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Subject Area: Music
Subject Area: Religion

Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar. - 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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Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar.

lf1393-03_figure_096

Melody: “Puer natus in Bethlehem”

Anon. 1543

    • i.

      From heaven the angel-troop come near,
    • And to the shepherds plain appear:
    • A tender little child, they cry,
    • In a rough manger lies hard by,

    • ii.

      In Bethlehem, David’s town of old,
    • As Prophet Micah has foretold;
    • ’Tis the Lord Jesus Christ, I wis,
    • Who of you all the Saviour is.

    • iii.

      And ye may well break out in mirth,
    • That God is one with you henceforth;
    • For He is born your flesh and blood—
    • Your brother is the eternal Good.

    • iv.

      What can death do to you, or sin?
    • The true God is to you come in.
    • Let hell and Satan raging go—
    • The Son of God’s your comrade now.

    • v.

      He will nor can from you go hence;
    • Set you in Him your confidence.
    • Let many battle on you make,
    • Defy them—He cannot forsake.

    • vi.

      At last you must approval win,
    • For you are now of God’s own kin.
    • For this thank God, ever and aye,
    • Happy and patient all the day.

    • Martin Luther (1483-1546)     Tr. George Macdonald1 .

Martin Luther’s Christmas Carol, “Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar,” was first published in Joseph Klug’s Geistliche Lieder zu Wittemberg (Wittenberg, 1543). The melody (supra) with which it is familiarly associated is proper to the Carol “Puer natus in Bethlehem,” published in the same Hymn-book, and is found as the Tenor of a fourpart setting in which the 1553 melody of the Carol2 appears as the descant. Zahn (No. 192a) seems to imply that the conversion of the 1543 melody to the use of “Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar” first appears in Vulpius (1609). The hymn, in fact, had two earlier melodies of its own, both of which are reconstructions of Latin hymns: one of them (1593) being developed from “A solis ortus cardine,” and the other (1598) from “Puer nobis nascitur.”

Bach uses the melody only in the Organ movement infra. His distinctive first phrase (varying notes 1-8 supra) is in Witt (No. 22).

[126]

N. xv. 23. The movement is one of the Christmas Preludes in the Orgelbüchlein. The brilliant scale passages represent the descending and ascending angels. The Pedal notes, too, provide a ladder. Had Bach Jacob’s vision in his mind?

[1 ]Exotics, p. 48. The original hymn has six stanzas.

[2 ] See supra, p. 286.