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Subject Area: Music
Subject Area: Religion

O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross. - Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach’s Chorals, vol. 3 The Hymns and Hymn Melodies of the Organ Works [1921]

Edition used:

Bach’s Chorals. Part III: The Hymns and Hymn Melodies of the Organ Works, by Charles Sanford Terry (Cambridge University Press, 1915-1921). 3 vols. Vol. 3.

Part of: Bach’s Chorals, 3 vols.

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O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross.

lf1393-03_figure_088

Melody: “Es sind doch selig alle”

Matthäus Greitter 1525

  • i.

    O man, thy grievous sin bemoan,
  • For which Christ left His Father’s throne,
  • From highest heaven descending.
  • Of Virgin pure and undefiled
  • He here was born, our Saviour mild,
  • For sin to make atonement.
  • The dead He raised to life again,
  • The sick He freed from grief and pain,
  • Until the time appointed
  • That He for us should give His Blood,
  • Should bear our sins’ o’erwhelming load,
  • The shameful Cross enduring.

  • Sebald Heyden (1494-1561)     Tr. Rodney Fowler1 .

Matthäus Greitter’s melody, published in 1525, was from circa 1584 attached to Sebald Heyden’s Passiontide hymn, “O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross.” Bach uses it in the St Matthew Passion (1729), No. 35, Choralgesänge, No. 286, and the movement infra. His text is practically uniform and close to that of 1525. The B naturals which replace B flat as the penultimate notes of bars 1 and 2 supra are in Witt (No. 96) and elsewhere. In the Orgelbüchlein Bach writes B natural as the third note of bar 7.

[111]

N. xv. 69. The movement is among the Passiontide Preludes in the Orgelbüchlein. It is written upon the first stanza of the hymn, whose last line

The shameful Cross enduring

is painted by Bach in his chromatic “grief” motive. The concluding bars, as Sir Hubert Parry remarks1 , “show how fully Bach realised the highest capacities of harmony.”

[1 ]St Matthew Passion, No. 35, Novello’s Edition. The original hymn has twenty-three stanzas.

[1 ]Op. cit. 556.