Tag Archives: BWV 136

First countertenor loves (BWV 136 and 45 for Trinity 8)

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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  • Kai Wessel
  • Gérard Lesne

Bach wrote three cantatas for this Sunday, and since my favorite recordings (for now)* of two of those feature my first and second countertenor loves, Gérard Lesne and Kai Wessel, I thought it might be nice to talk a bit about how I came to appreciate these singers.

Because I grew up listening to Bach cantatas from the cantata recording project by Leonhardt and Harnoncourt, hearing these every Sunday from when I was a small child, I was completely used to alto arias being sung by countertenors. I have become better at it, but sometimes I still feel as if I have to consciously switch something in my brain before I can listen to a female alto sing Bach and take it seriously.

However, none of the alto arias from that Leonhardt/Harnoncourt project (1970-1989), stayed with me the way many of the soprano, tenor, and bass arias did. The voices of René Jacobs or Paul Esswood just never blew me away nor did their singing truly move me. I remember enjoying Michael Chance’s singing on recordings of English Baroque composers and in the arias he sang in the live performance of Bach’s St. John Passion with Harnoncourt I mentioned in this post. But still, not blown away.

That all changed the summer of 1988 or 1989. Still a teenager, I had started volunteering for the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 1987. I did that for several years and then was on the summer staff for a few years as well, all this in the team that managed the Exhibition. The booth right around the corner from our own information booth was staffed by the best CD curator I’ve ever met, Joost. He went to all the concerts, and knew all the Early Music recordings, and I LOVED the recordings he recommended. It was through him that I learned about Gérard Lesne. The second or third year I was there, Joost was selling Lesne’s Vivaldi CD from 1988 to everyone with the words “Buy this. Listen to it. If you come back to me, look me in the eye, and can tell me without any sign of emotion that you didn’t like it, I’ll take it back.” (or, as he literally said in Dutch: “Als je me met droge ogen kunt vertellen dat je het niks vond, dan neem ik hem terug.”) I became a fan, and will never forget hearing Lesne live, singing Charpentier, in the Chapelle Royale of Versailles in the Holy Week of 1994.

Gérard Lesne is featured on a live audio recording from 1988 of Cantata 45 Es ist dir gesagt, Mensch, was gut ist which you can find here on YouTube. It is from a concert on October 25, 1988, in the Notre Dame du Travail church in Paris, by La Chapelle Royale (one of Herreweghe’s ensembles), conducted by Gustav Leonhardt. Other soloists are John Elwes, tenor; and Peter Kooij, bass.

Bach wrote this Cantata 45 in 1726 for the 8th Sunday after Trinity. Please find the score here, and the texts & translations here.

The Notre Dame du Travail church, in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, where the 1988 concert took place

My blog post from 2016 about Cantata 136 Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz spotlights my second countertenor love: Kai Wessel. His voice and interpretation was nothing short of a sensation for me when Ton Koopman’s recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion came out in 1993. That a countertenor could also have such a beautiful tenor quality to his voice was new to me, and I found his singing incredibly moving. Thanks to this, I gained new appreciation for the “Erbarme dich” aria. Because of Kai Wessel singing the alto aria, the Bach Collegium Japan recording I recommended in 2016 is still my favorite interpretation of Cantata 136, though the live performance by the J.S. Bach Foundation from 2011 is very well done too, and that video is exciting because you can see the corno da tirarsi** in action in the amazing opening chorus.

Wieneke Gorter, August 2, 2020.

*This might change soon, because Herreweghe recorded this cantata program, including BWV 45, at the end of January 2020. I will let you know when this recording comes out. It is the first time they have recorded BWV 45 and 118, and I can’t wait to hear Alex Potter in BWV 198, and look forward to hearing BWV 78 with Dorothee Mields and Alex Potter in the famous duet, and Thomas Hobbs in the gorgeous but often overlooked tenor aria.

**to read more about the corno da tirarsi, and to see a picture of the instrument, go to this blog post from November 2019.

Trinity 11, 1723: Bach on a roll

14 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in 1723 Trinity season special series, Bach's life, Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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8ea433d635c0bd84d61c155e0969f602c9c37beb
Mendelssohn’s sketch of the Thomasschule (St. Thomas School) and, behind it, the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas Church) in Leipzig.

Thank you for following this blog, and thank you for reading this long post all the way to the end!

For Trinity 11, which was last Sunday (August 7 in 2016, August 8 in 1723) we’re listening to Cantata 179 Siehe zu, daß deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei, with a superb opening chorus and one of the most beautiful soprano arias Bach ever wrote.

MiahPersson_MonikaRittershaus
Miah Persson. Photo by Monika Rittershaus.

