving four Biblical characters who were assigned to the four voice parts: the disciples Simon (tenor) and John (bass) who appear in the first duet hurrying to Jesus's tomb and finding it empty, and who meet there Mary Magdalene (alto) and Mary Jacobe (soprano). The Bach scholar Hans-Joachim Schulze wrote: "On the whole, the unidentified librettist deserves every recognition for his work to appropriately transform the arias and ensembles of the secular original into the subject matter of Easter with verbal skill and fealty to content." While the Shepherd Cantata was opened by one instrumental movement, the Easter cantata is unusually opened by two (other) instrumental movements that are probably taken from a concerto of the Köthen period. The work is, like the Shepherd Cantata, a musical drama and features no chorales, which is rare in Bach's liturgical music. The cantata was first performed on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1725. Bach led the Thomanerchor, with boys singing the women's roles; they gave two performances, one in the morning service at the Nikolaikirche where Salomon Deyling gave the sermon, and the other in a vespers service at the Thomaskirche, with a sermon by Johann Gottlob Carpzov. Markus Rathey points out that this music was Bach's first and only for Easter that matched the dramatic approach of the Passions. Perhaps because of the lack of chorales and original Bible text in the new cantata, the early Easter cantata was also performed in these services. Oratorio, BWV 249.4 (1738) In 1733, the death of Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony, caused an official year of mourning in the electorate; performances of festive music such as cantatas were not permitted, which interrupted Bach's regular work and gave him time to plan larger musical forms. Bach composed then the Missa for the Dresden court, mostly compiled in parody style from earlier compositions. In 1734, he wrote the Christmas Oratorio, performed in six church services around Christmas and based mainly on congratulatory cantatas. Bach chose two other church events of a celebratory nature, Easter and the Feast of the Ascension, as occasions for an oratorio to be performed in the respective church services. The Ascension Oratorio was probably first performed on Ascension Day of 1738. For Easter Sunday, 6 April 1738, Bach needed no new composition but used the 1725 Easter cantata with very minor changes. Ulrich Leisinger, who prepared a critical edition for the publisher Carus, mentioned four of them in his preface: • the insertion of a measure of music in the first movement • the assignment of a flauto traverso as the solo instrument in the second movement • the use of a different underlay of the text in the middle section of the alto aria and the addition of five measures at its end for better proportion • the assignment of an oboe d'amore instead of an oboe as the obbligato instrument in this aria. Bach wrote an autograph score of the music and labelled the work an oratorio, titling it . In this version, Bach omitted the assignment of characters to the music and noted only the voice parts. Leisinger notes that the score is unusually rich in expression marking. Derived from the secular musical drama, the Easter Oratorio lacks an Evangelist narrator, Biblical texts, and chorales, unlike Bach's other oratorios. Its early performance history suggests that Bach enjoyed the work. Revised oratorio, BWV 249.5 (1740s) Between 1743 and 1746, Bach revised the oratorio once more: he expanded the third movement from a duet into a four-part chorus, at least in the outer sections, and he changed the text underlay in the middle section of the soprano aria. This final version is the one usually performed and recorded. Conductors have to decide if the duet in the middle section of the third movement is sung by two soloists or the choir sections. Bach performed the Easter Oratorio for the last time in 1749, the year before his death; this performance, which took place on 6 April, again followed a performance of the St John Passion on Good Friday. Wolff notes that handwritten notes in the score at the time are among the last indications of performances Bach directed. == Music ==