Evangelienmotetten

Evangelienmotetten or Gospel motets (sometimes called Spruchmotetten, "Bible-text motets") were settings to music of verses from the New Testament. They were selected as an essence or Kernspruch ("text-kernel") of the verses in question, with the intention of highlighting dramatically or summarising in a terse fashion a significant thought from the Gospels.

There is a long tradition in Germany, dating back to the medieval era, of highlighting the importance of gospel readings through polyphonic musical settings of gospel texts. They became an increasingly popular genre from the 16th century onwards and were intended for use in Lutheran church services. They could thus be written in either Latin or German. The latter came to predominate by the end of the 16th century due to the emphasis placed by the Reformation on the need to make the Bible accessible to all people through the use of the vernacular language.

During the late 16th and early 17th centuries a number of composers drew on Gospel readings for an entire church year's worth of Sundays and feast days to create complete cycles of motets. Their text comprised phrases or paraphrases from the narrative readings or sometimes only the dialogue passages. A fashion for the latter prompted the development in Germany of the dramatic concertato dialogue from the 1620s onward. Composers of Gospel motet cycles included Leonhard Päminger, Johann Wanning, Andreas Raselius, Christoph Demantius, Thomas Elsbeth, Melchior Vulpius and Melchior Franck, whose work was gathered into collections by printers.

Gospel motets were the principal musical piece in the liturgy of the Mass, serving to enhance the reading of the Gospel lesson of the day immediately before the performance. By the later 17th century they were increasingly replaced by concertatos supplemented with arias and chorales and after 1700 by the cantata, which not only highlighted biblical passages but interpreted them as well. The genre fell out of general fashion by the early 18th century but was still in demand for use in funerals, as evidenced by the composition of motets by Johann Sebastian Bach for such ceremonies. Bach wrote for the function of enhancing the prescribed gospel reading several cycles of cantatas for all occasions of the liturgical year.

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