Christmas music from Luther to Bach

“Music played an important role in Lutheran worship from the beginning. In his own efforts to get sacred music to the people, Martin Luther adapted and translated into German some of the old Catholic hymns and chants, creating a new kind of congregational song called a ‘chorale’ — a theologically sound text paired with a simple melody sung by the entire congregation in unison, or featured in a multi-voice setting for choir or congregation. Chorale melodies could be drawn from the plainchant of the Catholic Church, from non-liturgical sacred song, or from vernacular folk songs. Two of Luther’s earliest and best-known Christmas chorales were the Advent hymn ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ (‘Savior of the Nations, Come’), a rhymed adaptation of the venerable Ambrosian hymn Veni redemptor Gentium, and ‘Christum wir sollen loben schon’ (‘We Should Praise Christ Beautifully’), based on the fifth-century Christmas hymn by Sedulius, A solis ortus cardine. Like many chorales, both of these went on to have an illustrious life in settings for various vocal and instrumental groups, by composers from Luther’s friend Thomas Walter to J. S. Bach and beyond.

“Beyond his many four-part chorales, organ preludes, and multi-movement Christmas cantatas, Bach’s most important contribution to Christmas music is his Weihnachts-Oratorium, or Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248), a massive work written for performance in church across six days of the Christmas season of 1734: Part I, for Christmas Day, on the birth of Jesus; Part II, for 26 December, on the angels’ message to the shepherds; Part III, for 27 December, on the adoration of the shepherds; Part IV, for New Year’s Day, on the circumcision and naming of Jesus; Part 5, for the first Sunday after the New Year, on the journey of the Magi; and Part 6, for Epiphany (6 January), on the adoration of the Magi. Markus Rathey has shown how this arrangement offered churchgoers in Leipzig an almost two-week reflection on the dramatic events of the biblical narrative, modelling and encouraging the ‘internalization of religiosity’ emphasized by Lutheran officials who opposed the exterior celebrations, including masked plays and door-to-door pageantry, that had marked German Christmastides past. Indeed, covering the same narratives as many of the special chants, tropes, and dramas performed over these same days in the medieval Church, Bach’s oratorio, like his cantatas, emphasized not only the standard teachings regarding the first and second comings of Christ but, more particularly, the mandate to welcome Christ into one’s own heart in the here and now, a concept common both to medieval mysticism and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century piety. (Isaac Watts’s memorable line, ‘Let evry heart prepare him room’, from ‘Joy to the World’ [1719] comes to mind.) In the closing hymn-chorale of Part I, Ach mein herzliebes Jesulein (from the thirteenth stanza of Luther’s Christmas chorale Vom Himmel hoch), the believer invites baby Jesus to make his cradle in the believer’s heart. The alto aria near the end of Part III, Schließe, mein Herze — the only newly composed aria in the whole work — encourages the believer’s heart to hold this blessed wonder (of Jesus’s Incarnation) fast within its faith. This emphasis on the interior emotions, not only of joy, but of wonder, trust, comfort, gratitude, deep love, and desire, and on the heart as the place for Christmas celebration, would endure through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

— from Tova Leigh-Choate, “Carols and Music to 1900,” in Timothy Larsen, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (Oxford University Press, 2020)