Weekly Cantata

~ Memories, musings, and movie script fantasies inspired by Bach cantatas, along with recommendations for recordings

Weekly Cantata

Monthly Archives: February 2016

Bach in Leipzig

21 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by cantatasonmymind in Bach's life, Cantatas, Leipzig

≈ Comments Off on Bach in Leipzig

lzchurch

From left to right, the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, where the Bach family lived in a large apartment on the left side (or front, seen like this, with a view over the park), the St. Thomas Church right next to the School (with such a high roof and spire it could be seen from all over the city), and the St. Nicholas Church at walking distance. Bach’s cantatas were performed in both churches.

No discussion of Bach cantatas until Easter, because Bach did not write any cantatas for Lent (the 40 days before Easter). Read more about this in my post from last week.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) wrote most of his cantatas, motets, masses, and passions in Leipzig. He moved there on Saturday May 22, 1723.

Christoph Wolff includes this account of the event by a Hamburg newspaper in his The New Bach Reader: “This past Saturday at noon, four wagons loaded with household goods arrived here from Köthen; they belonged to the former Princely Kapellmeister there, now called to Leipzig as Cantor Figuralis. He himself arrived with his family on two carriages at 2 o’clock and moved into the newly renovated apartment in the St. Thomas School.”

By that time, Bach’s family consisted of:

his wife Anna Magdalena (he married her in Köthen in 1721 when she was 20 years old),

four children from his first wife Maria Barbara (she died in 1720).

one child from Anna Magdalena,

and most probably his sister-in-law Friedelena Margaretha Bach  (sister of his first wife Maria Barbara, who -according to Wolff- lived in the Bach household from at least 1709 at age 34 to her death in 1729. I will probably write an entire post about all the stories and non-stories about Bach’s wives soon, but let’s just leave it at this for now, here :-)). That her last name is also Bach is because these sisters were Bach’s second cousins.

Until 1742, Anna Magdalena and Johann Sebastian would have 12 more children in Leipzig, of which they would lose six. They would also take some nephews under their wings (a normal thing to do in the extended Bach family—Bach himself had lived with a relative after his parents died) and have a mind-boggling number of private students.

Leipzig was a bustling town, the second largest in the region, with a highly regarded university as well as three annual trade fairs, which brought merchants, artists, and tourists from all over Europe to the city. It happened most probably during one of these fairs that Leipzig instrument maker J.H. Eichentopf came into contact with some eastern instruments on which he based the concept of the oboe da caccia he developed around the time of Bach’s arrival in the city, and which Bach used in many compositions, such as cantata 65. The only thing the city didn’t have was an opera house. The one in Dresden was about 112 kilometers, or 70 miles, or a day’s travel away. The other famous one, in Hamburg, was almost three times as far away.

In addition to teaching the boys of the St. Thomas School in music and many other subjects, Bach was to supply music for all Sundays and church feast days in both the St. Thomas and St. Nicholas churches. No-one had specified that these had to be cantatas. A simpler form of composition would probably have suited the council better, as many of the members opposed the Italian, operatic style of some of the arias, or the French character of many of the opening sinfonias. If Bach would sometimes have programmed music by other composers, that would not have been a problem either.* It was his own choice to write a new cantata for every Sunday, most probably driven by a strong desire, a promise to himself (or “life goal,” as he calls it when moving from Mühlhausen to Weimar) to change the concept of church music, glorifying God but also educating the congregation in Lutheran theology. And as far as we know now, he kept that promise, writing a new cantata every week, for almost three full years.

The churches would be full, with one to three thousand (!) people attending the services. But however large in number, the congregation did not necessarily form a captive audience. Many of them, especially the women, seated in the main, “ground floor” section of pews, would arrive late and make quite an entrance, taking time to greet their neighbors, and making sure to get the attention of the men who were sitting in the balconies. The men would sometimes throw the 18th-century equivalent of paper airplanes to the women to catch their attention. Upper class families had their own boxes, or “chapels” in the church, and were often laughing and talking very loudly in them.

In another part of his Leipzig life, Bach had more attentive audiences in “Zimmermann’s,” one of the six coffee houses in Leipzig, where he lead the Collegium Musicum of the university in performances of instrumental music and secular cantatas. They performed at least once a week on Wednesdays, and twice a week during the three annual trade fairs. At first Bach was principal guest conductor, from 1729 he was the director of this elite ensemble of virtuoso instrumentalists. It is safe to say that even though he owned an entire library of theological books and was committed to teaching his “neighbor” through his church music, he composed and performed as much (and maybe more!) instrumental and secular music in Leipzig as he did sacred music.

To read more, I highly recommend Christoph Wolff’s The New Bach Reader and John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.

Wieneke Gorter, February 21, 2016, updated February 20, 2021

*After a while, Bach did indeed perform music by other composers. Read more about this in a background article I wrote for California Bach Society’s blog, here.

The order of things

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by cantatasonmymind in Cantatas

≈ Comments Off on The order of things

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My mother, Weia Gorter-Assink (1946-2010) with my first-born, December 2002

One of the main reasons I started this blog was to honor my late musician/teacher mother, and to continue her legacy of playing the appropriate Bach cantata every Sunday. In the church newsletter she would look up what Sunday it was, and then she would open the little red book by Alfred Dürr (it actually consisted of two Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag books at the time, nowadays available as one single book in English or in German), and look up which cantatas Bach wrote for that Sunday. Then she would look through her collection of Leonhardt/Harnoncourt LPs (vinyl records), and if she had a recording, she would put it on the turn table, and read along in the score that came with the LP/vinyl record.

