A chorale is the name of several related musical forms originating in the music genre of the Lutheran chorale:

The chorale originated when Martin Luther translated sacred songs into the vernacular language (German), contrary to the established practice of church music near the end of the first quarter of the 16th century. The first hymnals according to Luther's new method were published in 1524. Luther and his followers not only wrote metrical hymn lyrics, but also composed metrical musical settings for these texts. This music was partially based on established melodies of church hymns and known secular songs. In the 17th century the repertoire was enriched with more choral and organ settings of the chorale tunes. By the end of the century a four-part setting for SATB voices had become the standard for the choral settings, while the congregational singing of chorales was tending towards monody with an instrumental accompaniment. The prolific creation of new Lutheran chorale tunes ended around that time.

The cantata genre, originally consisting only of recitatives and arias, was introduced into Lutheran church services in the early 18th century. The format was soon expanded with choral movements in the form of four-part chorales. Composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel often placed these chorales as the concluding movement of their church compositions. The chorale finale was emulated in more secular genres such as Romantic 19th-century symphonies. Other composers of that era, such as Franck, expanded the repertoire of the organ chorale, also emulating what late Baroque composers such as Bach had produced more than a century before. Entirely new chorale compositions became rare after the Romantic era, but by that time the four-part harmonization technique, as exemplified in four-part chorales, had become part of the canon of Western music.

In German, the word Choral may as well refer to Protestant congregational singing as to other forms of vocal (church) music, including Gregorian chant. The English word which derived from this German term, that is chorale, however almost exclusively refers to the musical forms that originated in the German Reformation.

The bulk of Lutheran hymn texts and chorale melodies was created before the end of the 17th century.

Johann Pachelbel's Erster Theil etlicher Choräle, a set of organ chorales, was published in the last decade of the 17th century. Johann Sebastian Bach's earliest extant compositions, works for organ which he possibly wrote before his fifteenth birthday, include the chorales BWV 700, 724, 1091, 1094, 1097, 1112, 1113 and 1119.

In the early 18th century Erdmann Neumeister introduced the cantata format, originally consisting exclusively of recitatives and arias, in Lutheran liturgical music. Within a few years, the format was combined with other pre-existing liturgical formats such as the chorale concerto, resulting in church cantatas that consisted of free poetry, for instance used in recitatives and arias, dicta and/or hymn-based movements: the Sonntags- und Fest-Andachten cantata libretto cycle, published in Meiningen in 1704, contained such extended cantata texts. The chorale cantata, called per omnes versus (through all verses) when its libretto was an entire unmodified Lutheran hymn, was also a format modernised from earlier types. Dieterich Buxtehude composed six per omnes versus chorale settings. BWV 4, an early Bach-cantata composed in 1707, is in this same format. Later, for his 1720s second cantata cycle, Bach developed a chorale cantata format where the inner movements paraphrased (rather than quoted) text of the inner verses of the hymn on which the cantata was based.

Each of the Meiningen cantata librettos contained a single chorale-based movement, on which it ended. Composers of the first half of the 18th century, such as Bach, Stölzel and Georg Philipp Telemann, often closed a cantata with a four-part chorale setting, whether or not the libretto of the cantata already contained verses of a Lutheran hymn. Bach set several of the Meiningen librettos in 1726, and Stölzel expanded the librettos of Benjamin Schmolck's Saitenspiel cycle with a closing chorale for each half cantata, when he set that cycle in the early 1720s. Two of such closing chorales by Telemann inadvertently ended up in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV): the fifth movements of the cantatas BWV 218 and 219, in the catalogue of Telemann's vocal works adopted as Nos. 1:634/5 and 1:1328/5 respectively. These closing chorales almost always conformed to these formal characteristics: