Lutheran chorale

[2] He composed melodies for some hymns himself, such as "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"), and even a few harmonized settings.

The German word Choral, which was originally used to describe Latin plainchant melodies, was first applied to the Lutheran hymn only in the later sixteenth century.

[7] Composers of tunes for Lutheran hymns, or who adopted such tunes in their compositions:[8] Chorales also appear in chorale preludes, pieces generally for organ originally designed to be played immediately before the congregational singing of the hymn, but developed into an autonomous genre by north-German composers of the middle and late 17th century, particularly Dieterich Buxtehude.

The musicologist Carl von Winterfeld published three volumes of Der evangelische Kirchengesang und sein Verhältniss zur Kunst des Tonsatzes (Evangelical church-song and its relation to the art of composition) from 1843 to 1847.

[11] Johannes Zahn published Die Melodien der deutschen evangelischen Kirchenlieder (the tunes of the German Evangelical hymns) in six volumes from 1889 to 1893.

The third stanza of the eponymous chorale in Johann Sebastian Bach 's setting as the final movement of his chorale cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme , BWV 140
The autograph of Bach's chorale prelude on the hymn " Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern ", BWV 739