ABSTRACT
Composers of Protestant church music have always considered the polyphonic arrangement o£ the Protestant chorale their main task. This polyphony reaches its climax in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. No composer before or after him possessed a closer relationship to the chorale; hardly another composer blended his work so intimately into it. At a time when composers begin to lose their interest in the chorale arrangement, Bach does not grow tired of arranging it in constantly new formal patterns. While Bach's contemporaries frequently observe a noticeable distance to the given church tune in their chorale arrangements, Bach amalgamates it with his composition in the closest possible way. With Philipp Spitta (II, 991) we find this to be a genuinely Protestant feature in Bach, "when he treats the chorale tune with great freedom."
