Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 227
Jesu, meine Freude, 227, is a motet by Johann Sebastian Bach. The longest and most musically complex of Bach's motets, it is set in eleven movements for up to five voices. It is named after the Lutheran hymn "Jesu, meine Freude" with words by Johann Franck, first published in 1653. The motet contains the six stanzas of the hymn in its odd-numbered movements. The hymn tune by Johann Crüger appears in all of these movements in different styles of chorale settings. The text of the motet's even-numbered movements is taken from the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, a passage that influenced key Lutheran teachings. The hymn, written in the first person with a focus on an emotional bond with Jesus, forms a contrasting expansion of the doctrinal biblical text. Bach set both texts alternating with and complementing each other, in a structure of symmetries on different layers.
Bach's treatment of Crüger's melody ranges from four-part chorale harmonisations that begin and end the work, to a chorale fantasia and a free setting that quotes only motifs of the hymn tune. Four biblical verses are set in the style of a motet, two for five voices and two for three voices. The central movement is a five-part fugue. Bach used word painting to intensify the theological meaning of both hymn and Epistle texts.
Jesu, meine Freude is one of few works by Bach for five vocal parts. The dating of the work is uncertain. It was supposed to have been written for a specific funeral in Leipzig in July 1723, a few months after Bach had moved there, as a scholar proposed in 1912. Since the 1990s, musicologists have come to doubt this, because the order of that funeral was found and shows no reference to music by Bach. At least one of the eleven movements seems to have been composed before Bach's tenure in Leipzig. The Bach scholar Christoph Wolff suggested that Bach may have composed and compiled the motet for the education of his choir in both composition techniques and theology. Chorale settings from the motet are included in the Dietel manuscript from around 1735, providing a latest dating of the work.
Unique in its complex symmetrical structure juxtaposing hymn and biblical texts, and with movements featuring a variety of styles and vocal textures, the motet has been regarded as one of Bach's greatest achievements in the genre. In 1927, it became the first of his motets to be recorded. The work has often been performed and recorded with a range of approaches, from unaccompanied singing to historically informed performances taking into account that in Bach's time it was customary to support the voices by basso continuo and instruments doubling the vocal lines.
History
Background
In late 17th-century Protestant Thuringia, members of the Bach family from the generations before Johann Sebastian Bach wrote motets, of which several are preserved in the Altbachisches Archiv. In this context, motets are choral compositions, mostly with a number of independent voices exceeding that of a standard SATB choir, and with German text from the Luther Bible and Lutheran hymns, sometimes in combination. When a hymn was used, usually its chorale tune was integrated into the composition. Instrumental accompaniment was often limited to basso continuo and/or instruments playing colla parte. By the time Bach started to compose his motets in the 1710s or 1720s along the principles of these older compositions, the genre was already regarded as antiquated. According to Philipp Spitta, Bach's 19th-century biographer, Johann Michael Bach's motet, ABA I, 10, which contains a setting of the "Jesu, meine Freude" chorale, may have been on Johann Sebastian's mind when he composed his motet named after the chorale, in E minor like his relative's.In Bach's time, the Lutheran liturgical calendar of the place where he lived indicated the occasions for which music was required in church services. The bulk of the composer's sacred music, including most of his church cantatas, was written for such occasions. His other church music, such as sacred cantatas for weddings and funerals, and most of his motets, was not tied to the liturgical calendar. Around 15 extant compositions came to be recognised as Bach motets by musicologists at some time. Jesu, meine Freude is one of only five core works which have always been considered to be Bach motets.
In eleven movements, Jesu, meine Freude is the longest and most musically complex of Bach's motets. It is scored for up to five vocal parts, which is rare among his works. Most of his vocal church music is to be performed with a four-part SATB choir, while most of his other motets are for double SATB choir. Exceptional compositions with five-part movements can be found in the Magnificat, written in 1723 at the beginning of Bach's tenure in Leipzig, and the Mass in B minor, compiled towards the end of his life. Like for most of his other motets, no continuo or other instrumental accompaniment has survived for BWV 227, but it is surmised there was one in Bach's time.
