🎶 cantāmus edition 🎶 Graupner Chorale No. 𝟙𝟛𝟘𝟚: 𝕷𝖆𝖘𝖘 𝖚𝖓𝖘 𝖎𝖓 𝕯𝖊𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖗 𝕷𝖎𝖊𝖇𝖊 (from GWV 1103/52)

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Chorale No. 1302 of 1345
Music: Christoph Graupner (1683-1760)
First performance: 17/12/1752 (3rd Sunday in Advent)
Verse Text: "Lass uns in Deiner Liebe"
Text source: 3rd verse of "Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn" by Elisabeth Cruciger (1524)
Chorale melody: "Herr Christ, der einig Gottes Sohn" adapted by Elisabeth Cruciger (1524)
8th movement of cantata "Gott der Herr der Mächtige redet" (GWV 1103/52)
Scoring: SATB, 2 horns, strings and organ
Reissued performance with vocals powered by cantāmus (https://cantamus.app/) of this video: https://youtu.be/AYvCQbYBpm4

In the 750 or so cantatas which Christoph Graupner wrote in the last two decades of his composing career one occasionally stumbles across works without the usual pattern of arias, recitatives and chorales. Over that timeframe there are just 12 cantatas which are mostly written for chorus alone (apart from short dicta or recitatives) and there are a couple more which have at most one aria, but are still very much chorus-dominated. For reasons not known to me, a third of all these “choral-cantatas” come from Graupner’s final partial cantata cycle. The very first one was written for the 3rd Sunday in Advent, and was first performed on 17 December 1752. The cantata (GWV 1103/52) has the title “Gott der Herr der Mächtige redet (The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken)” and apart from the 10 bar opening tenor dictum to these words from the start of Psalm 50 and 3 recitatives, the remaining four movements are all scored for SATB, 2 horns, strings and continuo.
The chorale text is a verse from one of the earliest Lutheran hymns, Elisabeth Cruciger’s “Herr Christ, der einig Gotts Sohn (Lord Christ, God’s only dear Son)”:

3. Lass uns in Deiner Liebe
und Erkenntnis nehmen zu,
dass wir im Glauben bleiben
und dienen im Geist so,
dass wir hier mögen schmecken
Dein Süßigkeit im Herzen
und dürsten stets nach Dir.

Translation: Christopher J. Neuendorf (2014)
Let us in love adore Thee,
In Thy knowledge increase,
In spirit serve before Thee,
Nor from faith ever cease,
That here in earthly weakness
Our hearts may taste Thy sweetness,
Thirsting ever for Thee.

Graupner set this text at least 18 times over his career. The setting he composed for the 3rd Sunday in Advent 1752 was his penultimate. In fact I have already performed his final setting, a quite incredible work including 5 timpani for Trinity Sunday 1753: https://youtu.be/pzcbYHmn4zc
For the advent setting, Graupner turns to a style which he occasionally used to great effect over the years and also revisited a couple more times in his final cycle: stile antico. After a short introduction by the horns and strings the lower voices enter contrapuntally before the soprano, first horn and second violin kick off with the cantus firmus. But the horn cannot play notes 6 and 7 of the first phrase of Cruciger's melody and drops out after note 5. Graupner cleverly disguises this by having his first violins double the altos up an octave. However, it is not the case that the first violins and violas simply double a single vocal part throughout the work. Instead, Graupner shows his genius of orchestration by constantly switching them around between doubling the altos or tenors or even adding completely different notes which further thicken the texture from 4 to 5 part counterpoint. He also uses his second horn sparingly, but to full effect. Thanks to all this masterful part-writing I found that I hardly needed to add any phrasing at all in my rendition (normally a recipe for disaster when working with synthetic performances!) because Graupner has taken good care of the ebb and flow of the music with his contrapuntal brush-strokes. At the very end we find something very rare in Graupner’s vocal parts – a dynamic marking. For the final two notes to the words “nach Dir” Graupner calls for the lower voices to sing piano, bringing this fine mid-18th century homage to renaissance polyphony to a quiet conclusion.