Bach wrote Cantata 62, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Come now, Savior of the Gentiles), in Leipzig in 1724 for the first Sunday in Advent. This cantata will be the subject of our interactive cantata workshop on Saturday, December 5, 2020.

There are several special stories to tell about this cantata. Paul Flight will go into more detail during the workshop, but we would like to highlight three interesting aspects:

The First Sunday of Advent marked an important feast day in Leipzig.
This Cantata was part of Bach’s 1724/1725 cycle of chorale cantatas, a stunning collection of cantatas that were considered the most important part of his cantata legacy directly after his death in 1750.
The ancient chorale this cantata is based on (as well as the motet by Samuel Scheidt we’re also singing during our December 5 workshop)

The First Sunday of Advent in Leipzig

In Weimar (between 1714 and 1716) Bach had written cantatas for all four Sundays of Advent. In the religiously much stricter town of Leipzig, no “fancy" music was allowed in the churches in the four weeks between the first Sunday of Advent and Christmas Day, only the singing of hymns. This is why Bach only wrote cantatas for the first Sunday of Advent during his Leipzig period, not for the three remaining Sundays.

This first Sunday of Advent thus marked two occasions at the same time: the celebration of the imminent coming of the Messiah, but also the start of a sober period of introspection. Thus the opening chorus of Cantata 62 definitely sounds festive, but in a measured way. Bach on purpose didn’t include trumpets or timpani in the orchestration. It wasn’t Christmas yet.

Bach’s 1724/1725 series of chorale cantatas

For nine and a half months, starting on June 11, 1724, Bach wrote a new cantata for each Sunday and holiday, each time according to the same template: the opening movement is a chorale fantasia on the first stanza of an existing Lutheran hymn or chorale, with the tune appearing as a cantus firmus in one of the voice parts in the chorus (almost always the soprano). The text is used verbatim. The text of the last movement is the last stanza of the same hymn, in a four-part harmonization of the tune, with the text also used verbatim. The text of the solo inner movements was paraphrased, but still based on the inner stanzas of the same hymn.

Most scholars now think that Bach intended this cycle of cantatas as an important part of his legacy. If any gaps had occurred in the 1724/1725 season, he filled them in later years by writing cantatas according to his chorale cantata format, for exactly those Sundays or holidays he had missed. It would become the cycle of cantatas most valued by his contemporaries directly after his death in 1750.

Both Cantata 78, Jesu der du meine Seele (the subject of our October workshop), and Cantata 62, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (the subject of our workshop on December 5, 2020), are part of this series of chorale cantatas.

Through his intent to write an entire series of cantatas according to a new format, Bach made a huge commitment to himself: he would now have to write a brand-new cantata for every Sunday and holiday. During his first year in Leipzig (the 1723/1724 cycle), he had written many new cantatas, but also regularly “recycled” music from his years in Köthen and Weimar. For the Christmas season of 1724/1725, this meant he would have to write seven new cantatas for the period from December 25 through January 7. (And he did: find the list here). So the four weeks of introspection in Leipzig were not “time off” for Bach: he must have been extremely busy writing music and conducting choir rehearsals.

Nobody knows if besides creating a legacy, Bach might perhaps have had other motives for writing an entire series of chorale cantatas. There are however a few speculations:

One theory is that Bach lost his soprano soloist sometime in the spring of 1724 and was having trouble training a new one because, as he had found out over this first year of working in Leipzig, the boy sopranos weren’t as good as he had hoped. With this new concept of the chorale cantata, Bach limited the rehearsal strain on the choirboys. In many of these cantatas, the boys only had to sing the chorale melody in the opening chorus, and there was no soprano recitative or aria at all among the inner movements (solos in this cantata cycle usually went to the male voices of countertenor, tenor, and bass, which would all have been sung by trained adults). If in later cantatas in this series the boys were assigned something a bit more complicated, it was still based on the chorale melody they already knew by heart, so it required much less rehearsal time for them.

Another theory is that Bach’s first Leipzig cycle of cantatas had proven too difficult to understand for his audience—the Lutheran congregations in Leipzig. It is possible that Bach had either received feedback to this end from the church elders, or that he himself felt that he had been unsuccessful in “educating his neighbor,” i.e. teaching theological lessons to the congregations by way of his music, something he arguably saw as his life’s work. By basing each cantata on a familiar chorale, he possibly lowered the threshold for them in the understanding of his compositions.

**The origins of the Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland chorale**

In the 4th century, Ambrosius created the hymn Veni Redemptor Gentium. Then, in 1524, Luther turned that hymn into Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (it sounds like this), which has been known to Lutherans from the 16th century to this day. When you attend our workshop, you will also get to sing Samuel Scheidt’s setting of this chorale from the first half of the 17th century, and you will thus get a better idea of how this melody was used in different ways over time, within the same German tradition.

Bach used this same chorale in movements of the two other cantatas he wrote for the First Sunday of Advent. In Cantata 61, which he wrote in Weimar in 1714 and performed again in Leipzig in 1723, it appears in the opening chorus. (Consequently, but very confusingly nonetheless, both cantatas 61 and 62 have the same title.) In Cantata 36, Schwingt freudig euch empor, which he wrote in Leipzig in 1731, the chorale appears in the soprano-alto duet, the second tenor aria, and the closing chorale.