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In music, a chorale prelude or chorale setting is a short liturgical composition for pipe organ using a chorale tune as its basis. It was a predominant style of the German Baroque music era and reached its culmination in the works of J.S. Bach, who wrote 46 (with a 47th unfinished work) examples of the form in his Orgelbüchlein,Grout, Donald J. & Claude V. Palisca, A History of the Western Music 7th edition, Norton, London, 2006. along with multiple other works of the type in other collections.
Notable composers of chorale preludes during the Baroque period include Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Pachelbel and Johann Sebastian Bach. After this period, the form fell out of favour and virtually none were written by subsequent composers, such as Stamitz, J C Bach, Haydn and Mozart, until examples from the late 19th century, including works by Johannes Brahms and Max Reger.
Chorale preludes also appear in the works of Dieterich Buxtehude and Georg Böhm. Over 40 chorale preludes by Buxtehude have survived to this day.Snyder, Kerala J. Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck. New York: Schirmer Books, 1987.Sadie, Stanley and John Tyrell (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Johann Pachelbel's compositions are another example of the form, with many of his chorale preludes elaborating upon Protestant chorale melodies.Melville, Ruth. The Chorale Preludes of Johann Pachelbel. "Bulletin of the American Musicological Society, Nº3, pp.11–12. Apr., 1939.
The best-known composer of chorale preludes is Johann Sebastian Bach. His earliest extant compositions, works for organ which he possibly wrote before his fifteenth birthday, include the chorale preludes BWV 700, 724, 1091, 1094, 1097, 1112, 1113 and 1119.Works , , , , , , and at Bach Digital website
In Bach's early Orgelbüchlein (1708-1717), the chorale melody is usually in the upper part and the accompanying lower parts, while being highly elaborate in their harmonic and contrapuntal detail, the beginnings and endings of phrases generally coincide with those of the chorale. An example is "Jesu, meine Freude", where the chorale melody in the upper part is supported by a closely woven and harmonically subtle counterpoint in three parts:]]
Peter Williams (1972, p. 27) says of the Orgelbüchlein: “Each approach to Bach’s organ chorales – their beauty, their ‘symbolism’, their mastery- is rewarding.” Williams, P. Bach Organ Music. London, BBC. Williams continues (1972, p29) “One of the most remarkable features of most of the settings is that the accompaniment and the motifs from which it is composed are newly invented and are not related thematically to the melody.”
By contrast, in the prelude on Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645) from the set of six Schübler Chorales, taken from earlier cantata movements, the accompaniment is a free-flowing obbligato which both derives from the chorale melody, yet seems to float independently over it. "The achieving of a melody independent of the cantus firmus, though in principle it is familiar in obbligato arias, is here unusually complete."Williams, P. (1980, p.112) The Organ Music of J.S. Bach: Vol. II, Works based on Chorales. Cambridge University Press. Julian Mincham (2010) sees an asymmetry here that is possibly rooted in the chorale itself “with its slightly puzzling mixture of different phrase lengths”: Two melodic ideas from the chorale, labelled (a) and (b) above are embedded in the obbligato line: Mincham says that while “theme and chorale are not designed to begin and end together… they fit together perfectly. Get to know the chorale and ritornello melodies well and the apparently effortless ways in which they inter-relate will become obvious. The important point is that they seem not to fit; but they do.”
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