Weekly Cantata

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

Weekly Cantata

Tag Archives: BWV 4

Blessings during a crisis

24 Sunday May 2020

Posted by cantatasonmymind in After Easter, Cantatas, Leipzig

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BWV 106, BWV 183, BWV 4, bwv 44, Exaudi, J.S. Bach Foundation, J.S. Bach Stiftung, Les Arts Florissants, Luc Barrière, Rudolf Lutz

French Alps at La Clusaz, photo by Luc Barrière.

In an effort to share some more personal thoughts with you, this has become quite a long post. If you prefer not to read it and go straight to the cantatas for this Exaudi Sunday, you can find my post about cantatas 44 and 183 here. It is a story with a wealth of information, gorgeous soprano arias, and recommendations for top-notch recordings. But since there’s always more to learn, I wanted to give some attention to Rudolf Lutz’ English spoken lecture about these cantatas. Find the link at the end of this post.

Over the past several months, while we’ve all been dealing with this global health crisis, I have often felt overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by piles of dishes, by potentially life changing decisions, by not knowing what my role is supposed to be in this crisis, but also by musicians and music organizations. While one is telling me to watch this YouTube video–available this week only!, another invites me to join a lecture on Zoom– please submit your questions ahead of time, yet another is showing me that singing while masked actually sounds pretty good (even though their images scare the * out of me), but wait … there’s a live Facebook Event STARTING NOW!

I understand the reasons behind it. An urge to share music with others, so strong they need to answer it or go insane. A fear of being forgotten by their patrons and thus losing even more income. Creative minds that keep exploring new possibilities. I also understand that there are probably millions of people for whom concert-going was their weekly bread, and that they are all eating this up. But it doesn’t calm me down.

My soul has been soothed much more by the images of sour dough rising, vegetable gardens being planned, blooming gardens, and nature. Two Instagram accounts I have especially enjoyed are those of Les Arts Florissants, who have been posting a wealth of pictures of William Christie’s gardens in France, and of Luc Barrière, a concert photographer who left Paris for the Alps before the strict lockdown happened in France. Yes, I know these are privileged people, and everyone can think of their living situations what they want. To me personally, these two accounts have given me examples of people taking care of themselves and slowing down, and that inspires me and calms me.

William Christie’s garden in Thiré, France, on March 28, 2020. Photo from Les Arts Florissants Facebook page.

Of course stress is not caused by the acts of other people, but by your own reaction to these acts, and fortunately most of the live streams can be watched again at a later time. So I have watched some of them at my own pace (while doing those dishes, folding laundry, or cleaning vegetables) and have realized that amidst the overwhelm there are blessings, because every now and then something new and marvelous emerges that would not have happened without this crisis.

For me, the absolute best example of this has been the series of “one man shows” by Rudolf Lutz, the artistic director of the J.S Bach Foundation in Switzerland. Every month, on the day his choir and orchestra would otherwise have given a concert for an audience, recorded live on video, he has live streamed an excellent and very witty lecture about that same cantata, brilliantly combined with organ improvisations on the music in the cantata, and the meaning behind the cantata. Without the crisis, his international online audience of Bach lovers would never have known what a talented improvisor he is. Without the crisis, he would never have held his lectures in English. (Until now his excellent cantata lectures were only accessible to German speakers, with only a handful of them subtitled in English).

Find Rudolf Lutz’ wonderful lecture/improvisation about Cantata 44 and 183 (from May 19) here. Find my blog post about these same cantatas (highlighting completely different aspects of the pieces!) here.

To learn more about Rudolf Lutz, read his bio here. Find his lecture/improvisation about Cantata 106 (from March 20) here, and about Cantata 4 (from April 17) here.

Rudolf Lutz, artistic director of the J.S. Bach Foundation.

Wieneke Gorter, May 24, 2020.

