Georg Andreas Sorge, Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr (reconstruction)

by admin · February 13, 2022

After my (in my opinion) succesful restoration of an incomplete choral prelude by Georg Andreas Sorge (see here and here I wanted to try another one.

On the last page of manuscript Go. S. 597, owned by the library of Dresden, a fragment of a choral prelude is notated of somewhere in the middle of the complete composition. The beginning is missing and the end is missing. And since the beginning is missing, the title is missing as well, so it is not immediately clear to which choral melody this prelude belongs.

And to be able to finish this incomplete composition, I first need to know to which chorale this prelude actually belongs. Luckily, that first part of the puzzle was actually quite easy to solve. I’ve played in church services for years and kept on playing chorale preludes long after I quit being a church organist. So, I am familiar with quite a lot of melodies used in the church services of Christian religions.

The picture above (Figure 1) shows bottom half of the manuscript page. From the complete page it is clear that this melody has two or more lines that are repeated. And from the fragment shown it is clear that the melody after the repetition moves from G major to a minor. There are very few melodies with this last characteristic. Combined with the ternary rythm, this melody fragment is immediately recognisable as part of the melody of “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr”. And the complete melody goes like this:

The blue box indicates the melody fragment that is also visible in the two systems of the manuscript shown above (Figure 1). The two upper systems on the manuscript page show the last note of the first fragment of the melody and the complete second fragment of the melody, the last 4 bars before the repeat. And if you look closely, you’ll see that this last fragment before the repeat is identical to the last fragment of the complete melody. So, we have 5 melody fragments in total, two are present in Sorge’s original and one can be repeated at the end. Therefore, I have to come up with new material for two fragments of the melody, the first and the fourth.

But that is not all. Sorge starts his choral preludes usually with a long introduction of 4 to 8 bars. And that introduction is missing in the maniscript and must be composed anew. Sorge rarely repeats his introduction completely in the rest of the piece, but elements or motives from the introduction often do appear in the rest of the piece in the music played between the fragments of the choral melody. In the manuscript two of such short intermezzi are present in the upper two systems on this manuscript page. I’ve indicated them with a green box:

One characteristic immediately stands out: the bass line is chromatic. And it could well be that Sorge wrote his introduction with that same characteristic. So I should write an introduction featuring this same chromatic bass line. And there is one further clue. The last bar before the repeat (the green box in figure 1) leads back to the first fragment of the choral melody. So it is safe to assume that the last bar of the introduction is identical to that bar. The ‘recipe’ for the introduction is therefore: 8 bars long chromatic bass line, last bar identical to the green box in figure 1. I came up with this:

The blue box indicates the chromatic bit, the green box is identical to the green box in Figure 1 and the introduction is indeed 8 bars long. I’ll come to the dark gray box in a minute.

Now the rest should be relatively straightforward: write an accompaniment for the first fragment of the choral melody, the fourth segment of the choral melody, repeat the second fragment at the end of the piece and create a short coda.

However, there was one thing nagging me about this strategy. And that is that by far the most preludes based on the melody of “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr” that I know, the second fragment of the melody is not just simply repeated at the end of the piece. There is always a bit a variation. And that is also the case in the prelude on this melody in another manuscript that was presumably written by Sorge.

If I just repeat the second fragment, it would not be very ideomatic for the time Sorge lived in and presumably not idiomatic for Sorge’s own writing. The reason for the variation almost every composer employs is a bit technical. The fourth fragment of the melody ends with the note b, which could be harmonized with a B major chord, or a seventh chord, which (and here’s the technical bit) would be the dominant of e minor, the paralel minor tonality of G major. It’is therefore an ideal spot to create some harmonic tension and hardly any composer passes the opportunity.

My recipe for that part of the composition therefore became: end the fourth line on the dominant of e minor, start the fifth line in sort of e minor and pick up Sorge harmonization of the rest of that fragment as soon as possible. The result is:

That the dark gray box in Figure 5 closely resembles the dark gray box in Figure 4 is of course no coincidence. Remember: use elements or motives from the introduction in the rest of the composition.

The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Sonus Paradisi, of the Schittger organ in the St. Martini-kerk, Groningen.

Score
Sorge, Allein Gott in der Hoh sei Ehr (2)