It starts with a good one and a half measures of silence before the trumpets set in with brief interjections, accompanied contrapuntally by the timpani and bass instruments. A dialogical interplay of silence and sound is established and repeated three times, setting the course for the rest of the piece. But why, in this manner, does Bach turn the final choral of the first cantata of the Christmas Oratorio into a fragment, a part of a whole in which the other parts are absent? Is it a reminder that in the moments of silence, a choral movement is supposed to be ringing out to the melody of Martin Luther's Vom Himmel hoch? Or is it a frame demanding to be filled: the time musically divided into measures, the film of a basic key, a harmonic course or the gestures of the trumpets, responding to that which rang out before?

Dr Takt's excerpts to Bach's Christmas Oratorio No. 9