Product Code Database
A chorale is the name of several related originating in the music genre of the Lutheran chorale:
The chorale originated when Martin Luther translated sacred songs into the vernacular language (German), contrary to the established practice of church music near the end of the first quarter of the 16th century. The first hymnals according to Luther's new method were published in 1524. Luther and his followers not only wrote metrical hymn lyrics, but also composed metrical musical settings for these texts. This music was partially based on established melodies of church hymns and known secular songs. In the 17th century the repertoire was enriched with more choir and pipe organ settings of the chorale tunes. By the end of the century a four-part setting for SATB voices had become the standard for the choral settings, while the congregational singing of chorales was tending towards monody with an instrumental accompaniment. The prolific creation of new Lutheran chorale tunes ended around that time.
The cantata genre, originally consisting only of recitatives and , was introduced into Lutheran church services in the early 18th century. The format was soon expanded with choral movements in the form of four-part chorales. Composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel often placed these chorales as the concluding movement of their church compositions. The chorale finale was emulated in more secular genres such as Romantic music 19th-century symphonies. Other composers of that era, such as Franck, expanded the repertoire of the organ chorale, also emulating what late Baroque music composers such as Bach had produced more than a century before. Entirely new chorale compositions became rare after the Romantic era, but by that time the four-part harmonization technique, as exemplified in four-part chorales, had become part of the canon of Western music.
Johann Pachelbel's Erster Theil etlicher Choräle, a set of organ chorales, was published in the last decade of the 17th century. Johann Sebastian Bach's earliest extant compositions, works for organ which he possibly wrote before his fifteenth birthday, include the chorales BWV 700, 724, 1091, 1094, 1097, 1112, 1113 and 1119.Works , , , , , , and at Bach Digital website
Each of the Meiningen cantata librettos contained a single chorale-based movement, on which it ended. Composers of the first half of the 18th century, such as Bach, Stölzel and Georg Philipp Telemann, often closed a cantata with a four-part chorale setting, whether or not the libretto of the cantata already contained verses of a Lutheran hymn. Bach set several of the Meiningen librettos in 1726, and Stölzel expanded the librettos of Benjamin Schmolck's Saitenspiel cycle with a closing chorale for each half cantata, when he set that cycle in the early 1720s. Two of such closing chorales by Telemann inadvertently ended up in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV): the fifth movements of the cantatas BWV 218 and 219, in the catalogue of Telemann's vocal works adopted as Nos. 1:634/5 and 1:1328/5 respectively. These closing chorales almost always conformed to these formal characteristics:
Vocal church music of this period also contained other types of chorale settings, the general format of which is indicated as chorale fantasia: one voice, not necessarily the voice with the highest pitch, carries the chorale tune, with the other voices rather counterpoint than homorhythmic, often with other melodies than the chorale tune, and instrumental interludes between the singing. For instance, the four cantatas with which Bach opened his second cantata cycle each start with a choral movement in chorale fantasia format, where the chorale tune is respectively sung by the soprano (BWV 20, 11 June 1724), alto (BWV 2, 18 June 1724), tenor (BWV 7, 24 June 1724) and bass (BWV 135, 25 June 1724) voices. Chorale fantasia settings are not necessarily choral movements: for instance, the fifth movement of the cantata BWV 10 is a duet for alto and tenor voices in that format. Quarter of a century after Bach had composed that duet, he published it in an arrangement for organ, as fourth of the Schübler Chorales, showing that the chorale fantasia format adapts itself very well to purely instrumental genres such as the chorale prelude for organ. Around 200 of Bach's chorale preludes are extant, many of them in the chorale fantasia format (others are fugues, or homorhythmic settings).
In the first half of the 18th century, chorales also appear in Hausmusik (music performance in family circle), e.g. BWV 299 in Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, and/or are used for didactical purposes, e.g. BWV 691 in the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
Most of Bach's four-part chorales, around 370 of them, were published for the first time between 1765 and 1787: these were the only works by the composer published between The Art of Fugue (1751) and the 50th anniversary of the composer's death in 1800. In the late 18th century symphony could include a chorale movement: for instance the third movement of Joseph Martin Kraus's 1792 Symphonie funèbre is a chorale on (the Swedish version of) "Nun lasst uns den Leib begraben".
