ExclusiveBach: Herr Gott nun schleuss den Himmel auf (Lord God Now Unlock the Heavens), BWV 617 (for Piano)
【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johann Sebastian Bach: Herr Gott nun schleuss den Himmel auf, BWV 617 (for piano - Busoni). This beautiful piece was played by Martha Goldstein. It has Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED, Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported). It is provided through www.musopen.org. No changes to the music were made.
J.S. Bach BWV 617 Organ chorale: ‘Herr Gott nun schleuß den Himmel auf’ (Lord God now unlock the heavens), it is a small piece of organ music, but the expressive power is very pronounced. In this choral arrangement, Bach has aptly illustrated the text from the Weimar Spiritual Hymnal from 1713: ‘- taken from.
I have suffered and fought, but now my life is finished and I can die with a clear conscience.’ These are the words of old Simeon. The persistent but tenacious melody sounds on the upper keyboard, while the left tensed the restless feet, give life after death. Meanwhile, the right pedal perseveres as heaven's gate - in the holy conviction that the reward for an earthly toil is coming.
Johann Sebastian Bach's Orgelbüchlein (little book for organ) is a collection of chorale-based organ pieces (chorale preludes) that he composed primarily during his tenure in Weimar between 1712 and 1717 (BWV 599-644).
The individual movements in the collection are united by a high artistic standard and the idea that they can be used both in church services and in instrumental and composition lessons. According to Christoph Wolff[1], Bach's chorale movements in the Orgelbüchlein are characterised by ‘dense motivic structure and contrapuntal refinement (including strict canons) in combination with a bold and expressive musical language as well as subtle musical and theological interpretation of the text. Each movement achieves proportional balance by elegantly combining manual and pedal parts into an exemplary organ score.’
Bach probably created the ninety-page landscape-format book at the beginning of his Weimar period, around 1708, and already entered all the titles of the 164 planned chorales. In doing so, he not only specified which chorales he wanted to copy or set to new music, but also whether they would each comprise one or two pages of six lines. The order of the movements is, as is customary in hymnals to this day, that of the church year. Around half of the entries are fair copies, i.e. copies of existing works.
He filled the first part, from Christmas to Easter, almost completely, after which there are gradually larger and larger gaps - apparently the very ambitious project gradually faded into the background, so that after 1726 he only added a single complete setting. This means that the little organ book now comprises ‘46 completed chorale preludes’, as an unknown scribe added to Bach's title.
Bach only added the title around 1720; it reads:
Orgel = Büchlein (Little Book for Organ)
In which a beginning organist is given instructions on how to perform a chorale in all kinds of ways, and also how to familiarise himself with the pedal studio, in that in such chorales the pedal is tractured entirely dutifully.
In 1739, at the time when the third part of the "Clavierübung" (Piano exercise) was composed, these movements were evidently already too historical to be used again; Bach's chorale arrangements from the later period are also usually much larger in scope.
Source: volkersklassikseitenjsbach.com
The video was recorded by Simone Schlegel in Switzerland and edited by Wenjing Ma.
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