List of Chorale Harmonisations By Johann Sebastian Bach - History

History

The first record of the existence and sale of groups of collected chorale harmonizations and chorale melodies with figured bass extracted from larger works by J.S. Bach is from 1764, fourteen years after Bach's death. In that year the firm Breitkopf und Sohn announced for sale manuscript copies of 150 chorale harmonizations and 240 chorale melodies with figured bass by J.S. Bach.

C.P.E. Bach published with Breitkopf from 1784 to 1787 a four volume collection of J.S. Bach's chorales, ostensibly 371 in number, but in fact 348. This collection was republished in 1804 ("neue Auflage"), in 1831 ("dritte Auflage", by Breitkopf & Härtel, preface by C. F. Becker), in 1885 ("vierte Auflage", edited by C. F. Becker) and in 1897 (edited by E. Naumann). About half of the chorale harmonizations in this collection have their origin in other extant works by Bach; the other half, extracted from works by Bach which are now lost, is presented in the table below, although an origin can now be assigned to six of them.

Prior to this publication, several other collections had been published, starting with 100 chorales in 1765 by F.W. Birnstiel in Berlin, started by F.W. Marpurg and completed, edited and supplied with a preface and supplemented with a list of errors by C.P.E. Bach. A second volume of 100 was issued by the same publisher in 1769, edited by J.F. Agricola, which was heavily criticised as being full of mistakes by C.P.E. Bach in Hamburg in an article in the Staats- und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyeschen Correspondenten on May 30, 1769, where he also claimed that some of the chorale harmonizations included in the volume had not been composed by his father. In 1777 Johann Kirnberger started an active letter campaign to induce Breitkopf to publish a "complete" (sic) set of chorale harmonisations. Kirnberger's letters emphasize his motivation to have the chorales printed in order to preserve them for the benefit of future generations. The manuscript to be used once belonged to C.P.E. Bach, who sold it through Kirnberger to Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia (for twelve louis d'or). It is presumed that this manuscript contained neither the text of the chorales nor any reference to the larger works from which the harmonizations had been taken. The manuscript's harmonizations extracted only the vocal parts and ignored the instrumental parts and the continuo, even though all of Bach's chorale settings included both instrumental parts and continuo. The instrumental parts were either independant, so called obbligato instrumental parts, or mostly doubled the vocal parts sometimes separating from it for a very few beats, and the continuo had its bass mostly double the vocal bass at the lower octave, but could also separate from it for a very few beats. (In some cases Riemenscheider's restores some information about obbligato instrumental parts when the larger work is extant, e.g. its no. 270 from cantata BWV 161, etc. or about the continuo bass line if this does not exactly coincide with the vocal bass, e.g. its no. 29 from cantata BWV 32, its no. 35 from Weihnachts-Oratorium BWV 248, etc.) Finally in some cases, for reasons unknown, whoever extracted the chorale from the larger work, changed the key of the setting. (Riemenschneider's does not restore the original key even if the larger work is extant but instead keeps the chorale in the key in which it is found in the Breitfkopf collection, e.g. its no. 22, in E-flat major comes from cantata BWV 180 where it is in F major). After Kirnberger died in 1783, C.P.E. Bach became Breitkopfs's editor for these chorales, which he then published in four parts: 1784: nos. 1–96, 1785: nos. 97–194, 1786: 195–283, 1787: 283–370 (the number 283 was mistakenly used for two different chorales which became 283a and 283b; this numbering error was corrected from the 1831 dritte Auflage on). This publication went through four more editions and countless reprintings until 1897 (see above). Additionally, several other editions using the original C-clef or different texts were also published. The Bach Gesellschaft published the original 371 chorales from the C.P.E. Bach edition in volume 39 of their Complete Works in 1892. The most significant recent publication is Dr. Charles Sanford Terry's J.S. Bach's Four-Part Chorales, Oxford University Press 1929 (reprinted 1964, with a foreword by Walter Emery), which contains 405 harmonised chorales and 95 melodies with figured bass. The most widely known collection is Albert Riemenschneider's 371 (1941).

Bach's chorale harmonizations are exclusively (as far as vocal parts are concerned) in 4 parts, but Riemenschneider's and Terry's collections contain one 5-part SSATB choral harmonization (Welt, ade! ich bin dein müde, Riemenscheider no. 150, Terry no. 365), not actually by Bach, but used by Bach as the concluding chorale to cantata Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende? BWV 27.

In the case of the chorales, the loss of musical material in manuscript from Bach's death to the first printings may have been substantial. Not only are many works the chorales were extracted from no longer extant but there is no way of knowing how much of all the harmonizations that were once compiled the current collections include. For example there is no way of knowing how many of the 150 harmonizations first proposed for sale in 1764 also appear in Princess Anna Amalia's manuscript which ultimately forms the basis of the Breitkopf edition. As to the chorale melodies with figured bass, current collections include less than one hundred of them whereas those proposed for sale in 1764 numbered 240.

The table below provides a cross reference of those compilations with the works in this range of BWV numbers, although the available compilations also contain many other chorales not in this range.