Despite being born less than a month and 100 miles apart from one another, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel lived out very different lives and embarked on very different careers. Bach, the pious, provincial composer from a town that Martin Luther once dubbed a “clerical backwater”, worked almost single-mindedly toward a “well-regulated church music” over the course of a career that only rarely took him outside central and eastern Germany. A staunch musical conservative, his music was defined by its brilliance, complexity, and architectural grandeur—rather than its innovation—and (perhaps inconceivably to us) after his death fell into obscurity until the Bach Revival of the early 19th century.
Handel, the cosmopolitan traveler, polyglot, and inveterate opportunist, followed a very different path. Brought up in the urban hub of Halle, he traveled the continent, absorbing varying musical styles, before settling in London in 1712. Two years later, he was reunited with his former patron, the Elector of Hanover, who acceded to the throne of the United Kingdom as King George I. Handel reached the peak of his fame in London, writing many of his most well-loved operas, anthems, and instrumental music, much of which was for the entertainment and celebration of George I and his son George II. Handel was acclaimed as a luminary both before and after his death, and he is today best remembered for the lyrical, modern style he developed in his operas and oratorios.
Despite these differences in their styles, motivations, and areas of concentration, the similarities between the two composers nevertheless run deep because of similar musical upbringing, occasionally resulting in striking musical analogues. Handel’s early teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow introduced him to the great organ masters of the 17th century, and even as his career led his style far afield from those forebears, Handel returned to his roots on several occasions, producing music far more similar to Bach’s than the works that have made him most famous. You will hear one such work today: the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline.
On November 20, 1737, Handel suffered a personal and professional blow when Queen Caroline, the wife of George II, died unexpectedly. Commissioned to write the music for her funeral taking place on December 17, Handel completed the work in just a week, finishing on December 12. Writing an extended anthem of high quality in seven days was no small feat, but Handel relied on a habit that pervaded his compositional process throughout his career: “borrowing” musical material from other composers as well as himself. At least seven movements of the Funeral Anthem are partially based on pre-existing music:
Sources for The ways of Zion do mourn:
Chorale tune: Herr Jesu Christ, ich weiß gar wohl
(?) Georg Friedrich Kaufmann: Herr Jesu Christ, ich schrei zu dir
Source for She put on righteousness:
Johann Philip Krieger: Fugue in A minor
Source for When the ear heard her:
Handel: Il Pastor Fido – Ouverture
Sources for She deliver'd the poor that cried
Chorale tune: Du friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ
(?) Heinrich Schütz: Die Musikalische Exequien – Ich lasse dich nicht
Source for Their bodies are buried in peace:
Jacobus Gallus: Ecce quomodo moritur justus
Sources for The people will tell of their wisdom:
Chorale tune: Herr Jesu Christ, ich weiß gar wohl.
(?) Lost fugal setting by Johann Friedrich Alberti
Source for The merciful goodness of the Lord:
Reinhard Keiser: Claudius – Ich sterb vergnügt
Under pressure to produce such an important work in such a short time—which was surely compounded by the grief he must have felt over losing his friend and patroness—Handel returned to music he had learned in his childhood. This included not only the works of the German organ masters to which Zachow had exposed him, but also to several relevant chorales and motets he would have grown up singing. Most notable among these is a tune sung to several pertinent texts in the Lutheran tradition, most notably Herr Jesu Christ, ich weiß gar wohl (“Lord Jesus Christ, I know full well [that I must die]”). This tune may sound familiar, as it is probably also the basis of the Introit of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. It is therefore possible, though by no means guaranteed, that Mozart had Handel’s Funeral Anthem in mind when composing the Requiem.
Three other notable borrowings deserve comment here. The musicologist Herbert Reich has made the case that the imitative section of She deliver'd the poor that cried is based on a passage from Heinrich Schütz’s Die Musikalische Exequien, which itself draws upon mortality-focused Lutheran chorales of the day. If this is indeed the case, it would create a chain of funeral homages spanning the 17th and 18th centuries. A few movements later, in Their bodies are buried in peace, Handel extensively quotes from a motet he doubtless heard in childhood, Jacobus Gallus’s Ecce quomodo moritur justus, which was often sung at funerals in the Lutheran churches of Saxony. The deep textual resonances between Gallus’s setting of Isaiah 57:1-2 and this movement of the Funeral Anthem make such a quotation extremely apt.
