In the early years Bach was obliged to produce a significant amount of new music for the church, including one new sacred cantata a week for performance at the Sunday morning service at St Thomas’s.  According to his son, C.P.E. Bach, he wrote five cantatas for each Sunday and Saint’s Day throughout the church year, which, together with some thirty-eight secular cantatas written for the birthday celebrations of various members of the nobility, and for civic occasions, would have brought the total to something over 330, although about a third of them have been lost. All of Bach’s major sacred choral works were written during the first ten years in this post. The St John Passion was written for Good Friday in 1724, Bach’s first Easter in Leipzig. The St Matthew Passion was written in 1727, the Magnificat in 1728, the St Mark Passion (which no longer survives) in 1731, the Mass in B Minor in 1733, the Christmas Oratorio in 1734, and finally the Easter Oratorio and Ascension Oratorios in 1735. It is frightening to think that, had the city council had their way in 1723, we would almost certainly have been denied these magnificent works, rich as they are in devotional music, drama, a sincerity of belief and transparent and beautiful settings of biblical and poetic texts. These works were composed to order as a direct consequence of Bach’s position in Leipzig, just as many of his earlier works, such as the Brandenburg concerti, numerous solo concerti, and harpsichord and organ music, had been written to satisfy the needs of various appointments and patronages. Composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries could not afford the luxury of writing for pleasure, as many of their Romantic successors would come to enjoy. They wrote music to order, for specific occasions, according to their circumstances, and in order to please those who held the purse strings.  

The Composition, Structure and First Performance of the Christmas Oratorio

Completed in the year in which Bach turned 50, the Christmas Oratorio was not so much composed as assembled, being a parody of a number of earlier works; and the term “oratorio” is something of a misnomer. (A parody occurs when existing musical material is taken and adapted for use – usually by changing the words.) An oratorio, traditionally, was a musical setting of a biblical story, told in the words of a librettist, and designed to be performed without costumes or scenery in a concert hall, theatre or church for the purposes of entertainment. The story is usually told through the medium of secco (dry) recitative, consisting of simple speech rhythms delivered by a solo singer and accompanied by simple and infrequent chords played by a keyboard instrument and a bass instrument, known collectively as basso continuo. The story is interrupted and enhanced by solo arias, duets and choruses. The arias and duets allow for reflection on the events of the plot and insight into the minds and hearts of the characters concerned, and the choruses provide context to the circumstances. The Christmas Oratorio differs from this established model in three fundamental ways. Firstly the work was written in six parts, to be performed liturgically, between the gospel and the sermon, at six different church services on six separate days. Secondly, Bach inserts a total of ten chorales, or Lutheran hymn tunes, written by the new generation of Protestant hymn writers and poets. The melodies of these would have been very familiar to the congregation. At the appropriate moment the congregation would have joined with the choir in the singing of these chorales as they are partly there to provide a liturgical opportunity for a communal response – another key element of the Lutheran doctrine. And thirdly, as in the St John and St Matthew Passions, Bach employs an Evangelist who delivers the story not in libretto form, but as the personification of the gospel writers themselves, using original biblical text, unabridged and unadulterated. 

The reason for the six part structure of the oratorio is quite simply that the Lutheran church regarded the entire Christmas season, from Christmas Day until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6^th, as a single celebration, and six important church services were held throughout the period to mark key events. The six parts are, in effect, six cantatas, and are structured as follows: