After the Christmas of 1734, the next performance of the work seems to have been given by the twenty-four-year-old Brahms at the Berlin Singakademie in 1857 as part of Mendelssohn’s movement to re-popularise Bach’s music by introducing it to the contemporary Berliners. A translation of the work into English by Helen Johnston gave rise to the first English performance by William Sterndale Bennett at the Hanover Square Rooms in London in 1861. (Both Johnston and Sterndale Bennett had been responsible for the first English performance of the St Matthew Passion at the same venue in 1854.)
The Text
When considering the text for the Christmas Oratorio we have to consider both the biblical and the non-biblical. From a biblical point of view a comparison of the four gospels is interesting. Neither St John nor St Mark makes any mention of the Immaculate Conception, or of the birth of Jesus in any way, both choosing to begin their biographical narratives with the baptism of the young adult Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. The end of the first chapter of St Matthew, and the first 12 verses of Chapter 2, make passing reference to the immaculate conception, assume the nativity to have happened without actually mentioning it, and tell of the journey and subsequent adoration of the Magi, and the anxiousness and actions of King Herod, before cutting a couple of decades or so to the baptism of Jesus. These 12 verses are used by Bach to plot the story through parts 5 and 6.
It is in the first 21 verses of the second chapter of St Luke, and there alone, that we find an account of the nativity story as we recognise it, complete with the decree of taxation from Cæsar Augustus, the journey to Bethlehem of the unmarried and expectant couple, the overcrowded inn, the stable, the appearance of angels to shepherds on the hillside and the virgin birth itself. It is to these verses therefore that Bach has to turn to plot the story, in regular, short and well-rationed statements through parts 1 – 4. St Luke makes no reference to the Magi. (There are 3,779 verses in the four gospels combined; as an aside it is interesting to consider that the entire multi-billion pound annual occurrence which we call Christmas is based entirely on just 33 short verses of historic scripture.)
As in the telling of the passion stories therefore, and uncommonly for the writing of cantatas, Bach has chosen to use sequential passages of scripture. The more usual form for cantatas was to set to music the appointed biblical readings for the day, along with associated scripture, sacred poetry and hymn words.
The parodying of vocal music throws up some significant challenges. If one is going to take existing music and fit new words to it, the words have both to fit, and to make sense. We do not know who the librettist was for the Christmas Oratorio, but it is very likely to have been Christian Henrici (1700 – 1764), a local postal worker and tax officer and a close friend of Bach. Henrici wrote under the pseudonym Picander. Although not a poet of great depth, Picander was an ideal partner for Bach, being widely read, technically skilful and well versed in music. He could express his ideas with clear and simple imagery which was well suited to a composer’s needs, allowing as it does scope for effective musical illustration of the text. Picander had already provided the text for the St John Passion, the St Matthew Passion and many of Bach’s cantatas; so, in the absence of any other evidence, and given their long-established working relationship, it is highly likely that Picander was the chosen wordsmith to “bend” new text to fit Bach’s existing music. The musicologist Alfred Dürr also suggests that the non-biblical text for the Christmas Oratorio could only have been written by Picander in collaboration with Bach.
Whoever the accomplished author may have been, Bach himself must have played a crucial part in shaping the text. In particular, he must have been instrumental in selecting which musical movements were to be inserted between the passages of biblical text and in defining the expressive character of each of them in turn, for it was necessary to ensure a perfect match between the metrical patterns of the individual lines of existing melody and the scansion of the new poems. In other words, it had to be possible, on a purely technical level, to set them to the same music. This is a reversal of the usual composition process in which the text is the starting point and music is written to fit the words.
At least as important as Bach’s contribution to shaping the text was his influence on the planning of the oratorio as a whole, an involvement that must have included choosing how to divide up the verses from St Luke, choosing which arias and choruses to plunder from existing works, and integrating the chorales.
