In the Christmas season of 1734-35, the good citizens of Leipzig were the first to experience a performance of J.S. Bach’s “Weihnacthsoratorium” – albeit in a very different fashion from tonight’s presentation. The six festive cantatas which make up the complete Christmas Oratorio were performed on six different days in December and January at the two churches’ for which Bach was responsible for the music. While they were performed at specific festive services ranging from those held the night before Christmas and Christmas Day itself, to New Year’s and the Feast of the Epiphany, Bach clearly meant for these cantatas to form a whole, as he produced a careful succession of key schemes and a thoughtfully conceived broad dramatic narrative. And, important to our modern conception of the work, he collated the scores to the cantatas into a full set and titled the work “Weihnachtsoratorium.”

Congregations in Bach’s time would have considered the presentation of this drama over time appropriate – an integration of a musical story over the 13 day time period which Bach called ‘the holy festival of Christmas” in the title page of the Christmas Oratorio libretto. Rather than experiencing the presentation of these six cantatas at six festive church services as a series of interruptions they would have accepted it as a normal integration into the Christmas and New Year holiday festivities. For a modern secular audience, presenting the whole, as collated in Bach’s score and libretto, allows us to experience Bach’s organization of some of his finest celebratory full choruses with orchestra, poignant recitatives with their following arias and duets and trios, and chorales written especially for this work that “reveal a new degree of polyphonic sophistication, elegance of voice leading, and immediacy of expression.” (Christoph Wolff)

Patrick Gardner