ExclusiveBach: Schübler Chorales, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 645 (for piano - Busoni)

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Bach: Schübler Chorales, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 645 (for piano - Busoni). This beautiful piece was played by Chiara Bertoglio. It has creative commons license (CC BY 3.0, Attribution 3.0 Unported), and is provided through musopen.org.

A simple arrangement demonstrates Bach's genius:

Five wise virgins and five foolish virgins are waiting for their bridegrooms. When night falls with not a fiancé in sight, the wise virgins extinguish their lamps, while the foolish ones go to bed without thinking. When the men turn up in the middle of the night, the wise virgins are ready to leave, but the foolish ones miss their opportunity, as their oil has run out and they have no light. This parable from the Gospel according to St Matthew about vigilance and the Last Judgement is read out on the last Sunday of the ecclesiastical year. Logically, it became associated with the chorale ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme’.

Schübler Chorales, BWV 645-650
They may have a number and an epithet, but that does not necessarily mean that Bach wrote the six enchanting Schübler Chorales himself. Five of them are arrangements of known cantata movements – and the sixth may well be an arrangement too, from a lost work. Whereas some people, as organist Wolfgang Zerer, do not doubt the hand of the master and identify a well-considered construction in it, other specialists see a big gap between Bach’s own refined transcriptions and these works that have often been transferred rather literally to the organ.

Bach himself owned a copy of Schübler’s publication, which is very interesting for its abundance of improvements and changes by a composer in the latter years of his life.
Source: bachvereniging.nl

The video was captured by Christian Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.





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