Monthly Archives: November 2016

Many things to be proud of

26 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by in Advent, Cantatas, Leipzig, Weimar

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giotto-entry-into-jerusalem

The Entry into Jerusalem by Giotto, ca. 1305. Fresco in the Scrovengni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Bach performed this cantata 61 Nun komm der Heiden Heiland in Leipzig on November 28, 1723, as a “rerun” of the first performance in Weimar in 1714. Why did he not write a new cantata? The prevailing scholarly answer is that Bach was giving himself a break from composing in between the three-week frenzy of cantatas 60, 90, and 70 and the new works (including a Magnificat) he was planning for the Christmas days.  I think Bach was proud of his Weimar cantatas, and I believe he wanted to show off the special features in this cantata to his colleagues and to the thousands of Lutherans that he knew would flock to the Leipzig churches on holidays.

I myself am proud of having followed Bach’s cantata writing of 1723 every week for the entire Trinity season. After all this listening and reading, I see a pattern in Bach reviving some of his Weimar cantatas on Leipzig feast days*, and I now look at cantata 61 Nun komm der Heiden Heiland in a new way.

This cantata had already been in my top five because of the moving interpretation of the soprano aria by Seppi Kronwitter (soprano) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cello) on the Harnoncourt recording from 1976. My mother loved this aria and played this recording many times, and I have fond memories of listening to it with her.

Harnoncourt-cello

I had always found the bass recitative that precedes it very charming, with the musical illustration of the knocking on the door, but not more than that.  I had seen this recitative in the context of all the Bach cantatas and passions that I knew, and had compared it with other typical Bach “Vox Christi” writing for bass. But those were all written after November 28, 1723.  So now, after having tried to place myself in the shoes of the Leipzig congregations for the entire 1723 Trinity season, I am fully aware that they had not heard a “Vox Christi” at all in any of the cantatas leading up to this one.** And thus I finally realize how it must not have been charming, but truly moving to them to hear this announcement presented in this way, on the first Sunday they started looking forward to the birth of Christ.

In the text of the recitative, Jesus says: “See, I am in front of your door! I’m knocking!” The librettist means the door of the believer’s heart, in which he’s planning to live. The pizzicato in the strings, as well as the staccato and the intervals in the voice part illustrate the knocking, and the dissonances at the beginning only resolve until the final “klopfe an.” The form of this recitative is highly unusual, and perhaps also something Bach wanted to show off in Leipzig.

However Bach’s greatest source of pride was probably the opening chorus of this cantata. To understand this, we need to do a mini music history class. First, in the 4th century, Ambrosius created the hymn Veni Redemptor Gentium, beautifully sung here on this video by Giovanni Vianini, director of the Schola Gregoriana Mediolanensis in Milan, Italy. Then, in 1524, Luther turned that hymn into Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, which sounds like this and which all Lutherans in Bach’s time knew very well.

In Weimar Bach had come into contact with French and Italian court music, and had adopted the habit of writing almost every opening chorus or opening sinfonia of his cantatas as a royal “entrada,” to show off his skills in French ouverture writing as well as to please the Duke.

So now Bach needed/wanted to merge the timeless hymn with a fashionable French ouverture. And the result is stunning. Or, as Eduard van Hengel says: Bach wrote “brilliant fusion” at the age of 29. Listen to this in the recording by Philippe Herreweghe on YouTube (Sybilla Rubens, soprano; Christoph Prégardien, tenor; Peter Kooij, bass).

Find the German text with English translations here and the score here.

The first line of the hymn is sung one voice part at a time, an illustration of the Bible reading for this Sunday: the people greeting the messiah who is riding into Jerusalem. The second line is then sung as a simple four-part hymn, while the instrumental parts keep playing the first part of the ouverture. The third line becomes a mini motet in the fast and happy (“Gai”) middle part of the ouverture, in 3/4. 

The fourth line of text is then again a simple four-part setting on the third part of the ouverture.