Epistle text and chorale
The text of Jesu, meine Freude is compiled from two sources: a 1653 hymn of the same name with words by Johann Franck, and Bible verses from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 8:1–2 and 9–11. In the motet, the six hymn stanzas form the odd movement numbers, while the even numbers each take one verse from the Epistle as their text. The hymn is written in the first person and deals with a believer's bond to Jesus who is addressed as a helper in physical and spiritual distress, and therefore a reason for joy. The singer realizes the world as vanity, and prefers to leave it. Franck used stark images such as "old dragon" and "death's jaw" to express the believer's enemies. The hymn adds a layer of individuality and emotions to Biblical teaching. When Catherine Winkworth translated the hymn into English in 1869, she rendered it as "Jesu, priceless treasure".As a key teaching of the Lutheran faith, the Biblical text reflects on the contrast of living "in the flesh" or "according to the Spirit". The hymn's first line is also the last line of its final stanza, framing the poetry of the whole work.
Johann Crüger's chorale melody for the hymn, Zahn 8032, was first published in his hymnal Praxis pietatis melica of 1653; several variants of the hymn tune were published in other hymnals over the ensuing decades. The tune is in bar form. While the first version had dance elements of an Allemande, the version of the 1682 Neu Leipziger Gesangbuch, the hymnal used in Leipzig then, it is in common time. the melody is built from one motif, the beginning descent of a fifth, with the word "Jesu" as the high note, which is immediately inverted. In the Leipzig version, the melody of the first line is identical to that of the last line. The hymn tune appears in the odd-numbered movements of the motet, completely in the Leipzig version for most stanzas, but paraphrased for the third stanza, and in a slightly different older version in the fifth stanza.
Time of origin
Most of Bach's motets are difficult to date and Jesu, meine Freude is no exception. Spitta assigned the motets that he knew, including Jesu, meine Freude, to Bach's Leipzig years, 1723 to 1750. In 1912, Bernhard Friedrich Richter, a church musician in Leipzig, wrote that Jesu, meine Freude was likely written in Bach's first year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig; he concluded that it was written for the funeral of Johanna Maria Kees, the wife of the Leipzig postmaster, on 18 July 1723, because a scripture reading of verse 11 from the Epistle passage set in the motet's tenth movement was documented for the funeral. Daniel R. Melamed, a musicologist from Cambridge University, wrote in his 1995 book that this was no conclusive evidence for a motet performance on the occasion, but the date has still been "nearly universally accepted". The order of that particular service was found in 1982, mentioning neither a motet nor even the chorale. Possibly the idea of combining hymn and epistle text dates back to the funeral.Friedrich Smend was the first musicologist to analyse the motet's symmetrical structure, a feature which can also be found in Bach's St John Passion of 1724 and St Matthew Passion of 1727, which led Smend to suggest that the work was composed in the 1720s. Melamed thought that the motet was likely in part compiled from music Bach had composed before his Leipzig period. He based that view on the four-part settings of the chorale movements 1, 7 and 11, and on the older version of the chorale melody used as the cantus firmus in the ninth movement. The latter suggests an origin of this movement in Bach's Weimar period, or even earlier. John Eliot Gardiner, who conducted the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, noted that the motet, compiled partly from earlier compositions, is comparable in that respect to the Credo from Bach's Mass in B minor, and both are coherent in performance.
Christoph Wolff, a Bach scholar, suggested in 2002 that the motet may have been intended for the education of the Thomanerchor rather than for a funeral. He assumed the same intended use for the motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225. According to Bach scholar Richard D. P. Jones, several movements of Jesu, meine Freude show a style too advanced to have been written in 1723. He assumed in his 2013 book that the final arrangement of the work likely happened in the late 1720s, when two motets which can be dated with greater certainty were also written: Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied and the funeral motet Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf, BWV 226. The Dietel manuscript, written around 1735, contains three chorales extracted from the motet; the composition of the motet is supposed to have been completed before that time.