The Magnificat text is from Luke 1:46–55, where it is Mary’s response to her cousin Elizabeth’s praise of her for being chosen to give birth to Jesus. Martin Luther valued how Mary deflected the praise from herself to God, and, as a result, the Magnificat is one of the few Latin texts used in Lutheran services.
It has long been thought that Bach’s setting of the Magnificat was composed for Christmas in 1723, the first Christmas of Bach’s tenure in Leipzig. But recently musicologists have discovered that the Magnificat text was sung at several occasions in the church year in Leipzig and elsewhere in the Lutheran regions of Germany, and that the first performance may have been at Advent, a month before Christmas.
Advent would have been the first major church festival at Leipzig for Bach and he must have wanted to make a strong impression on the congregations at St. Thomas’s and St. Nicholas’s churches. The Advent Vespers allowed him to combine all the instrumental and vocal forces at his disposal; yet he was required to fit his setting into a mere half-hour, only slightly longer than a conventional cantata. As a result, Bach’s setting is both rich (five-part chorus, five soloists, three trumpets, timpani, two oboes, two flutes, strings and continuo) and extraordinarily concise and energetic, with no recitatives or da capo arias.
Bach’s Magnificat was performed again at Christmas in 1723. At this performance, Bach followed a long tradition in Leipzig of interpolating four traditional Christmas songs, two of them in German. These appear as addenda in Bach’s manuscript, giving credence to the theory that the Magnificat setting wasn’t specifically intended for performance at Christmas.
In the 1730s, Bach revised his setting of the Magnificat, together with several other of his works with Latin texts. Among numerous other minor revisions, the work was transposed from E flat to D, a more convenient key for the natural trumpets and timpani, though this required replacing the obbligato recorders used in the original version of Esurientes by transverse flutes. It is this revised version (BWV 243) that is almost always performed in our time, though there seems to be no evidence that this version was ever actually performed in Bach’s time.
Were the Leipzig congregations impressed by Bach’s first major liturgical composition? We don’t know; but one city councillor was recorded as expressing the opinion that Bach’s church music should be less “theatrical.”
ⒸCopyright 2010 R.D. Tennent