The structure of the story is defined to a large extent by the particular requirements of the church calendar for Christmas 1734/35. Bach abandoned his usual practice when writing church cantatas of basing the content upon the Gospel reading for that day in order to achieve a coherent narrative structure. Were he to have followed the calendar, the story would have unfolded as follows:
1. Birth and Annunciation to the Shepherds 2. The Adoration of the Shepherds
3. Prologue to the Gospel of John 4. Circumcision and Naming of Jesus 5. The Flight into Egypt
6. The Coming and Adoration of the Magi
This would have resulted in the Holy Family fleeing before the Magi had arrived, which was unsuitable for an oratorio evidently planned as a coherent whole. Bach removed the content for the Third Day of Christmas (December 27), John's Gospel, and split the story of the two groups of visitors—Shepherds and Magi—into two. This resulted in a more understandable exposition of the Christmas story:
1. The Birth
2. The Annunciation to the Shepherds 3. The Adoration of the Shepherds 4. The Circumcision and Naming of Jesus 5. The Journey of the Magi
6. The Adoration of the Magi
The fifth part finishes with the Flight into Egypt.
That Bach saw the six parts as comprising a greater, unified whole is evident both from the surviving printed text and from the structure of the music itself. The edition has not only a title—Weihnachtsoratorium—connecting together the six sections, but these sections are also numbered consecutively. As John Butt has mentioned,[1] this points, as in the Mass in B minor, to a unity beyond the performance constraints of the church year.
Performance
The oratorio was written for performance on six feast days of Christmas during the winter of 1734 and 1735. The original score also contains details of when each part was performed. It was incorporated within services of the two most important churches in Leipzig, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. As can be seen below, the work was only performed in its entirety at the St. Nicholas Church.
St. Nicholas Church St. Thomas Church
First performances:
• 25 December 1734: Part I – 'early in the morning' at St. Nicholas; 'in the afternoon' at St. Thomas • 26 December 1734: Part II – morning at St. Thomas; afternoon at St. Nicholas
• 27 December 1734: Part III – morning at St. Nicholas
• 1 January 1735: Part IV – morning at St. Thomas; afternoon at St. Nicholas • 2 January 1735: Part V – morning at St Nicholas
Christmas Oratorio 143
Music
Bach expresses the unity of the whole work within the music itself, in part through his use of key signatures. Parts I and III are written in the keys of D major, part II in its subdominant key G major. Parts I and III are similarly scored for exuberant trumpets, while the Pastoral Part II (referring to the Shepherds) is, by contrast, scored for woodwind instruments and does not include an opening chorus. Part IV is written in F major (the relative key to D minor) and marks the furthest musical point away from the oratorio's opening key, scored for horns. Bach then embarks upon a journey back to the opening key, via the dominant A major of Part V to the jubilant re-assertion of D major in the final part, lending an overall arc to the piece. To reinforce this connection, between the beginning and the end of the work, Bach re-uses the chorale melody of Part I's Wie soll ich dich empfangen? in the final chorus of Part VI, Nun
seid ihr wohl gerochen; this choral melody is the same as of O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, which Bach used five
times in his St Matthew Passion.
The music represents a particularly sophisticated expression of the parody technique, by which existing music is adapted to a new purpose. Bach took the majority of the choruses and arias from works which had been written some time earlier. Most of this music was 'secular', that is written in praise of royalty or notable local figures, outside the tradition of performance within the church.
These secular cantatas which provide the basis for the Christmas Oratorio, are: • BWV 213 – Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen (Hercules at the Crossroads)
• Performed on 5 September 1733 for the eleventh birthday of Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony. • BWV 214 – Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten!
• Performed on 8 December 1733 for the birthday of Maria Josepha, Queen of Poland and Electress of Saxony. • BWV 215 – Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen
• Performed on 5 October 1734 for the coronation of the Elector of Saxony August III as King of Poland. In addition to these sources, the sixth cantata is thought to have been taken almost entirely from a now-lost church cantata, BWV 248a. The trio aria in Part V Ach, wenn wird die Zeit erscheinen? is believed to be from a similarly lost source, and the chorus from the same section Wo ist der neugeborne König is from the 1731 St Mark Passion (BWV 247).[2]
Instrumentation
The scoring below[1] refers to parts, rather than necessarily to individual players. Adherents of theories specifying small numbers of performers (even to 'One Voice Per Part') may however choose to use numbers approaching one instrument per named part.