In the first half of the 19th century, chorale-like symphony finales were also composed by Louis Spohr ("Begrabt den Leib in seiner Gruft" concludes his 1832 Fourth Symphony, named Die Weihe der Töne), Niels Gade (Second Symphony, 1843) and others. Otto Nicolai wrote on "Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her" ( Christmas Overture, 1833) and on ""Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"" ( Ecclesiastical Festival Overture, 1844). Giacomo Meyerbeer set "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" to a chorale melody of his own invention in his 1849 opera Le prophète. The chorale tune was the basis for Franz Liszt's organ composition Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" (1850).
Joachim Raff included Luther's "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" in his Overture opus number 127 (1854, revised 1865) and had his Fifth Symphony ( Lenore, Op. 177, 1872) end on a chorale. The Finale of Camille Saint-Saëns's 1855 First Symphony contains a homorhythmic chorale. One of the themes in the Finale of his 1886 Third Symphony, that is the theme that was adopted in the 1978 "If I Had Words" song, is a chorale. Anton Bruckner's 1873 Third Symphony and his 1876 Fifth Symphony both end on a chorale played by . Bruckner also used the chorale as a compositional device in Two Aequali. Further, he included chorales in masses and motets (e.g. Dir, Herr, dir will ich mich ergeben, In jener letzten der Nächte), and in part 7 of his festive cantata Preiset den Herrn. In his setting of Psalm 22 and in the Finale of his Fifth Symphony he used a chorale in contrast to and combination with a fugue.Carragan, William. n.d. " Bruckner's Symphony No. 5: Timing Analysis " One of the themes in the Finale of Johannes Brahms's First Symphony (1876) is a chorale.
In 1881 Sergei Taneyev described chorale harmonisations, such as those ending Bach's cantatas, rather as a necessary evil: inartistic, but unavoidable, even in Russian church music.Jopi Harri. St. Petersburg Court Chant and the Tradition of Eastern Slavic Church Singing. Finland: University of Turku (2011), p. 23–24 From the 1880s Ferruccio Busoni was adopting chorales in his instrumental compositions, often adapted from or inspired by models by Johann Sebastian Bach: for example BV 186 (), an introduction and fugue on "Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen", No. 3 of Bach's St Matthew Passion. In 1897 he transcribed Liszt's Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" for piano. César Franck emulated the chorale in compositions for piano ( Prélude, Choral et Fugue, 1884) and for organ ( , 1890). Johannes Zahn published an index and classification of all known Evangelicalism hymn tunes in six volumes from 1889 to 1893.
A chorale-like theme appears throughout the last movement of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony (1896):
Busoni continued to compose Bach-inspired chorales in the 20th century, for instance including chorale subsections in his Fantasia contrappuntistica (1910s). Sports et divertissements, written by Erik Satie in 1914, opens with "Choral inappétissant" (unsavoury chorale), in which the composer put, according to his preface, everything he knew about tedium, and which he dedicated to all who disliked him. As with much of Satie's music, it was written down without metre.
Igor Stravinsky included chorales in some of his compositions: among others, a "Little Chorale" and a "Great Chorale" in his L'Histoire du soldat (1918) and a chorale concluding his Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947). "By the leeks of Babylon" is a chorale in The Seasonings, an oratorio which appeared on , a 1966 P. D. Q. Bach album. Professor Peter Schickele* – An Hysteric Return P.D.Q. Bach At Carnegie Hall at Discogs. Chorales appear in Olivier Messiaen's music, for instance in (1986–1988) and La ville d'en haut (1989), two late .
Stand-alone orchestral chorales were adapted from works by Johann Sebastian Bach: for instance Leopold Stokowski orchestrated, among other similar pieces, the sacred song BWV 478 and the fourth movement of the cantata BWV 4 as chorales Komm, süsser Tod (recorded 1933) and Jesus Christus, Gottes Sohn (recorded 1937) respectively. Leopold Stokowski – Philadelphia Orchestra: Chronological Discography of Electrical Recordings 1925–1940 , stokowski.org Recordings of all of Bach's chorales—vocal as well as instrumental—appeared in the three complete works box sets that were issued around the 250th anniversary of the composer's death in 2000. "Bach Edition" , musicweb-international.com, 1 December 2001Teldec's 1999 Bach 2000 Box set, Limited Edition , amazon.com Bach-Edition: The Complete Works (172 CDs & CDR) at the Hänssler Classic website:
Collections, e.g. Bach's four-part chorale editions
Colla parte accompaniment, e.g. closing chorales of Bach-cantatas
Originally Choralbearbeitung, i.e. setting of a pre-existing chorale melody
Not based on pre-existing hymn tunes, e.g. César Franck's Trois chorals
|
|
