Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture by Markus Rathey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture by Markus Rathey Mark A. Peters (bio) Markus Rathey. Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 414 pages. Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio is among the best-known and best-loved works in the Western art music repertory and, like the composer's St. Matthew Passion and B-minor Mass, is regularly heard by concert audiences. Given the frequency with which it is performed and recorded, it is surprising to note how little research has been published on the Christmas Oratorio, particularly in English. The only English-language monograph dedicated to the work is Ignace Bossuyt's Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio. BWV 248, which was translated from Dutch and is more an introductory handbook than it is a work of new scholarship.1 One other significant recent monograph dedicated to the Christmas Oratorio is Meinrad Walter's Johann Sebastian Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium of 2006 (published only in German), which focuses primarily on theological perspectives on the work.2 Three recent publications in English provide valuable resources for encountering the Christmas Oratorio, but none attempts a comprehensive study of the work. Michael Marissen includes an annotated text of BWV 248 with a new English translation in his Bach's Oratorios of 2008.3 Christoph Wolff provides an excellent broad introduction to Bach's three oratorios (Christmas, Easter, and Ascension) in his "Under the Spell of Opera? Bach's Oratorio Triology" of 2011.4 And Markus Rathey offers a helpful introduction to the Christmas Oratorio for a general readership in his 2016 chapter "From Love Song to Lullaby: The Christmas Oratorio BWV 248."5 [End Page 126] Rathey's Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture thus addresses a significant gap in Bach research by offering the first comprehensive English-language monograph dedicated to the oratorio. And it does so by masterfully weaving together source study, music analysis, textual analysis, contextual study, and historical theology to present a comprehensive and compelling body of research into this well-known composition. In my introduction to current research on Bach's vocal music in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, I presented six broad approaches to the study of Bach's vocal music: source study, musical analysis, performance practice, theology, text, and contextual studies.6 While Rathey does not focus on performance practice in this volume, he treats in detail all five of the other approaches in relation to the Christmas Oratorio. Rathey's varied approaches to understanding the Christmas Oratorio are not separated into distinct chapters, but are rather interwoven throughout each chapter. By way of example, I briefly trace here the primary themes and sources addressed in Chapter 3, "Layers of Time: The Theology of the Christmas Oratorio," as representative of Rathey's approach throughout the book. Chapter 3 focuses primarily on the libretto of the Christmas Oratorio, explicating it through the lens of historical theology around the concept of the "threefold coming of Christ, which represents the common view of the birth of Jesus at that time and connects the historical event to a chronological continuum with the present and with the end times" (52, italics in original). Following the chapter's introduction that presents historical theology as a framing approach for understanding the Christmas Oratorio and calls attention to the shifting perspectives and chronological layers of the libretto (50–52), a substantial section of the chapter explores theological sources from Bach's time that inform our understanding of Jesus's "threefold coming" (52–59). Rathey begins by discussing a didactic book for school children published in 1727 by Hamburg theologian Johann Joachim Neudorf and drawing on sources such as cantata librettos by Benjamin Schmolck [End Page 127] and Erdmann Neumeister, as well as the Leipziger Kirchenstaat. Rathey continues with what he identifies as "[t]he most influential exposition on the threefold advent in Lutheran Orthodoxy," Johann Gerhard's Postille of 1617. Within this context, Rathey explores how Advent hymns of the seventeenth century reflect the emphasis on Christ's threefold coming. In the next section of Chapter 3, Rathey shifts to explore how such a theological understanding is...