Part I
3 trumpets, timpani, 2 transverse flutes, 2 oboes, 2 oboes d'amore, 2 violins, viola, continuo group[3][4]
Part II
2 flutes, 2 oboes d'amore, 2 oboes da caccia, 2 violins, viola, continuo Part III
3 trumpets, timpani, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 oboes d'amore, 2 violins, viola, continuo Part IV
2 horns, 2 oboes, 2 violins, viola, continuo Part V
2 oboes d'amore, 2 violins, viola, continuo Part VI
Christmas Oratorio 144 3 trumpets, timpani, 2 oboes, 2 oboes d'amore, 2 violins, viola, continuo
Notes
[1] Sleeve notes to Philip Pickett's recording of the Christmas Oratorio (Decca, 458 838, 1997)
[2] Werner Breig, sleeve notes to John Eliot Gardiner's recording of the Christmas Oratorio (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, 4232322, 1987) [3] The continuo part is open to interpretation in matters of scoring. Examples: for his 1973 recording, Nikolaus Harnoncourt employed bassoon,
violoncello, violone (double bass) and organDas Alte Werk (Warner), 2564698540 (1973, re-released 2008); Peter Schreier (1987) used violoncello, double bass, bassoon, organ and harpsichordDecca (Philips), 4759155 (1987, re-released 2007); René Jacobs in 1997 chose violoncello, double bass, lute, bassoon, organ and harpsichordHarmonia Mundi, HMX 2901630.31 (1997, re-released 2004); and Jos van Veldhoven in 2003 opted for violoncello, double bass, bassoon, organ, harpsichord and theorbo.Channel Classics Records, CCS SA 20103 (2003)
[4] The different types of oboes referred to above are mostly called for at different points in each section. However, numbers 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19 and 21 in Part II call for 2 oboes d'amore and 2 oboes da caccia. This scoring was intended to symbolise the shepherds who are the subject of the second part. It is a reference to the pastoral music tradition of shepherds playing shawm-like instruments at Christmas. Similarly, the pastoral sinfony in Handel's Messiah (1741) is known as the 'Pifa' after the Italian piffero or piffaro, similar to the shawm and an ancestor of the oboe.
Text
The ease with which the new text fits the existing music is one of the indications of how successful a parody the
Christmas Oratorio is of its sources. Musicologist Alfred Dürr[1] and others, such as Christoph Wolff[2] have
suggested that Bach's sometime collaborator Picander (the pen name of Christian Friedrich Henrici) wrote the new text, working closely with Bach to ensure a perfect fit with the re-used music. It may have even been the case that the Christmas Oratorio was already planned when Bach wrote the secular cantatas BWV 213, 214 and 215, given that the original works were written fairly close to the oratorio and the seamless way with which the new words fit the existing music.[2]
Nevertheless, on two occasions Bach abandoned the original plan and was compelled to write new music for the
Christmas Oratorio. The alto aria in Part III, Schließe, mein Herze was originally to have been set to the music for
the aria Durch die von Eifer entflammten Waffen from BWV 215. On this occasion, however, the parody technique proved to be unsuccessful and Bach composed the aria afresh. Instead, he used the model from BWV 215 for the bass aria Erleucht' auch meine finstre Sinnnen in Part V. Similarly, the opening chorus to Part V, Ehre sei dir Gott! was almost certainly intended to be set to the music of the chorus Lust der Völker, Lust der Deinen from BWV 213, given the close correspondence between the texts of the two pieces. The third major new piece of writing (with the notable exception of the recitatives), the sublime pastoral Sinfonia which opens Part II, was composed from scratch for the new work.
In addition to the new compositions listed above, special mention must go to the recitatives, which knit together the oratorio into a coherent whole. In particular, Bach made particularly effective use of recitative when combining it with chorales in no. 7 of part I (Er ist auf Erden kommen arm) and even more ingeniously in the recitatives nos. 38 and 40 which frame the "Echo Aria" (Flößt, mein Heiland), no. 39 in part IV.