For the closing chorale, Bach chose the last two lines of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern as melody. And again he marries the chorale tune beautifully with the instrumental writing.

Wieneke Gorter, November 26, 2016, updated December 1, 2019.

*Read more about this in my post about the feast of St. John the Baptist on June 24, The Visitation on July 2, and last week’s post about cantata 70. Read how proud Bach was of his Weimar cantatas in this post about cantata 12.

** unless they had a really good memory, and were present at Bach’s “audition” in February 1723. There is a Vox Christi in Cantata 22 which he presented at that time, but didn’t repeat in Leipzig until that same time in the church year in 1724.

The Crown on Bach’s 1723 Trinity season

20 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in 1723 Trinity season special series, Cantatas

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lucasvanleyden_lastjudgment

The Last Judgment by Dutch painter Lucas van Leyden, 1526-1527. Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, Netherlands. (link for more information at the very end of this post)

When Bach accepted his post in Leipzig, he knew that between the first Sunday in Advent and Christmas Day, there wasn’t to be any music in the churches in that city. However, among the goods he moved with him to Leipzig on May 22, 1723, there was a stack of several beautiful Advent cantata manuscripts from his Weimar period (1714-1716), and I think he was eager to perform all this music for the much larger audience he had in Leipzig than the small entourage of the Duke of Weimar that would have heard the music there. So he reworked and expanded several of those Weimar Advent cantatas for other times of the church year in Leipzig.

The Weimar Advent cantatas all had a similar structure: opening chorus, arias without recitatives, closing chorale. For the performances in Leipzig, Bach added recitatives, to make the libretto closer related* to the Bible text of that particular Sunday. He would also insert a chorale in the middle, so he could perform Part I of the cantata (with the newly written closing chorale at the end of that half) before the sermon in Leipzig, and Part II (with the existing closing chorale at the end) after the sermon.

During the 1723 Trinity season he had already done this successfully with cantata 147 for the Feast of the Visitation, and  cantata 186 for the 7th Sunday after Trinity, but he truly mastered it with cantata 70, Wachet! betet! betet! wachet!, originally written for 2nd Advent in Weimar in 1716, but now dramatically expanded for the 26th Sunday after Trinity, November 21, 1723. As last week, it is a Judgment Day cantata, and the stunning recitatives for bass and trumpet make that absolutely clear, but there is much more sparkle in the music and hope in the text than last week, because of the link with Advent.

As a child I loved the tenor aria from this cantata, exactly because of that sparkle and lightness in the music and the hope in the text. Also, I have beautiful but emotional memories connected with a performance of this cantata during the First Advent church service in my parents’ church in the Hague, only three days after my mom’s funeral service in that same church.

For my own sentimental reasons, and for an excellent rendition of the tenor aria by Kurt Equiluz and the bass recitatives and aria by Ruud van der Meer, I would listen to the Harnoncourt recording of this cantata. But the opening chorus and some other movements in the first half are a bit hard to listen to, so I’ll give you just the second half of that Harnoncourt recording, here on Spotify.

A joyful update from 2019: this entire cantata is now available on YouTube in an excellent performance by the J.S. Bach Foundation. Watch it here. Soloists on this live video recording are Gudrun Sidonie Otto, soprano; Margot Oitzinger, alto; Daniel Johannsen, tenor; Wolf-Matthias Friedrich, bass, and Patrick Henrichs, trumpet. For the Advent cantata version of it, just imagine it without all the recitatives and without the chorale in the middle.

For those who understand a little German, there’s also a nice interview with trumpet player Patrick Henrichs here on YouTube.

Find the German texts with English translations here, and the score here.

