Bach Studies

Liturgy, Hymnology, and Theology

Robin A. Leaver, Daniel Zager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000343533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

This volume draws together a collection of Robin A. Leaver's essays on Bach's sacred music, exploring the religious aspects of this repertoire through consideration of three core themes: liturgy, hymnology, and theology. Rooted in a rich understanding of the historical sources, the book illuminates the varied ways in which Bach's sacred music was informed and shaped by the religious, ritual, and intellectual contexts of his time, placing these works in the wider history of Protestant church music during the Baroque era.

Including research from across a span of forty years, the chapters in this volume have been significantly revised and expanded for this publication, with several pieces appearing in English for the first time. Together, they offer an essential compendium of the work of a leading scholar of theological Bach studies.

Part I

Liturgy

1Bach’s cantatas and the liturgical year

There are many studies of the musical form and content of the German church cantata,¹ but not so many discussions of its liturgical context and purpose. However, without an appreciation of the liturgies within which the cantata was performed, together with its close connections with the Lutheran tradition of preaching, its musical form is likely to be misunderstood. The cantata was heard within two primary liturgical environments: the seasons and Sundays of the liturgical year, explored here in this chapter; and the specific liturgical forms of weekly worship that are discussed in Chapter 2.

The liturgical year

Lutheran liturgical worship, derived from earlier Catholic tradition, was an annual cycle of Sundays and specific celebrations. Its twofold structure, each covering approximately six months, dealt first with the life and work of Christ—birth, ministry, death, resurrection, ascension—and, in the second half-year, explored in detail the life and work of the Christian:

Sundays before Christmas

• Advent 1–4

Christmas (Weihnacht)

• Christmas Day (Weihnachtstag—25 December and the two days following)
• Sunday after Christmas
• New Year’s Day (Neujahr)/Circumcision (Beschneidung Christi)
• Sunday after New Year

Epiphany (Epiphanius) = 6 January

• Sundays after Epiphany (The length of the Epiphany season in any year is variable, depending on the date of Easter).

Pre-Lent

• Septuagesima—third Sunday before Lent
• Sexagesima—second Sunday before Lent
• Estomihi²—Sunday before Lent

Lent

• Invocavit—first Sunday in Lent
• Reminiscere—second Sunday in Lent
• Oculi—third Sunday in Lent
• Laetare—fourth Sunday in Lent
• Judica—fifth Sunday in Lent

Holy Week

• Palm Sunday (Palmarum)
• Maundy Thursday (Gründonnerstag)
• Good Friday (Karfreitag)

Easter

• Easter Day (Ostertag) and the two days following
• Quasimodogeniti—first Sunday after Easter
• Misericordias Domini—second Sunday after Easter
• Jubilate—third Sunday after Easter
• Cantate—fourth Sunday after Easter
• Rogate—fifth Sunday after Easter

Ascension

• Ascension (Himmelfahrt)
• Sunday after Ascension (Exaudi)

Pentecost

• Pentecost (Pfingsttag) and the two days following

Trinity Season

• Trinity Sunday (Trinitatis)
• Sundays after Trinity—variable in number, to a maximum of 27, depending on the date of Easter.

Festival and Apostle Days³

• Purification (Fest Mariae Reinigung or Lichtmesse)—2 February
• Annunciation (Fest Mariae Verkundigung)—25 March
• Visitation (Fest Mariae Heimsuchung)—2 July
• St. John the Baptist’s Day (Fest Johannes des Taufers)—24 June
• St. Michael’s Day (Fest Michaelis)—29 September
• St. Stephen’s Day (St. Stephani)—26 December
• St. John’s Day (St. Johannis)—27 December

Other Days

• Inauguration of the town council (Ratswahl)—last Monday in August
• Reformation (Reformationsfest)—31 October

For each of these Sundays and celebrations specific biblical readings—Epistles and Gospels—were prescribed, readings that established the content of the day within one of the seasons of the church year.

Epistles and Gospels in Lutheran worship

The Roman lectionary, the list of passages mostly from the New Testament to be read in the Mass on all the Sundays and festivals of the church year, was an early development.⁴ Luther grew up with this one-year cycle of readings that became very familiar to him after he was ordained a priest and regularly celebrated Mass. In the Formula missae of 1523 he entertained the possibility that at some time in the future they might be revised,⁵ but three years later, in the Deutsche Messe, he endorsed their continued use.⁶ Thereafter the preexisting lectionary, with very few minor modifications, was universally adopted in the churches of Lutheran Germany. Since these readings, listed according to the Sundays and celebrations of the church year, are readily available in various sources, they are given here in biblical order (see Table 1.1). The reason is twofold. First, it enables the extent of the biblical material to be seen more clearly. Second, it facilitates the comparative study of Bach’s settings of the same or similar texts. The information has been established from contemporary sources, such as Bibles, New Testaments, and supplements containing the complete texts of the readings commonly appended to hymnals.⁷ The listings can also be found in various studies of Bach’s cantatas.⁸ But the primary source for the usage in Leipzig is the seventeenth-century Saxon Vollständiges Kirchen-Buch, an anthology of fundamental liturgical and theological documents, reprinted and reissued in every subsequent generation.⁹

Like his contemporaries, Bach had a lifelong association with these passages of scripture. He would have encountered them in his earliest years when attending worship with his family in the Georgenkirche, Eisenach, and then around his eighth birthday, when he entered the Quinta of the Latin school, his reading exercises included the study of the Epistles and Gospels of the church year in both Latin and German.¹⁰ Later, as organist in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, and especially as Konzertmeister in Weimar and Cantor in Leipzig, he was involved in providing specific music for the weekly services that centered on the Epistles and Gospels throughout the church year.

A significant difference between the Roman Mass and Luther’s reformed liturgical orders was his insistence that they should always include preaching. In the evangelical Mass he directed that the sermon should always be on the Gospel of the day, and although at first he advocated preaching consecutively through books of the Old Testament at Sunday Vespers,¹¹ it became customary for the preaching at this afternoon service to be on the Epistle of the day. Thereafter, the pattern was set for Lutheran Germany that on Sundays and primary celebrations of the church year the sermon in the morning evangelical Mass, the Hauptgottesdienst, would be an exposition of the Gospel of the day, and in the afternoon Vespers the preaching would be on the Epistle of the day. Over the next two hundred years or so, pastors would preach annual cycles of sermons on these biblical lections of the church year. Then sometime later many of them would edit and rework one of these annual cycles of sermons for publication as devotional reading. Over the years some preachers published more than one collection of their church-year sermons.

Table 1.1 Epistles and Gospel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Examples
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I Liturgy
• Part II Hymnology
• Part III Theology
• Bibliography
• Index