List of chorale harmonisations by Johann Sebastian Bach


's chorale harmonisations, alternatively named four-part chorales, are Lutheran hymn settings that characteristically conform to the following:
Around 400 of such chorale settings by Bach, mostly composed in the first four decades of the 18th century, are extant:
  • Around half of that number are chorales which were transmitted in the context of larger vocal works such as cantatas, motets, Passions and oratorios. A large part of these chorales are extant as autographs by the composer, and for nearly all of them a colla parte instrumental and/or continuo accompaniment are known.
  • All other four-part chorales exclusively survived in collections of short works, which include manuscripts and 18th-century prints. Apart from the Three Wedding Chorales collection, these are copies by other scribes and prints only published after the composer's death, lacking context information, such as instrumental accompaniment, for the individual harmonisations.
Apart from homophonic choral settings, Bach's Lutheran hymn harmonisations also appear as:
  • sung chorale fantasias in some of Bach's larger vocal works
  • hymn melodies for which Bach composed or improved a thorough bass accompaniment, for instance as included in Georg Christian Schemelli's Musicalisches Gesang-Buch
  • harmonisations included in purely instrumental compositions, most typically organ compositions such as chorale preludes or chorale partitas.

    History

The compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach that had been printed during his lifetime were nearly exclusively instrumental works. Moreover, by the time Bach died in 1750 it was forgotten that a few of his vocal works had indeed been printed in the first half of the 18th century. In the period between the publication of The Art of Fugue in the early 1750s, and the publication of further works from 1800, only one group of Bach's works was published: his four-part chorales.
The most complete 18th century publication of chorales by J. S. Bach is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's edition in four volumes, published by Breitkopf from 1784 to 1787. About half of the chorale harmonisations in this collection have their origin in other extant works by Bach. This collection went through four more editions and countless reprintings until 1897. Several other collections of chorales by J. S. Bach were published, some of these using the original C-clefs or different texts.
The loss of musical material from Bach's death to the first printings of chorale collections 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 harmonisations that were once compiled the current collections include. For example, there is no way of knowing how many of the 150 harmonisations 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 chorale harmonisations BWV 250–438 were probably all extracted from lost larger vocal works. For six of them the work they have been derived from has been identified. Bach's chorale harmonisations are all for a four-part choir, but Riemenschneider's and Terry's collections contain one 5-part SSATB choral harmonisation, not actually by Bach, but used by Bach as the concluding chorale to cantata Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende, BWV 27.
Some harmonisations exist in different keys, i.e. pitches, in 18th-century sources: for instance a Bach cantata autograph gives the four-part chorale in one key, and the same harmonisation is found in one or more of the early chorale compilations in a different key.

Manuscripts

The first record of the existence and sale of groups of collected chorale harmonisations 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 harmonisations and 240 chorale melodies with figured bass by J.S. Bach.
In 1777 Johann Kirnberger started an active letter campaign to induce Breitkopf to publish a complete 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. It is presumed that this manuscript contained neither the text of the chorales nor any reference to the larger works from which the harmonisations had been taken. The manuscript's harmonisations 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 independent, 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. Finally in some cases, for reasons unknown, whoever extracted the chorale from the larger work, changed the key of the setting.
; "Y" manuscript hypothesis : Hypothetical early autograph collection of chorale harmonisations from which Bach would have selected settings he later integrated into his larger vocal works.
; Larger vocal works manuscripts : Mostly extant as autograph score and/or as parts written out under Bach's supervision: many of these works, such as cantatas and Passions, include four-part chorales
; Three Wedding Chorales autograph : Bach's autograph of the wedding chorales BWV 250–252, written between 1734 and 1738.
; Dietel manuscript, a.k.a. Dietel Collection and, in German, Choralsammlung Dietel

Printed editions

A few chorale harmonisations had been published before Bach adopted them into his larger vocal works, and are therefore listed as spurious in the third annex of the BWV catalogue:
  • , also known as closing movement of cantata BWV 27: five-part harmonisation published, for instance, in Vopelius' 1682 Neu Leipziger Gesangbuch, p. 947.
  • Cantata BWV 43, movement 11: harmonisation by published in 1652, later adopted in Vopelius' Neu Leipziger Gesangbuch: "Ermuntre dich, mein schwacher Geist", p. 70.
  • Cantata BWV 8, movement 6 : Daniel Vetter's four-part setting of "Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben", published in 1713.
Several more harmonisations stay close to the version published by Vopelius: for example "Christus, der ist mein Leben", BWV 281, is a variant of the harmonisation found in the Neu Leipziger Gesangbuch, with added embellishments and the harmonic structure altered for one of the tune's four phrases.
Printed collections of Bach's harmonisations usually provide an alphabetical collation of the chorales, that is, ranged alphabetically by text incipit of the hymn. Some editions contain an alphabetical index at the end of the compilation, for instance at the end of the final volume of C. P. E. Bach's 18th-century collection. Other editions, such as the Breitkopf compilations of 1892 and 1899, present the chorales themselves in alphabetical order. However, not all of these alphabetical collations result in analogous chorale sequences. Some major differences in this respect result from chorales that are known by different names: in that case it depends on the editor which name is used for the collation. For example, the melody of "Ach, lieben Christen, seid getrost" also being known as "Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält" it is an editor's discretion whether BWV 256 is found early on or near the end of an alphabetically sorted collection.

18th century

Some of Bach's voice and thoroughbass settings published in Georg Christian Schemelli's 1736 Musicalisches Gesang-Buch are better known in their four-part realisation included in the chorale harmonisation collections.
; Chorales published by Birnstiel : In 1765 F. W. Birnstiel published 100 chorales in Berlin. The edition had been initiated by F. W. Marpurg and completed, edited and supplemented with a preface and a list of errata by C. P. E. Bach. A second volume of 100 was issued by the same publisher in 1769, edited by J. F. Agricola. C. P. E. Bach criticised this publication as being full of mistakes in an article which was published in Hamburg in the Staats- und Gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyeschen Correspondenten on 30 May 1769, in which he also claimed that some of the chorale harmonisations included in the volume had not been composed by his father.
; C. P. E. Bach's edition for Breitkopf : After Kirnberger died in 1783, C. P. E. Bach became Breitkopf's editor for the chorales, which he then published in four parts:

19th century

C. P. E. Bach's selection of 371 chorale harmonisations was republished a few times in the 19th century, for instance by Carl Ferdinand Becker in 1832, and by Alfred Dörffel in 1870.
; Bach Gesellschaft : The Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe kept the chorale settings that were part of a larger vocal work together with these larger vocal works and added the Three Wedding Chorales to its 13th volume containing wedding cantatas. The remaining separate four-part chorales, purged from doubles, were ordered alphabetically and numbered from 1 to 185 in the 39th volume which was published in 1892.
; Richter's edition for Breitkopf : In the late 19th century Bernhard Friedrich Richter collected all straightforward chorale harmonisations that had appeared in the BGA edition —including as well the separate ones as those from larger vocal works—, added a "Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir" harmonisation from a variant version of Cantata 130, and numbered all of these chorales in alphabetical order. The set contained a few doubtful and spurious settings, but four-part settings which were part of a more complex texture were not always included by Richter. The set was published by Breitkopf as Joh. Seb. Bach: 389 Choral-Gesänge für gemischten Chor in 1899.