Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt

Today is the First Sunday in Advent.

Being all out of "Advent pieces" to play, I chose this "substitute" chorale.

"Durch Adams Fall ist ganz verderbt" gives the story of the original sin of Adam and Eve, and the redemption of the world through the birth of the Savior.

In this version, I've done the piece twice, the first of the two being the more "delicate," and the second grander, using a fairly large plenum. The second setting begins at around 3:02 of the combined upload.

Johann Gottfried Walther (18 September 1684 – 23 March 1748) was a German music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer of the Baroque era.

Walther was born at Erfurt. Not only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to that of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the famous composer's cousin.

Walther was most well known as the compiler of the Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), an enormous dictionary of music and musicians. Not only was it the first dictionary of musical terms written in the German language, it was the first to contain both terms and biographical information about composers and performers up to the early 18th century.

Walther was the music teacher of Prince Johann Ernst von Sachsen-Weimar. As an organ composer, Walther became famous for his organ transcriptions of orchestral concertos by contemporary Italian and German masters. He made 14 transcriptions of concertos by Albinoni, Gentili, Taglietti, Giuseppe Torelli, Vivaldi and Telemann. These works were the models for Bach to write his famous transcriptions of concertos by Vivaldi and others. On the other hand, Walther as a city organist of Weimar wrote exactly 132 organ preludes based on Lutheran chorale melodies. Some free keyboard music also belongs to his legacy.

The score is attached below, as well as a likeness of Walther.

The full translation of the chorale is given in the First Comment.