Easter Oratorio

The Easter Oratorio (Latin: Oratorium Festo Paschali; German: Oster-Oratorium), BWV 249, is an oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach. He wrote an autograph score in Leipzig in 1738 under this title, matching his Christmas Oratorio and Ascension Oratorio. Bach had already composed the work in 1725, when he used most of its music for two compositions, the congratulatory Shepherd Cantata, BWV 249a (BWV 249.1), and a church cantata for Easter Sunday, Kommt, gehet und eilet ('Come, go and hurry'), BWV 249.3, that later became the oratorio. Both works are musical dramas involving characters: in the secular cantata two shepherds and two shepherdesses, and in the Easter cantata four Biblical figures from the Easter narratives in the Gospel of Luke and other Evangelists.

Bach performed the Shepherd Cantata on 23 February 1725 for his patron Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels. Its text was written by Picander, in his first documented collaboration with Bach. Picander may also have adapted his text for the Easter cantata that Bach first performed on Easter Sunday, 1 April 1725, in both a morning service at the Nikolaikirche and a vespers service at the Thomaskirche.

In 1738, Bach revised the Easter cantata as the Easter Oratorio, BWV 249.4. He wrote an autograph manuscript of the score with the title Oratorium Festo Paschali (Easter Oratorio), made minor changes to the text and music, and assigned the music to four voice parts instead of characters. This version is also known as Kommt, eilet und laufet ('Come, hasten and run'). Uniquely among Bach's oratorios, it features no original Biblical text, no Evangelist narrator, and no chorale, due to its history as dramatic music.

The work is structured in eleven movements. Two contrasting instrumental movements are followed by a duet for tenor and bass, assigned in the cantata to two disciples running to the tomb of Jesus, where they meet two women who followed Jesus (soprano and alto). The middle movements are alternating recitatives in which the characters mostly engage in conversation, and arias, in which three of them express their emotions, facing the empty tomb and then the news that Jesus is risen. The final movement is a chorus of praise and thanksgiving. The music is scored festively with a Baroque instrumental ensemble of three trumpets, timpani, two oboes, oboe d'amore, bassoon, two recorders, flauto traverso (only in the oratorio version), strings and continuo.

In the 1740s, Bach again revised the work (BWV 249.5), which he seems to have regarded highly. He arranged the third movement partly for choir, whereas in earlier versions the choir sang only in the final movement. He performed the oratorio once more in 1749, the year before his death.

Early Bach scholars, beginning with his biographer Philipp Spitta, were critical of the Easter Oratorio because of its libretto and its character as a musical drama. When the relation to the Shepherd Cantata was discovered in 1940, criticism of the parody music was added. In more recent studies, Christoph Wolff evaluates it as a skillful transformation "from theatrical into devotional music", and Markus Rathey sees the oratorio as a sequel to the St John Passion, "continuing the dramatic narrative but also its theological and musical interpretation".