I prefer Bach Collegium Japan’s recording of this cantata. It’s a special recording, with Miah Persson singing the soprano aria. She’s having quite a career now, recently starring in Michel van der Aa’s opera Blank Out, singing Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at the Scala in Milan in September and October, and going on a recital tour in the USA  later this season [2016/2017], so I think we’re lucky to have her beautiful voice and sensitive interpretation on this recording from 1999.

Listen to this recording on Spotify. Please consider purchasing this recording on jpc.de, ArkivMusic, Amazon, or iTunes. Soloists on this recording are Miah Persson, soprano; Makoto Sakurada, tenor; and Peter Kooij, bass.

The BBC recorded Gardiner’s live performance of this cantata in 2000, and you can watch that here on youTube. Soloists in this performance are Magdalena Kožená, soprano; Mark Padmore, tenor; and  Stephan Loges, bass.

Find the score here (it’s fun to read along with the recording, especially in the opening chorus, to see what Bach does with the fugue).

Find the German text with English translation here.

It is now more than two months since Bach started his new job in Leipzig, and he is about three weeks into writing a brand new composition every week, and I’m sorry if I sound too casual here, but he’s on a roll. He must now have a vision of what it is he really wants to do for these churches (see the tiny preludes to his Passions he incorporates in cantatas 105 and 46), and he must have the classes at the St. Thomas School organized, and his singers sufficiently trained, so that he can now have them sing a new and challenging opening chorus every week.  Just listening to the opening choruses alone, starting with the one of cantata 136 for Trinity 8, I marvel at what he comes up with every time. Every single one of them is stunning, but at the same time completely different from the one of the previous Sunday. This time Bach chooses to write a perfect “old style” (Palestrina-style) motet fugue as opening chorus.

As always, to fully understand the cantata and not miss any of Bach’s hidden messages, it is important to look at the Gospel reading for the day. In this case it is the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (or Pharisee and the Tax Collector), a story Jesus tells as an illustration on how to pray: the Pharisee is full of himself, telling God how good he is, while the Publican in his own prayer merely asks for mercy, and tells God how bad he is.  This concept of “how to be a good Christian before God” was very important to Bach and apparently his librettist got the message loud and clear. He or she uses the opportunity to first write a strong protest against fake religion and hypocrisy in “Christianity today” in movements 1 to 3 (probably having certain people in Leipzig in mind), after which he/she states that all Christians should take the humbleness of the publican as example in movements 4 to 6. For another example of how Bach interprets this Bible story, read my post about Cantata 113, written for this same 11th Sunday after Trinity, in 1724.

The most special feature of the fugue in the opening chorus is that since the text talks about beautiful outer appearance versus a bad character, Bach uses a mirror-fugue, which he used as well in fugues 5-7 from the Art of the Fugue (the theme of six bars is first introduced by the basses, and then is answered by the tenors in an “inversion:” every step up from the basses becomes a step down in the tenor part.)

To understand how Bach built this intricate fugue I am sharing the excellent music example and diagram by Dutch Bach writer Eduard van Hengel, with his permission:

179_diagram1
179-diagram2

Even though the text here is in Dutch, the diagram speaks for itself, with this quick explanation of the numbers and symbols:

1 = The theme (or first half-sentence of the text: Siehe zu, dass deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei). Note the ascending line on the word “Gottesfurcht” (fear of God/love of God) and the descending line on the word “Heuchelei” (hypocrisy).

2 = The counter-subject (or second half-sentence of this text: und diene Gott nicht mit falschem Herzen). Note here that there is a chromatic line every time the word “falschem” appears in the text: for the chromatic line the composers needs accidentals that are not part of the key the piece is written in, which in the “old polyphony” would be seen as “falsch” (not right, off-key).

Upward arrow = fugue theme regular

Downward arrow = fugue theme inversed (mirror fugue)

2* = a more compact (only 4 bars instead of 6 bars long) theme which is derived from the first counterpoint/counter-subject on the words und diene Gott nicht mit falschem Herzen, still with the chromatic line on falschem Herzen.

The numbers at the top are measure (“maat”) numbers.

Bach himself must have greatly valued this cantata. About 15 years later, he used no less than three movements from this cantata for use in his short masses, or Lutheran masses.**

The opening chorus was later “recycled” as the first movement (Kyrie) in the Mass in G Major, BWV 236. Keep listening, or scroll to 18:00 and you’ll discover that the tenor aria Quoniam (sung here by Thomas Hobbs) was, with some changes and a much slower tempo, recycled from the tenor aria in this cantata 179. In cantata 179 the tenor aria gets a colorful accompaniment of two oboes and first violins in unison. The second violins and violas fill in the meaningless middle part (representing the “nothingness, emptiness”). When recycling this later for the Quoniam in the Mass in G Major, Bach uses only one solo oboe for the accompaniment, and completely leaves out all strings (confirming that with a different text, the meaningless middle part is not relevant anymore).

