[3] The first part (for Christmas Day) describes the birth of Jesus; the second (for 26 December) the annunciation to the shepherds; the third (for 27 December) the adoration of the shepherds; the fourth (for New Year's Day) the circumcision and naming of Jesus; the fifth (for the first Sunday after New Year) the journey of the Magi; and the sixth (for Epiphany) the adoration of the Magi.

It included at least three feast days that called for festive music during religious services: apart from Christmas (Nativity of Christ) and Epiphany (Visit of the Magi) the period also included New Year's Day (1 January), in Bach's time still often referred to as the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.

is believed to be from a similarly lost source, and the chorus from the same section "Wo ist der neugeborne König" is from the 1731 St Mark Passion, BWV 247.

[48] Martin Luther's 1539 "Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her" melody appears in three chorales: twice on a text by Paul Gerhardt in Part II of the oratorio, and the first time, in the closing chorale of Part I, with the 13th stanza of Luther's hymn as text.

First performances: The ease with which the new text fits the existing music is one of the indications of how successful a parody the Christmas Oratorio is of its sources.

[72] Nevertheless, on two occasions Bach abandoned the original plan and was compelled to write new music for the Christmas Oratorio.

The third major new piece of writing (with the notable exception of the recitatives), the sublime pastoral Sinfonia which opens Part II, was composed from scratch for the new work.

7 of part I ("Er ist auf Erden kommen arm") and even more ingeniously in the recitatives nos.

Until 1999 the only complete English version of the Christmas Oratorio was that prepared in 1874 by John Troutbeck for the music publisher Novello.

Bach abandoned his usual practice when writing church cantatas of basing the content upon the Gospel reading for that day in order to achieve a coherent narrative structure.

Were he to have followed the calendar, the story would have unfolded as follows: This would have resulted in the Holy Family fleeing before the Magi had arrived, which was unsuitable for an oratorio evidently planned as a coherent whole.

Bach removed the content for the Third Day of Christmas (27 December), John's Gospel, and split the story of the two groups of visitors—Shepherds and Magi—into two.

This resulted in a more understandable exposition of the Christmas story: The Flight into Egypt takes place after the end of the sixth part.

That Bach saw the six parts as comprising a greater, unified whole is evident both from the surviving printed text and from the structure of the music itself.

As John Butt has mentioned,[74] this points, as in the Mass in B minor, to a unity beyond the performance constraints of the church year.

To reinforce this connection, between the beginning and the end of the work, Bach re-uses the chorale melody of Part I's "Wie soll ich dich empfangen" in the final chorus of Part VI, "Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen"; this choral melody is the same as of "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden", which Bach used five times in his St Matthew Passion.

Recitative (bass) Wer will die Liebe recht erhöhn In Göran Tunström's 1983 Swedish novel Juloratoriet (The Christmas Oratorio) and its 1996 film version, Bach's work is important for the leading characters.