My mom’s routine of checking the church newsletter or doing her own calculations *before* she checked the Dürr book is crucial here. Because there are three Sundays before Lent (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima/Estomihi), and they override the Sundays after Epiphany. If Easter is late, there can be as many as six Sundays after Epiphany (though we only have surviving Bach cantatas for the first four of those), if Easter is early (as is the case this year) there are only two Sundays after Epiphany.

This means that my post this year about cantata 3 was still correct, my next two posts (about 72 & 73, and about the operatic cantata 81) were irrelevant for this year, I should have posted about cantata 144 on Sunday January 24 instead of last week, and in the two weeks between then and now I should have introduced you to the fantastic portrayal of rain and snow in cantata 18, followed by some of Bach’s most magnificent choral writing in cantata 23.

Wieneke Gorter, February 13, 2016

Dutch memories, Dutch discoveries

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by cantatasonmymind in Cantatas, Leipzig, Septuagesima

≈ Comments Off on Dutch memories, Dutch discoveries

Tags

Bach, BWV 144, cantatas, English Baroque Soloists, J.S. Bach Foundation, John Eliot Gardiner, Miah Persson, Nuria Rial, Septuagesima, Wilke te Brummelstoete

Opnamedatum:  2012-04-06
Parabel of the Laborers in the Vineyard by Jan Luyken, print, 1703

A number of Dutch things converged for me when writing this post. Whenever I think about the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Bible story for this Septuagesima Sunday, or the third Sunday before Lent, I see the windows of my 3rd or 4th grade classroom.* I also have to think of my late grandfather reading this story from the Bible.  Quickly summarized, this story is: A landlord pays all his laborers equally, no matter how many hours they worked. Those that worked all day object.

My favorite recording of cantata 144 Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin (first performed on Sunday February 6, 1724) turns out to have two connections to my home country: It was recorded in the Grote Kerk in Naarden, during the Bach Pilgrimage tour of Gardiner/English Baroque Soloists, and it features Dutch singer Wilke te Brummelstoete as alto soloist. Counter-tenor fan that I am, I can safely state that I will mention no more than a handful of female altos on this blog each year, so this is pretty special.

Naarden, The Netherlands

The icing on the cake is the illustration I discovered when searching for a good picture to go with this blog post: an etching by Haarlem artist Jan Luyken as published in the Amsterdam Mortierbijbel (Bible published by Pieter Mortier) in 1703, from the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Listen to John Eliot Gardiner’s recording of cantata 144 on Spotify

Listen to John Eliot Gardiner’s recording of cantata 144 on Youtube

Soloists: Miah Persson, soprano; Wilke te Brummelstroete, alto;
James Oxley, tenor; Jonathan Brown, bass.

As I’m updating this post on February 8, 2020, the J.S. Bach Foundation has just released their entire live video recording of this cantata, and that one is wonderful too, especially because Nuria Rial sings the soprano aria. Find that video here on YouTube. Soloists are Nuria Rial, soprano; Markus Forster, alto; Raphael Höhn, tenor.

Read the German text with English translation of cantata 144

Find the score of cantata 144 here

What to listen for in cantata 144 Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin:

In the opening chorus: the illustration of the text gehe hin, gehe hin! (off you go!) with ascending figures, each gehe hin “retaken” so that the text really leaps off the page, more on the Gardiner recording than on other ones. Also listen how beautifully the sopranos and violins enhance each other’s sound in this movement. That happens too on the J.S. Bach Foundation recording.

In the alto aria:  The illustration of the grumbling workers by the repeated 8th-notes in the strings. The music on the text “Murre nicht” (Don’t grumble) is always low, the music with the text “Lieber Christ” (please note that this means “dear Christian,” not “dear Christ”) always goes up. Very well done in an appropriate style by Wilke te Brummelstoete on the Gardiner recording.

In the soprano aria: the glorification of the “Genügsamkeit” (being satisfied with what you have, a concept that must have been very important to Bach), and the wonderful voice of soprano Miah Persson on the Gardiner recording or the always radiant Nuria Rial on the J.S. Bach Foundation recording. Read more about Miah Persson in my blog post about cantata 179 and those about cantatas 186 and 186a. Read more about Nuria Rial in my posts about Cantata 36 and Cantata 89.

Thank you for reading! Please leave your email address in the “follow this blog” section on the left side of this blog post. You will receive an email by WordPress whenever I have posted a new story. Please note that the choice of words and spelling in their confirmation email is by WordPress, not me. My apologies for that, and many thanks to you for your patience while I work on a more elegant solution!

To support this blog, please consider purchasing Gardiner’s album featuring cantata 144 on Amazon. I receive a small percentage of every sale made through this link. And it would be so fun if someone would actually buy a CD through this link. So far (February 13, 2020), it hasn’t happened 😉 Thank you!

Wieneke Gorter, February 6, 2016, updated February 8 and 13, 2020.

*Though a protestant school, it was pretty moderate in its teachings, and I don’t really remember Bible reading in the classroom. However, we learned a hymn every week and the reason I have to think of the classroom when reading this parable probably has to do with the hymn “De eersten zijn de laatsten” (The first will be the last) which is based on this same story.

Recent Posts

  • First Two Days in Bach Land
  • Daily Posts this Week: Traveling to the Bach Towns
  • Memorable for at least 47 days. Leave it to Alex Potter.
  • Bach and the Weather
  • February 2: Simeon’s Prophecy

Archives

  • April 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 319 other subscribers

Categories

  • 1723 Trinity season special series
  • Advent
  • After Easter
  • Ascension
  • Bach's life
  • Cantatas
  • Chorale cantatas 1724/1725
  • Christmas
  • Easter
  • Epiphany
  • Following Bach in 1725
  • Köthen
  • Leipzig
  • Septuagesima
  • Trinity
  • Weimar

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Weekly Cantata
    • Join 110 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Weekly Cantata
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...