Crüger, Jesus, meine Zuversicht

Johann Crüger Praxis Pietatis Melica (1653/1668). The example comes from C. S. Terry, Bach's Chorals, Part II (1917), 412.

Here is a parsing of the intervals and lines. The assumption is Ionian mode with secondary emphasis (I am reluctant to call it dominant or reciting tone) on A (see *).

The strongly defined perfect interval frames for lines are common in modal melodies and in the early Lutheran chorales. If we need a focal tone, it would be C5 in the first phrase, with D5-C5 in the final cadence. The immediately preceding E5 is a simple expressive high note or "one note too far" of the kind I have seen in many 17th and 18th century melodies, songs, and dance-songs.

This is the melody Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145, in a four-voice chorale setting that is clearly Easter-related (Terry says the cantata was meant for Easter Tuesday).

There's a bit of Leipziger-style tone-painting in bar 4, where louring chromaticism in the bass is sparked by "Nacht" and "Tode" but note also that Bach really pushes the Resurrection ascent motif in the melody by rewriting it to expand to a 6th in bars 9-10. The chorale in its original text isn't obviously associated with Easter morning though it does mention Jesus as alive; the focus is on our death and on the final resurrection. Still, a setting by Christoph Graupner using the original first-verse text is dated April 1734 and a librarian's note indicates that it is meant for Easter Tuesday (the manuscript is in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt; see IMSLP for a digital copy).

The melody discussed above is the one Bach uses for the first movement of Cantata 145. Terry gives an alternate version from Crüger (from the 1653 edition? unclear). This was not used by Bach (or anyone else, to judge from scores I've collected so far) but is interesting because of its much stronger emphasis on the Ionian/Phrygian connection.

The last line parsed:

Two hymns from an 18th century service manual

"Das Grab ist leer, der Held erwacht" is an Easter hymn published in the Landshuter Gesangbuch in 1777. The editors of the volume were presumably responsible for the unsigned music and text: Norbert Hauner and Franz Seraph von Kohlbrenner. This hymn became quite popular and remained so through the nineteenth century. The version below is a duple meter variant published in 1874. The opening of the original triple-meter version is reproduced at the bottom of this post.

The design of the opening holds for the entire verse, in melodic shape a proto-background ^3-^8, as shown below (though possibly ^3-^5-^8, as suggested by the ^5 in parentheses), the line being a neighbor ^8-^7-^8, which might possibly be heard as a double neighbor figure depending on the details of a particular harmonization.

Below: The opening of the 1777 version, which clearly combines the heroic and pastoral topics. The F#5 in bar 6 is a hint of what follows (not shown), where I would find ^3 to be plausible focal tone.

Reference: Wikipedia page for "Das Grab ist leer": link.