Apart from the beautiful light in the tenor aria, and the incredible writing for bass and trumpet, listen for two special chorales:

In the bass recitative in the second half (movement 9, not part of the original Advent cantata), the text mentions “der Posaunen Schall” (the sound of the trumpet, meaning the trumpet that announces Christ coming down from the heaven as Judge at the end of times) and then immediately after the bass sings that word, the trumpet plays a chorale, which the congregation in Bach’s time would have recognized as emphasis of the  Last Judgment theme:

Es ist gewisslich an der Zeit,
daß Gottes Sohn wird kommen
[in seiner großen Herrlichkeit,
zu richten Bös’ und Frommen.]
Dann wird das Lachen werden theur,
Wann Alles soll vergehn im Feu’r,
Wie Petrus davon zeuget.

Indeed the time is here
when God’s Son will come
[in His great glory
to judge the wicked and the righteous.]
Then laughter will be rare,
when everything goes up in flames,
as Peter bore witness.At the very end, Bach uses the closing chorale from the original Weimar Advent cantata, and gives it as much hope and light as possible, in three ways. First, in the melody of the chorale, which the congregation would have recognized as the to them very well-known “Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht”:

Meinen Jesum laß’ ich nicht.
Weil er sich für mich gegeben,
So erfordert meine Pflicht,
Klettenweis’ an ihm zu kleben;
Er ist meines Lebens Licht;
Meinen Jesum laß’ ich nicht.

I shall not leave my Jesus.
Since he has given himself on me,
my duty therefore demands
that I should cling to him like a limpet;
he is the light of my life;
I shall not leave my Jesus

Second, in the addition of three shimmering string parts above the regular four choral parts. Third,  in the actual text he uses here, which confirms the light (Jesum wünsch ich und sein Licht / I wish for Jesus and his light) and confirms the melody at the very end: Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht.

Wieneke Gorter, November 20, 2016, Location of painting updated November 24, 2019, link for recordings updated December 7, 2019.

More information about the painting (which was at the time I originally wrote this post on special exhibit in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but is now back at Museum de Lakenhal in Leiden) is available here.

*The texts of  the Advent cantatas were not that far removed from the new texts as we might think. In this case, the reading for the Second Sunday in Advent (Luke 21: 25-36) linked the first coming of Christ (Advent) to his second coming as judge at the end of times,  which is the reading for the 26th Sunday after Trinity (Matthew 25: 31-46).

Trying to find some beauty in ugliness

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in 1723 Trinity season special series, Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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trumpetsmemling

The least gruesome detail of Hans Memling’s “The Last Judgment”, a triptych painted between 1467 and 1471. National Museum, Gdansk, Poland.

This week I’ve been trying harder than ever in my life to find islands of beauty in a sea of ugliness. I found some: I witnessed communities coming together, had a very uplifting choir rehearsal, attended a concert at my daughter’s music school where the director gave a heart-felt speech, and the choir director had included We Shall Overcome in their part of the program. I have talked with my children about what it means to “stand up” for the millions who will suffer discrimination in the next four years in this country.  I realize I have many different readers of this blog, and that some of you might not share my political opinion. But I would urge you to be there for each other. And whomever you had been meaning to contact, whether it is a friend you should have apologized to four weeks ago, someone you know who is having a hard time, a relative you haven’t called in too long, or your representative in the House or Senate, write that letter, make that phone call. Don’t put it off.

In today’s cantata 90 Es reißet euch ein schrecklich Ende (A terrible end shall sweep you away), written for November 14, 1723, the 25th Sunday after Trinity, it is not easy to find beauty either, at least not the soul-soothing kind, since it is based on the Bible story of The Last Judgement, which is an ugly concept in my opinion. However this story was important in Bach’s time, and it was thus appropriate to let the Trinity season go out with a bang: two weeks in a row of impressive cantatas, including some of the most magnificent (and difficult!) arias for bass and trumpet in all of his work.

While Bach’s audience (the congregations of the St. Thomas and St. Nicholas churches in Leipzig) got plenty of tenor drama in the fall of 1723, it had been a long time (August 1, 1723 to be exact) since they had last heard an operatic aria for bass, with the majestic trumpet as accompanying instrument.

