florida state university college of music performance practice

Güttler (1998), Suzuki (1998), Schulz (1999), Suzuki (2000) and Veldhoven (2004), just
to name a few, come to the decision to contrast the beginning phrases separated by the
repeat with a forte and piano relationship. Textually this decision makes sense because
the repeat speaks of sleeping chambers and rest. Dynamically this was usually followed
by an increase of volume to forte in measure 14, then softer at measure 20, “mein Heiland
und Genadenthron!” (my Savior and throne of grace). This set the stage to suddenly
increase in volume to a forte to highlight and underscore the subsequent phrase “Herr
Jesu Christ,” (Lord Jesus Christ). The remaining five measures continued in a forte
dynamic as the choir sings “I want to praise you forever.”
While many chorales are conservative in regards to added ornamentation, this
chorale does employ a trill in the alto vocal part in measure 11 on the words “Seele” and
“und.” It is doubtful that Bach purposefully added the trill to draw attention to text
because it comes on the weak syllable of “spirit” and the word “and;” rather, it is
probably safer to say the trill was used to simply decorate the alto melodic line. All of the
thirty-eight recordings did implement the trills.
Results from phrasing choice of conductors show that the majority of conductors
followed the score religiously and incorporated every fermata written in the score.
Fermatas were held at variant lengths but most were held no longer than the value of the
note. However, there were conductors who were interested in preserving the poetic text
by ignoring particular fermatas in favor of the poetry. For example, conductors like
Gardiner (1986), Cleobury (1996), Milnes (1996), Beringer (1997) and Max (2006)
ignored the fermatas on the words, “Engelein,” “mein,” “Schlafkämmerlein” and “Pein”
to create an extensive phrase but one that is more consistent with the poetry.
Interpreting the duration graph for this movement exhibits the same trend of other
chorales with the St. John Passion. This chorale shows no observable tendencies
regarding duration. Rather the graph shows that within the time period of twenty-five
years, save three recordings in the early 1990s, many divergent interpretations were
documented. The top three fastest performances of this movement come from German
conductor Max (1990) at 1:23 followed second by Dutch conductor Leusink (2001) at
1:31 and third, German conductor Hempfling (2004) at 1:34. The top two slowest
recordings of this movement are German conductors Beringer (1997) and Daus (1999)
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