('How beautifully the morning star shines'), 1, is a church cantata for Annunciation by Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1725, when the cantata was composed, the feast of the Annunciation (25 March) coincided with Palm Sunday. Based on Philipp Nicolai's hymn "" (1599), it is one of Bach's chorale cantatas. Bach composed it in his second year as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where the Marian feast was the only occasion during Lent when music of this kind was permitted. The theme of the hymn suits both the Annunciation and Palm Sunday occasions, in a spirit of longing expectation of an arrival. As usual for Bach's chorale cantata cycle, the hymn was paraphrased by a contemporary poet who retained the hymn's first and last stanzas unchanged, but transformed the themes of the inner stanzas into a sequence of alternating recitatives and arias.
is the last chorale cantata of Bach's second cantata cycle, possibly because the librettist who provided the paraphrases for the middle movements of these cantatas was no longer available. Bach scored the work for three vocal soloists, a four-part choir and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of two horns, two oboes da caccia, two solo violins, strings and continuo. The chorale melody of Nicolai's hymn appears in the opening and closing choral movements of the cantata. All instruments play in the opening festive chorale fantasia, in which the soprano sings the hymn tune, and the two solo concertante violins represent the morning star. An oboe da caccia accompanies the vocal soloist in the first aria. The strings, including the solo violins, return in the second aria. An independent horn part crowns the closing chorale.
The original performance parts of the cantata, partly written by the composer, are conserved in Leipzig. Commentators writing about the cantata, such as Carl von Winterfeld in the 19th century and W. Gillies Whittaker in the 20th century, were particularly impressed by its opening chorus. The Bach-Gesellschaft published the cantata in 1851 as first work in the first volume of their complete edition of Bach's works. From then on known as Bach's Cantata No. 1, it retained that number in the , published in 1950, and its recording appeared, in 1971, as first work of the first album of Teldec's complete Bach cantata recordings by Harnoncourt and Leonhardt.
Background In 1723, Bach was appointed as Thomaskantor and director musices in Leipzig, which made him responsible for the music at four churches. He provided church music for the two main churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, and occasionally also for two others, the New Church and St. Peter. Bach took office in the middle of the liturgical year, on the first Sunday after Trinity.
In Leipzig, cantata music was expected on Sundays and on feast days, except during the tempus clausum ("silent periods") of Advent and Lent. Lutheran Leipzig observed several Marian feasts, including Annunciation on 25 March, nine months before Christmas. In 1725, the feast fell on Palm Sunday. Annunciation was the only occasion for festive music during Lent. The prescribed readings were, as the epistle, Isaiah's prophecy of the birth of the Messiah (), and from the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of Jesus ().
Cantata cycles
In his first twelve months in office, Bach decided to compose new works for almost all liturgical occasions. These works became known as his first cantata cycle. In his second year in office, Bach composed a cycle of chorale cantatas, with each cantata based on one Lutheran hymn, for the liturgical occasions. The choice of hymn for each of the cantatas was probably made according to the wishes of a local minister, who based the choices upon the prescribed readings and his plans for sermons. Compared to the first cycle, the music has less emphasis on biblical texts, but more on the use of chorale text and melody.
Bach's earliest extant chorale cantata, , written more than a decade before arriving in Leipzig, followed the principle, that is, it adopted the text of all stanzas of the hymn without modification, the hymn's melody being used throughout. Most of the chorale cantatas Bach wrote in his second year in Leipzig, including , were formatted differently. In this structure, the outer stanzas of the hymn, and its melody, were retained in the outer movements of the cantata: typically the first stanza was set as an opening chorale fantasia, and the last as a closing four-part chorale. The inner stanzas of the hymn were rephrased into recitatives and arias for the cantata's inner movements, their setting mostly not based on the hymn tune.
Hymn
Bach's cantata is based on Philipp Nicolai's hymn with the same name. Nicolai wrote the hymn when he was pastor in Unna and faced an outbreak of the plague, intending it to project a view of a heavenly world as counterpoint to pain and suffering in the real world. Nicolai published the hymn in 1599 as part of a collection titled ('Mirror of the joys of eternal life') in 1599. The hymn tune with which Nicolai published his text, Zahn No. 8359, is reminiscent of a 1538 melody published in the Strasbourg Psalter in 1539 with the song , possibly by Jakob Dachser, Zahn No. 1705.
The image of the morning star is taken from ("I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star."). In its title, Nicolai indicated the hymn as ('Bridal song') of the soul addressing Jesus as its heavenly bridegroom, which refers to Psalm 45, described as a bridal song in the Luther Bible, and to the Song of Songs. Nicolai did not write a paraphrase of the biblical texts, but used elements from them for the seven stanzas of his hymn. He also alludes to the nativity.