Since this emotional week also calls for some nostalgia, I’m going with the Leonhardt recording of this cantata, because I grew up listening to Max van Egmond sing these bass arias. The trumpet player on that recording however barely makes it, so if you would like to listen to a better player in that particular aria, and also see a close-up of the instrument, watch this video (of the bass aria only) by the Bach Foundation, with Patrick Henrichs on trumpet.

Find the text here, and the score here.

Wieneke Gorter, November 13, 2016, Links updated November 24, 2019.

Bach in Vienna / Robin Blaze going wild

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in 1723 Trinity season special series, Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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kokoschka_pieta

Pietà (It is enough) / Pietà (Es ist genug), plate 11 from a series of 11 lithographs O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort by Oskar Kokoschka, 1914/1916. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In Vienna, they were all talking about Bach’s cantata 60 O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort. The astonishing harmonization in the closing chorale as well as the structure of a “dialogue” between Fear (alto) and Hope (tenor) made it one of the most unusual among his cantatas, and apparently something worth discussing. In the first half of the 20th century, that is. In 1935  Alban Berg used the “modern” harmonization from the closing chorale Es ist genug in the final movement of his violin concerto To the Memory of an Angel–an instrumental Requiem for Manon Gropius, daughter of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and Mahler’s widow, Alma Schindler.

Several years before, the same Alma Schindler had a short-lived affair with Czech painter Oskar Kokoschka. After they broke up, Kokoschka processed his torment by making a series of 11 lithographs to illustrate the cantata. The dialogue between Fear (the alto) and Hope (the tenor) in the cantata became a dialogue between Alma and himself, in pictures only: click here to see the entire series. Many thanks to Eduard van Hengel for pointing this out.

Listen to Bach Collegium Japan’s recording of this cantata on Spotify, with countertenor Robin Blaze and tenor Gerd Türk. Find the German text with English translations here, and the score here.

Bach wrote this cantata 60 O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort for the 24th Sunday after Trinity in 1723, the Sunday normally linked to the Gospel story of the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter. However, in 1723–as now in 2016–this day fell on the first Sunday in November: All Hallows Sunday, All Saints Sunday, however you want to call it, but the Sunday on which the congregation would have commemorated all who had passed away that year. None of the commentaries I have read mention this, but I think it is important, because I feel this cantata is much more about how horrible it might be to die, or the thoughts one has when sitting at a loved one’s deathbed, than it is about the Raising of Jairus’ Daughter.

Of all the recordings I listened to, I like Bach Collegium Japan’s the best, because of Robin Blaze’s interpretation of the alto part. I always love his voice, but he is usually quite understated in his singing. He explains this well in this interview on San Francisco Classical Voice. I sometimes wish he would indeed sing with Kate Bush and “let go” a little, so I was thrilled to hear that in this cantata he actually does go a bit wild, for his standards at least, and that Suzuki lets him do it. His conviction in the opening chorale is already terrific (also note the wonderful blend with the horn doubling his part), but the way he sings the text “Und martert diese Glieder” (and tortures these limbs) in movement 2 is amazing, spot-on, and unrivaled by any others I listened to.

As we have seen before in the course of these 1723 Trinity Season cantatas (read for example my post on cantata 105) there are elements of Bach’s passions already present in this cantata. The agitated singing of the tenor in the stunningly beautiful duet (movement 3) resembles the Ach, mein Sinn! tenor aria from the St. John Passion. The repeated tremolo in the violins in movement 1 is something Bach often uses to illustrate fear, and this will show up again in the tenor arioso O Schmerz! Hier zittert das gequälte Herz in his St. Matthew Passion.

For further reading, including all the amazing harmonies in this piece which impressed the Viennese composers of the early 20th century,  as well as other insights, I can highly recommend Gardiner’s journal entry about this cantata (start reading on page 5).

Wieneke Gorter, November 6, 2016.