Two Chorale Cantatas

Abstract The question of how the mode of a chorale melody may affect the musicotheological design of an entire cantata of several movements has seldom been addressed in the Bach literature, one of the main reasons for that being the generally tenuous connections between the theological content of most chorale verses and the modes of their melodies. There are, nevertheless, cases where such connections do exist and others where, even if they do not, Bach’s treatment of the melodies indicates that he either perceived them to exist or introduced them by various means. Such is the case with the chorales that form the basis of the two cantatas to be examined in this chapter, “Christum wir sollen loben schon” (Cantata 121) and “Es ist das Heil uns kommen hier” (Cantata 9). In them Bach seized on details in the melodies that proved to be of enormous potential in his articulating a bond between music and theology over the course of their multimovement sequences.