The Neumeister Collection is a compilation of 82
chorale preludes found in a manuscript copy produced by
Johann Gottfried Neumeister (1757–1840). When the
manuscript was rediscovered at the Yale University in
the 1980s it appeared to contain 31 previously unknown
early chorale settings by Johann Sebastian Bach, which
were added to the BWV catalogue as Nos. 1090–1120 and
published in 1985.
Very little is really known of J. S. Bach's life,
career, and music before he took up the appoi...(+)
The Neumeister Collection is a compilation of 82
chorale preludes found in a manuscript copy produced by
Johann Gottfried Neumeister (1757–1840). When the
manuscript was rediscovered at the Yale University in
the 1980s it appeared to contain 31 previously unknown
early chorale settings by Johann Sebastian Bach, which
were added to the BWV catalogue as Nos. 1090–1120 and
published in 1985.
Very little is really known of J. S. Bach's life,
career, and music before he took up the appointment as
chapel organist to the Duke of Weimar in 1708, and so
it came as a particularly delightful surprise when it
was announced, during the 1985 celebrations of the
tricentennial of Bach's birth, that some sixty or so
previously unknown Bach organ chorale preludes dating
from the composer's pre-Weimar years had been
discovered, buried and forgotten, in the depths of an
old Yale University manuscript collection. (German
organist and musicologist Wilhelm Krumbach and Bach
scholar Christoph Wolff, working independently but, as
fate would have it, towards a common goal, are
responsible for uncovering this Baroque goldmine.) Of
these sixty works in this so-called Arnstadt Organ Book
(so-called because the pieces are almost certainly the
product of J. S. Bach's time as a young organist in the
city of Arnstadt, from 1703 to 1707), about thirty-five
are part of the so-called Neumeister Collection, a
manuscript collection of organ music put together
during the late eighteenth century by a man named
Johann Gottfried Neumeister that contains, in addition
to the J. S. Bach works, many organ pieces composed by
two of Bach's ancestors--Johann Christoph and Johann
Michael Bach--and a spattering of works from Pachelbel
and a few lesser-known North German composers. It is
from this rich new vein of Bach music that the prelude
on the chorale "Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du
verbrochen," now officially given the BWV number 1093,
comes.
"Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du verbrochen" is one of
the simpler traditional Lutheran chorales (melody:1640,
text:1547), and Bach makes no changes to the cantus
firmus' four-phrase structure in crafting the prelude;
each of the phrases of the chorale save the final one
is of exactly the same length, and none is repeated.
Bach in fact provides virtually no ornamentation or
elaboration of the tune at all, and the general style
of writing is not of the flashy, extremely decorated
kind that conventional musicology tends to tell us is
Bach's earliest style. The four-voice part writing of
"Herzliebster Jesu," a very early work, is certainly
compact enough, and although the counterpoint of the
inner voices seems at times rather clumsy and the
harmonies defined by this loosely-imitative internal
counterpoint a little aimless when compared with the
composer's later triumphs, the chorale prelude is
without a doubt the kind of very high-minded,
non-virtuosic work of sacred music that one normally
associates with Bach's later years. It may well be that
we can see in this style something of Pachelbel's
influence on the young composer.
The prelude is notated for manuals only, though at the
time of its composition an organist very well might
decide to incorporate the pedals into the texture
anyway. The first phrase of the chorale tune (which is
given exclusively to the uppermost voice, mostly in
half notes) starts without any introduction, but upon
its conclusion, the other voices continue their
contrapuntal spinning for several bars before allowing
the top voice to continue with the chorale cantus
firmus; the four phrases of the cantus firmus are thus
isolated from one another in the manner common to organ
preludes of the day. Bach's sole alteration of the
actual chorale cantus firmus is to be found in the
final, very brief phrase, whose stepwise descending
gesture is filled in by chromatic passing notes that
receive a very colorful--and not at all "Baroque
sounding"--harmonic support by the other three voices
before finally settling into the quintessentially
Bachian plagal cadence.
Although originally written for Organ, I created this
Arrangement of the "Herzliebster Jesu, was hast du
verbrochen" (Ah, Holy Jesus) BWV 1093 for Wind Quartet
(Oboe, English Horn, French Horn & Bassoon).
PARTITION