Aspiring Toward Heaven: Tonal, Motivic, and Narrative Structure in 'Jesu, meine Freude' BWV 227

Jennifer Smith, Florida State University

J. S. Bach's motet, Jesu, meine Freude BWV 227, weaves shared tonal, structural, and motivic strands through each movement that relate expressively to its text, yielding a coherent narrative that describes the believer's earthly journey toward a spiritual state that is only achievable in death. In this paper, I will demonstrate the influence of these musical markers on the underlying narrative progression by providing a detailed Schenkerian treatment of the first two movements (the first segment of the narrative) in relation to the larger narrative structure of the work as a whole. This project begins to rectify the dearth of analytical literature on Bach's motets and also represents a unique synthesis of structural, motivic, and narrative analysis applied to a complex, multi-movement work from the late Baroque era.

The paper begins with a brief synopsis of the entire motet's narrative structure, citing the text source, key phrases, and thematic content for each of its eleven movements. Then, I discuss how the intense desire for spiritual transcendence and the steps taken to achieve it are expressed in the text and music of the first narrative segment, using Lawrence Zbikowski's extension of the conceptual integration network to music in order to illustrate how Bach's compositional choices, such as his selection of significant key areas and his treatment of primary motives, communicate the affect of the text and enhance the Lutheran theological narrative set out by its progression. In the next section of the paper, a Schenkerian approach to motivic parallelisms drives my more detailed exploration of how two of the primary motives from the opening chorale are composed-out in the second movement of the motet. I enrich my analysis by invoking Karl Braunschweig's notion of rhetorical types of phrase expansion (2004/2005) and Channan Willner's work on pacing (2005) in order to adumbrate Bach's unique method of communicating the sentiment of the chorale and biblical texts. I conclude the paper by summarizing the text/music interaction in the remainder of the motet in order to contextualize my work on the first two movements.