There is no cantata for this Sunday, since Bach didn’t write any cantatas for Lent. So I thought maybe it would be nice to share some background stories I wrote over the past years that aren’t related to any specific cantata, but might be unknown to those who subscribed to this blog after January 2018.

I started writing this blog in January 2016, as a tribute to my mother, and have now published 180 posts. In 2018, I explained how the birth of my blog was prompted by a broken dishwasher. You can find that story here.

To learn more about Bach and his cantata compositions, read my post about Bach in Weimar, my post for California Bach Society’s blog about Bach and his musician friends in Weimar, and my post on this Weekly Cantata blog about Bach in Leipzig. Also find a virtual tour through Bach’s Leipzig, provided by the Bach Archives in Leipzig, here, and a terrific documentary about Bach’s entire life here.

If there is anything you’d like to know more about or have questions about, please let me know in the comments below, or send me a direct message on Instagram or Facebook.

Thank you for following this blog!

Wieneke Gorter, February 20, 2021.

For this third Sunday after Epiphany, Bach wrote four cantatas, and again I have written about all of them over the past years. I still stand by all my recommendations for recordings, so I’m just going to refer you to the old posts. Please find all the links below.

Unlike last week, this time you won’t find four different paintings of “Jesus healing [or cleansing] a leaper,” the Gospel story for this Sunday, because I seriously have only been able to find two paintings over the years: the one I used in my very first post from 2016, and the one I’m including in this post. I can find several illustrations of “Jesus healing ten leapers” (which is a different story), but not of this story. So if any of you knows of a painting somewhere, please let me know. (I prefer 17th century or older, because I’d like it to depict imagery that Bach would have been familiar with).

Cantatas 72 (at least partly from 1715) and 73 (from 1724) can be found in this post, Cantata 111 from 1725 in this post, and Cantata 156 (from 1729) in this post.

Wieneke Gorter, January 23, 2021

For this Sunday, the second Sunday after Epiphany, Bach wrote three heart-wrenchingly beautiful cantatas, all more or less focused on the Gospel story of the day: the Marriage at Cana. But none of these cantatas are festive.

In Cantata 155 Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange from 1715 (and performed again during Bach’s first year in Leipzig, 1724), Bach illustrates the hand-wringing and desperation expressed by Jesus’ mother Mary in several different ways, including a Monteverdi-like “lamento bass.” Read it in my blog post from 2017, titled Mary’s Lament.

Cantata 3 Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid, from 1725, takes up a special place within Bach’s 1724/1725 chorale cantata cycle, because the chorale melody appears in the bass part of the opening chorus. It gets doubled by a trombone, and this makes it “good kind of stomachache” music for me. There are not many things better than a Bach opening chorus with trombones. But much more is happening in this cantata. Read it all in my blog post from 2016, titled Hidden messages.

I wrote about Cantata 13 Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen only last year, and found out that Bach must have been inspired by Cantata 155 when writing this one. Read it here.

If you have been following this blog for a while, and have thus already read all these posts, I have two interesting news items for you:

Two young Early Music musicians, Anne Charrier and Ben Kazez, came up with a useful project to pass the months and months of performance-free life. They hand-catalogued 1,699 movements from J. S. Bach cantatas, put the entire database on a website, and gave it a nifty search feature so you can find for example all arias for soprano and oboe, that one tenor aria that was about “Jammertale” (if you are as nerdy as me), or … all opening choruses with trombone :-). Find it here.

David Chin of Bachfest Malaysia compiled his part documentary, part travel show Encountering Bach series and some extra video material into one longer movie. I highly recommend this! The story is now in chronological order, which is helpful I think. It’s a wonderful way to virtually travel to all the Bach towns in Germany with some excellent guides! The movie takes you through Bach’s life and his works from his birth in Eisenach through the last 27 years of his life in Leipzig. Find it here on YouTube.

Wieneke Gorter, January 16, 2021.

If you don’t want to read a long sentimental story and just want to read about the cantatas for this Fourth Sunday of Advent, my blog post from last year gives you all the links. Other non-food and non-Bach goodies on YouTube this week: Alex Potter starring in this Sunday’s offering by La Festa Musicale and Hanneke van Proosdij in the “Pastorale” from Telemann’s Flute Concerto in D. For some fabulous Christmas music away from the German tradition, I recommend Pacific Music Works ¡Navidad! concert.

Advent for me is also about baking. As I write this on Saturday afternoon, my daughter is baking Dutch Speculaas cookies to give to her friends for Christmas. The whole house is filled with the delicious scent of orange peel, cinnamon, clove, ginger, cardamom, and aniseed. Traditionally these cookies are only eaten in the Netherlands around St. Nicholas (Dec 5), and not really associated with Advent or Christmas. However, being expats, we tend to mix up the traditions a bit.

There is no real tradition in the Netherlands of baking Christmas cookies during Advent the way there is in Germany for baking Plätzchen (a collective name for cookies baked in the weeks leading up to Christmas, to then have on hand for all the Christmas festivities). The main reason my mother, my sister, and I learned about the German tradition was because of Burda, the monthly German sewing magazine my mother subscribed to.  After music, sewing clothes was my mother’s biggest hobby. She found it important to read the original German version of the magazine, not the Dutch translation, as it contained too many mistakes in the descriptions of the patterns. From Burda we learned all the German terminology for sewing clothes, but also German words to describe a nice dress, such as “Bildhüpsch!” and “Todschick!” (I still make my German friends here in California laugh with those). There were also recipes in the magazine, and the November issue always featured pages and pages of delectable Plätzchen. Our hair stylist in the small town where we lived was from Germany, and he had good stories about the Advent baking traditions, which further inspired us. 

My sister was the baker in the family, I was the cook. So while my sister bakes Plätzchen around this time of year, I never baked anything, at least not until I had kids and my mother gave me a little nudge. It was 2007 — my oldest was in Kindergarten and my parents were visiting for several weeks (they would arrive at the end of November, celebrate St. Nicholas with us, and that year stayed until after Christmas (the next two years they went home before Christmas to help run the Christmas Eve service at their church in The Hague). My mother asked me: “Shouldn’t we bake kruidkoek (Dutch spice cake) for his teachers and for your friends?” The recipe was from her mother (my grandmother, who’s almost 103 years old now). That year my mother baked ten mini-cakes, as you can see in this photo. We did this together for about three years I think, the last time in 2009.

Kruidkoek
Dutch coffee cake with spices
Recipe from my grandmother:

For 1 large loaf pan or 5 mini loaf pans:

16 oz flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
10 oz dark sugar
1.5 cup raisins
1/2 cup candied orange peel
1/2 cup molasses
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon each cloves, nutmeg, pepper,
optional: 1 teaspoon ginger powder

[note: the pepper can be overwhelming if you don’t like it spicy, and my sister never adds it]

mix together and add as much milk (or water, or orange juice) to make a mud-like dough. You can add hazelnuts instead of, or in addition to the raisins at this stage too if you like.

bake for 60 minutes at 330 F / 165 C
or little longer for the large loaf

The spices in kruidkoek are quite similar to those in Speculaas, so when the scent of Speculaas was filling the house this afternoon, I had to think of baking kruidkoek with my mother.

Wieneke Gorter, December 19, 2020.