One of my favorite cantatas

03 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by cantatasonmymind in After Easter, Cantatas, Leipzig

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1st Sunday after Easter, Barbara Schlick, BWV 21, BWV 31, BWV 4, BWV 42, BWV 6, Gérard Lesne, Howard Crook, Peter Kooij, Philippe Herreweghe

appearance-of-christ-to-his-disciples
Anthony van Dyck: Appearance of Christ to his Disciples, 1625/1626

This post is about Cantata 42 Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats, written for the 1st Sunday after Easter in 1725.

For Bach, Easter season in Leipzig was extremely busy. Immediately after the passion on Good Friday, he needed to have three to four cantatas ready to go: two cantatas for Easter Sunday, one for Easter Monday, and one for Easter Tuesday. And then five days later, again one for the Sunday after Easter, the one I am discussing here. If we imagine Bach having to work on most of these in the week before Easter, that same week in which he was rehearsing the Passion for Good Friday, and often adjusting the score still too, it is not so strange that he often re-used existing music at this time of year. It would either be a repeat performance of an Easter cantata from his time in Mühlhausen (Christ lag in Todesbanden) or Weimar (Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde Jubilieret!) or a new cantata, with new text, but largely based on existing secular music he had written for the Weimar or Köthen courts.

In 1725, the performance list looked like this:

Good Friday: St. John Passion, 2nd version, significantly rewritten from the year before.

Easter Sunday: Easter-Oratorio, largely based on existing court music from Köthen + a repeat of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (Bible story: Maria Magdalena and Maria Jacobi finding the empty tomb)

Easter Monday: new composition: Cantata 6 Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden (Bible story: Jesus appeared before two of his disciples while they were walking on the road to Emmaus).

(If you have time, it is helpful to listen to cantata 6 (here on YouTube) before you listen to today’s cantata 42, because 42 refers to 6 in style and thought, and the use of the “two and three” in the text of the alto aria of cantata 42 might even be meant to “remind” us of these *two* disciples in that story of Easter Monday.

Easter Tuesday: we don’t know what was performed on this day in that year.

1st Sunday after Easter: Cantata 42 Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats, opening sinfonia and alto aria based on existing court music from Köthen (Bible story: while a small group of his disciples are inside a house in Jerusalem, with all the doors and windows locked, Jesus appears in their midst).

Ever since I started this blog at the beginning of this year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting this first Sunday after Easter, so I can finally introduce you to cantata 42 from 1725. It is one of my favorites because of the many gems strung together: a Brandenburg concerto-like sinfonia (as if Bach wanted to continue the kind of instrumental opening he had written for the Easter Oratorio from last week), a bit of Evangelist recitative (which is missing from the Easter Oratorio, so is more a reference to the St. John Passion), a terrific alto aria, a pretty soprano-tenor duet, an impressive bass aria, and a wonderful closing chorale.

I discovered this cantata about fifteen years ago, on the Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis CD Herreweghe recorded in 2000. It took me a little while to listen past the well-known cantata 21, and thus get to know cantata 42, but then I fell in love with it, especially with the alto aria, so beautifully sung by Gérard Lesne.  Later, in 2007, while watching the documentary DVD Philippe Herreweghe by himself, it was a treat to find a couple of scenes showing Herreweghe rehearsing that same alto aria  (though sadly not with Lesne).

Listen to cantata 42 on YouTube

Soloists on this Herreweghe recording are Barbara Schlick, Gérard Lesne, Howard Crook, and Peter Kooij.

Read the German text with English translation of cantata 42 here.

For a long time I thought that the gorgeous oboe parts at the start of the alto aria were based on the opening chorus of cantata 3 (and only found one other commentator ever to remark on this too) but thanks to Gardiner’s recent research, we know that the music for the aria as well as for the opening sinfonia of this cantata was copied from a (now lost) birthday serenata Bach wrote for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen (BWV 66a).

We can only guess if Bach had always meant to use the birthday music from Köthen, and selected text that would fit on the music, or if he received the “Wo zwei und drei versammlet sind” (Where two or three are gathered together) text from his librettist and only then had to think of that composition he had written in Köthen, with the groups of two and three in the orchestration …

Wieneke Gorter, April 3, 2016, updated April 26, 2020.

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