Choral Prelude, BWV62, for Strings
performed Mar 7, 2004

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is unquestionably the greatest composer before Mozart, and arguably the greatest ever. On one level, his music is an example of supreme craftsmanship, yet his music is also deeply human.

Bach came not so much from a musical family as from a musical dynasty. The line of musical Bachs begins in the 16^th century and extends to the middle of the 19^th. After spells as church organist at Arnstadt and Mulhausen, Bach's first important position was at Weimar, where in 1708 he became the court organist and a chamber musician to the duke, Wilhelm Ernst. When eight years later a disgruntled Bach over-insistently applied for permission to leave, having been passed over for the senior post of Kapellmeister, the duke's response was to jail him for one month for his impertinence. (Disagreements with employers were to dog his career.) He left immediately after, to become Kapellmeister at the small court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Here he composed most of his instrumental and orchestral music.

When Prince Leopold married, his enthusiasm for music waned and in 1722, Bach applied to be cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. He got the position, but only after his friend Telemann, among others, turned it down. Bach spent his remaining 27 years in Leipzig, maintaining an almost impossible schedule. He taught at the Thomasschule, oversaw the musical operations for the church at St. Thomas and three other of the town's churches, and was expected to provide music for important civic occasions. (He also found time to father thirteen children by his second wife Anna Magdalena, of whom only six grew to adulthood, to add to the four surviving children of his first marriage.)

More than any master composer in Western European history, Johann Sebastian Bach obstinately maintained his allegiance to techniques, styles, musical figurations and aesthetic doctrines that had gone out of fashion. In the early 18th century the glorious tradition of North German polyphony had subsided before an onslaught of Italian operatic style in nearly every center of musical culture. Bach, with his fugues, chorale variations and mighty organ works, was, for all his recognized genius, the living embodiment of the past.

Chorale Preludes make up more than a third of Bach's organ music. They are short compositions, "take-offs" on the melodies of congregational hymns. In Bach's hands, each Chorale Prelude is a tone poem inspired by the meaning of the texts to which the chorales were sung. The Chorale Prelude, BWV62 leaves no question that Bach was a religious man. Based on the text "Come, Redeemer of our Race," Bach's deepest faith and greatest vision come to life in a piece so stunning that the great composer Ottorino Respighi felt it had to be freed from its organ shackles and set free with the more colorful and expressive strings.

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