LDV302

This analysis also holds true for Durch Adams Fall ; the musical source is no longer either religious or Latin, but of popular origin (a song about the Battle of Pavia), but the same contrapuntal asceticism (in the manner of Scheidt or Pachelbel) is attached to the implicit textual message: everything has been corrupted by the fall of Adam, as is suggested by a depressive discourse, further underlined here by use of the appropriate registers. As if the interpreter were doubling the typology of language with that of timbre, while showing how, in Bach, ‘the intensity of a thought which aspires to express itself openly and in all sincerity, and sometimes as it stands, is detrimental to the purely musical beauty of his works’. 10 In figural style, the chorale Wir glauben all an einen Gott also shows the influence of Renaissance vocal forms - naturally the most appropriate in this case. The female choir carries the cantus firmus , in a sort of psalmody of the verses of this German Credo, with its very regular phrase construction. In the same figural genre, the chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr applies the canonic style to a melody based on a Gloria in plainchant for Eastertide. 32 BACH_TE DEUM / DE PROFUNDIS 10.A. Schweitzer, op.cit., p. 218