Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring

The movement closes Bach's cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147, written for Leipzig in 1723. The chorale melody the choir sings is not his. Johann Schop wrote that tune in 1642. Bach's contribution is the part everybody hums, a line of rolling triplets that winds around the chorale from the first bar to the last and never stops moving.

Its fame outside church owes a great deal to Myra Hess, whose 1926 piano transcription is how most of the world met the piece. She played it through the war at the lunchtime concerts she ran in London's emptied National Gallery, and from there it went onto recital programs, wedding orders of service and a very large number of piano benches.

The 9/8 on this page is a renotation, not a rewrite. Bach writes the line as triplets over common time. Three rolling threes to a bar says the same thing with less ink and fewer numbers over the beams, and it matches how a player counts the line anyway.

On a mandolin it is a line of even eighths and nothing else: no chords to grab, no double stops, no shifting. All of it sits in first position, from the open D up to the high g at the third fret of the E course. What makes it hard is keeping the notes even. Three to a beat with no accent poking out of the middle of a group is harder than it looks with a pick, which wants to lean on every downstroke, and with nothing else going on the tune shows up a bump right away. The held g at the end is the breath the whole line has been walking toward.