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. Chorales Like for most of his German-language church music, Bach used Lutheran hymns, and their Lutheran chorale tunes, in his Christmas Oratorio. The first chorale tune appears in the 5th movement of Part I: it is the tune known as Herzlich tut mich verlangen, that is, the same hymn tune which Bach used in his St Matthew Passion for setting several stanzas of Paul Gerhardt's "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("O Sacred Head, Now Wounded"). The same melody reappears in the last movement of the oratorio (No. 64, closing chorale of Part VI). In the oratorio there is, however, no association with the pain and suffering evoked in the Passion. 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. A well-known English version of that stanza is "Oh, my dear heart, young Jesus sweet", the first stanza of "Balulalow", as, for instance, sung by Sting: The Christmas Oratorio is exceptional in that it contains a few hymn settings, or versions of hymn tunes, for which there is no known earlier source than Bach's composition: The chorale melody used in No. 33 of the oratorio appears to be based on Georg Ebeling's 1666 "Warum sollt ich mich denn grämen" hymn tune. The Zahn number of Ebeling's original is 6456a. Bach's Christmas Oratorio version of the tune is Zahn 6462, first printed in 1769 as No. 143 in the second volume of Bach's four-part chorales published by Birnstiel. No. 38 and 40 set the first stanza of Johann Rist's "Jesu, du mein liebstes Leben" hymn text: the setting is Bach's – it is not based on any known pre-existing hymn tune. The tune used for Johann Rist's "Hilf, Herr Jesu, lass gelingen" hymn text in No. 42 of the oratorio appears to be an original composition by Bach. It is mentioned as such in the last volume of Johannes Zahn's , as first of four late additions to his catalogue of German Evangelical hymn tunes. There are very few known hymn tunes by Bach (he used Lutheran