The hymn was associated with Epiphany but also with the Annunciation. Expressing the longing for the arrival of the Saviour, it can be connected to the reading about Jesus' birth being announced to Mary. The theme of arrival was also fitting for Palm Sunday, when the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem is celebrated.
Libretto
A librettist retained the first and last stanzas of the hymn and paraphrased the other stanzas, using the second stanza for the first recitative, the third stanza for the first aria, the fourth stanza and part of the fifth for the second recitative, and the sixth stanza for the second aria. Bach scholar Alfred Dürr wrote: "The librettist must be credited with the empathy he shows for that fervour which characterises Nicolai's poem and which has made his hymns into an enduring possession of the Protestant Church."
While the identity of the librettist, a "poetically and theologically competent specialist", is not certain, scholars have suggested Andreas Stübel, a Leipzig intellectual who held controversial theological views. First performance
For the first performance of the cantata, on 25 March 1725, Bach helped copy out his composition score for the musicians participating in the premiere. Johann Andreas Kuhnau, a main copyist of Bach at the time, produced most of this performance material, that is, all performance parts, except the figured bass part (partly written by the composer) and one of the oboe da caccia parts (written by the composer's son Wilhelm Friedemann)."Kuhnau, Johann Andreas" at Bach Digital (10 September 2020).
was to be the last newly composed chorale cantata of Bach's second cantata cycle. If Stübel was the librettist, his death in January 1725 would explain the end of the chorale cantatas in the second cycle, because Bach lost a competent collaborator and source of inspiration. Bach returned to other texts for the remaining liturgical times of Easter, Pentecost and Trinity. The completion of the cycle of chorale cantatas was so important to him that he included the early chorale cantata for Easter, , in 1725, and over the following decade added a few chorale cantatas for some missing occasions.
Music The title page of the extant 18th-century set of performance parts of BWV 1, written around 1750 by an unknown scribe, mentions the occasion (Annunciation), the cantata's title (incipit) and scoring, and its composer.
Scoring and structure Bach structured the cantata in six movements. Both text and tune of the hymn are retained in the outer choral movements, a chorale fantasia and a four-part closing chorale, which frame a sequence of alternating recitatives and arias. Bach scored the work for three vocal soloists (soprano (S), tenor (T) and bass (B)), a four-part choir, and a Baroque instrumental ensemble of two horns (Co), two oboes da caccia (Oc), two solo violins (Vs), strings consisting of two violin parts (Vl) and one viola part (Va), and basso continuo. A festive scoring like this, including brass, was usually employed on holidays. The duration of the cantata is given as 25 minutes.
In the following table of the movements, the scoring, keys and time signatures are taken from Dürr. The continuo, which plays throughout, is not shown.
Movements Bach provided a rich orchestration. The sparkle of the morning star is illustrated by two solo violins, first in the first chorus, and reappearing with the other strings in the second aria. The sound of the oboe da caccia, first heard in the opening chorus, returns in the first aria. In the closing chorale, the four-part harmony setting of the hymn tune, performed by choir and colla parte instruments, is complemented by a counter-melody played by the second horn. The scoring is reminiscent of , written for Epiphany 1724. Bach would later use the pair of horns in Part IV of his Christmas Oratorio, dealing with the naming of Jesus as announced to Mary.
1
The first movement, "" ('How beautifully the morning star shines'), is a stately, richly coloured chorale fantasia for the chorus. The of the chorale melody is sung in long notes of dotted minims by the sopranos. A substantial orchestral 12-bar ritornello or sinfonia begins the movement, with the solo instruments in the foreground; its wide harmonic range contrasts with the chorale, which remains mostly in the tonic key of F major. Bach achieves "unusual animation" by setting the hymn not in common time but . The scintillating semiquaver passagework of two solo concertante violins illustrate the sparkle of the morning star. A baroque pastoral imagery is established by the addition of two other pairs of solo instruments which play pronouncedly below the range of the higher solo violin bariolage, resulting in a transparent multilayered musical texture: the two pairs of horns and oboes da caccia, all associated with the hunt and nature, evoking a bucolic landscape.
The text of the hymn is reflected in the music iconography: the horn calls signify the majesty of the king, while the virtuosic concertante violin passagework signifies the morning star and joy in the universe. Musical analysis of the chorale fantasia makes specific references to the 10 lines of the hymn text; an English metrical translation is given here as an ad hoc composite, combining two early 18th-century sources, the Lyra Davidica and the Psalmodia Germanica, as well as a late 19th-century translation by M. Woolsey Stryker.