This cantata’s wonderful soprano aria (with two oboi da caccia and basso continuo) was later reworked into the Qui Tollis for the Mass in A Major, BWV 234 (with two flutes and only high strings as continuo). This was actually how I first knew and loved this soprano aria, I didn’t know cantata 179 until I started listening to it for this blog. Please click on this link and listen to the amazing Agnès Mellon sing the Qui Tollis from the Mass in A Major.

Wieneke Gorter, August 14, 2016, updated August 21, 2020.

** These are called “short” or “Lutheran” masses because they consisted of only the Kyrie and Gloria part of the traditional Catholic mass. Bach wrote four of them (BWV 233-236), and they are all made up of existing movements from cantatas, but reworked and compiled in a very smart way and they are all absolutely beautiful. You can purchase an album with Herreweghe’s recording of all of them on jpc.de, iTunes, or Amazon.

Trinity 8: the start of the shorter cantata

16 Saturday Jul 2016

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

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Trinity8

Excerpt from the title page of the manuscript, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz

 

Previously on Weekly Cantata: Beginning on May 30, 1723 (the first Sunday after Trinity) Bach presented a long cantata of 10 to 14 movements each to the Leipzig congregations every Sunday, including cantatas for the special occasions of St. John (Johannis) on June 24 and the Visitation of Mary (Mariä Heimsuchung) on July 2.

However, only a few of these were newly written in Leipzig. The first two cantatas (75 for Trinity 1 and 76 for Trinity 2) were new, but he had probably already prepared them in Köthen, before moving to Leipzig.* For several weeks after that, he wrote almost no new works, but “recycled” creations from his Weimar period, adding recitatives and sometimes changing aria texts to make them better suited for the specific Gospel readings in Leipzig, and adding chorales to make them longer. The only two new works he wrote in Leipzig in those first months were the “additional” cantata 24 for Trinity 4 and the modest cantata 167 for St. John.

With the exception of cantata 167, all cantatas in the first seven weeks after Trinity were 10 to 14 movements long, divided over two parts, one before the sermon, one after.

What changed for this 8th Sunday after Trinity in 1723 (July 18, 1723) was not that Bach stopped recycling older works—scholars think that this cantata 136 Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz most probably was an assembly of several different unknown compositions from Köthen**–– but that the cantatas became significantly shorter in length: starting with this one for Trinity 8, cantatas will generally be only around six movements long. We don’t know the reason for this: an order or request from the Leipzig Council, Bach’s own decision that it would be too much work to write such a long work every week, or Bach’s experience that the notable members of the congregation would not actually arrive in the church until right before the sermon?

For this cantata 136 Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz, I prefer the recording by Bach Collegium Japan, because of their interpretation of the opening chorus, alto aria (with one of my favorite countertenors, Kai Wessel), bass recitative (excellent job by Peter Kooij), and tenor/bass duet (the voices of Makoto Sukurada and Peter Kooij are a wonderful match here). Listen to this recording on Spotify.

Read the German text with English translation of this cantata here. Find the score here.

About ten years later, Bach reworked the glorious music of the opening chorus of this cantata into the In Gloria Dei Patris, Amen of his short Mass in A Major (BWV 234). This entire opening chorus is terrific, already from the very beginning: before the fugue even starts, its theme already sounds in the horn part, and then in the soprano part.

The alto aria elaborates on the Doomsday which was already announced three times in the tenor recitative. To make the vocal part of this aria sound a bit more threatening, Bach composed a new, fast middle part for the Leipzig performance. I enjoy listening to Kai Wessel’s voice, which is deep and clear at the same time, and this aria truly showcases his talent and skills.

At first, the closing chorale seems like a normal, “simple” setting, the way it will be in most cantatas after this, but when you pay a bit more attention, you’ll hear that the first violins play a beautiful ornamental part which floats over the vocal lines.

Wieneke Gorter, July 16, 2016, updated August 1, 2020.

*The paper of the manuscripts has been declared “non-Leipzig” paper by the researchers, and the compositions have many similarities and cross-references. Read more about this in the posts about cantata 75 and cantata 76.

**The manuscript is written very neatly, as if existing work was being copied, the opening chorus doesn’t really match the rest of the work in style or key, and the tenor-bass duet is very similar in style to the secular cantatas Bach wrote for the Köthen court.