Finally, there is a fascinating recapitulation within the Funeral Anthem itself: the chorale tune that forms the basis for the first movement is repeated in the compact little fugue on the words “And the congregation will shew forth their praise” in the seventh movement. Musicologist John Roberts speculates that this might simply be a repurposed copy of a lost fugue on this tune by Johann Friedrich Alberti. Herein lies yet another possible parallel with the Mozart Requiem: Mozart’s probable plan, thwarted by his premature death, that the Dies Irae conclude with a fugue based on this very same chorale tune.
Without the proper context in which to consider them, many of the Funeral Anthem’s movements may strike the listener as uncharacteristic of Handel’s style. Thanks to his early training, Handel excelled as a contrapuntalist in the realm of church music when the situation necessitated it. His English oratorios, though perhaps most representative of his output, are not quite perfect vehicles for this style because they straddle the realms of sacred and secular music. As such, they retain much of the lyricism and virtuosity of Handel’s Italian operas, spicing this style to varying degrees with aspects of the sacred style. It might also strike us as odd at just how heavily flavored this music is with Lutheran chorales until we consider that Queen Caroline (not to mention her husband and Handel himself) was Lutheran, having been born and raised in northern Germany.
It is in this light that we come to consider perhaps the most famously Lutheran composer of all—with the possible exception of Luther himself—Johann Sebastian Bach, and the many aspects of his music to which Handel drew close in his composition of the Funeral Anthem. Bach and his work need no introduction, though it can be helpful to note the context in which he wrote the majority of his famous collection of chorale cantatas.
Bach arrived at his ultimate post in 1723—as Thomaskantor (music director of the famed Thomanerchor boy’s choir) in Leipzig—with a small body of cantatas already to his name; but upon his arrival there, he began to produce these works at the frenzied pace for which he is now famous. Within a year, he composed roughly 60 cantatas, one for each Sunday on which concerted music was allowed, as well as other occasions. He followed this up with what became known as the Chorale Cantata cycle in his second year, completing a chorale cantata for nearly every Sunday until Lent of 1725, after which he prematurely broke off this work with just a handful left to go. Nevertheless, he completed at least 40 cantatas of this type that year.
As the name suggests, a chorale cantata is based on a chorale tune that would have been familiar to the churchgoers of Leipzig. The opening movement takes the form of a fantasia, using the chorale melody as a cantus firmus. The middle movements, typically consisting of recitatives and arias, sometimes abandon the tune and text of the underlying chorale, substituting artful paraphrases of its text. Each cantata then concludes with a simple four-part harmonization of the final stanza.
Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 177, illustrates this format perfectly. (We should note that this work is not one of the original set of chorale cantatas from 1724–1725, but rather comes from the later period [1731–1735] during which Bach completed the annual cycle by filling in the post-Lenten works he had not composed in 1725.) As in many of Bach’s chorale cantatas, the opening movement is a majestic rondo, punctuated at regular intervals by an instrumental ritornello featuring a solo violin. The first stanza of Johann Agricola’s chorale (on which the cantata is based) is heard, one line at a time, in the sopranos, doubled by the oboes, while the solo violin and instrumental and choral ensembles accentuate this theme.
The next three movements, all solo arias that hardly alter the original chorale’s text, build steadily, each upon the last. The second movement is a brooding aria for alto and continuo in the form of a quasi-passacaglia. The third movement, for soprano, lifts the mood with a buoyant 6/8 meter and the addition of an oboe da caccia intoning a cheerful countermelody. The final solo aria, for tenor, is a boisterous trio for tenor, bassoon, and the return of the solo violin. This progressive build in mood and orchestration is completed with the return of the entire musical force for the standard declamation of the final stanza of Agricola’s chorale. We thus bring the concert to a close having transmuted the opening G minor of the Funeral Anthem into a contented G major, our opening sighs into the assurance of deliverance, and our mourning into peace.
—Nate Widelitz
