AUS DER TIEFE RUFE ICH / I CRY TO THEE, O LORD

The chorale prelude is a genre that engages with a verbal text, even though the text itself remains unspoken. Bach takes a church hymn known to every parishioner of the Lutheran church and leads its melody through the organ voices. Thus, the faithful, listening to Bach's work, heard very specific messages behind it—the prelude gives voice to a psalm. However, even in a concert hall outside a religious context, the music remains so expressive that it can move listeners without any words.

The program is built between two psalms. It opens with "Aus der Tiefe rufe ich"—Luther's paraphrase of the 130th Psalm, "Out of the depths I cry to Thee." It closes with Julius Reubke's Sonata on the 94th Psalm, the sharpest text of the evening: an appeal to a God who sees injustice.

The five Bach chorales in the first part are drawn from different collections and different decades. "Herr Gott, nun schleuß den Himmel auf" and "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" come from the "Little Organ Book," where each piece fits into a minute and a half and contains not a single extra note. In "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland," the upper voice melody is entwined with ornamentation while the bass steps steadily beneath it. "Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter" comes from the Schübler Chorales, transcriptions of Bach's own cantata movements.

The chorales of 19th-century composers continue this idea while demonstrating a different style and writing technique. César Franck's Third Chorale was the composer's last completed work, written a few weeks before his death; it contains no church chorale—Franck composes his own theme and treats it as a chorale. Reubke's Sonata belongs to a twenty-four-year-old student of Liszt who died a year after its completion. Its sections correspond to specific verses of the 94th Psalm, and these lines are written right into the score. Thus, the evening moves from music that assumes a knowledge of the text by heart to music where the text is formed by the composition of the work itself.