Leipzig for Bach = finally getting to work with the legendary Reiche and his crazy instruments

06 Sunday Aug 2023

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

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Anneke Scott, Bachstiftung, BWV 105, BWV 24, California Bach Society, Caspar Wilcke, corno da tirarsi, Egger, Gottfried Reiche, J.S. Bach Foundation, Olivier Picon, Rudolf Lutz, Stadtpfeiffer, Todd Williams, Trinity 4, Trinity 8, Trinity 9

Olivier Picon with a natural horn on the left, and *corno da tirarsi* on the right

I’m in movie script mode again and jumping back 300 years, to the summer of 1723 in Leipzig. I believe that when moving to Leipzig, Bach couldn’t wait to meet the town’s famous brass player, Gottfried Reiche (1667-1734). I imagine that throughout the summer of 1723, these two creative geniuses would have frequently been “geeking out” about Reiche’s exciting innovation in brass instruments: the corno da tirarsi (or slide horn, on the right in the picture above), for which Bach most probably started writing around Trinity 4 in 1723 (about a month before today’s cantata).

As far as we know Reiche owned the one and only specimen and was the only one who knew how to play it. Scholars consider it very likely that he had the instrument specially made for him, in order to play more complicated music on a horn than one could at the time on a natural horn.

I have written about the corno da tirarsi before. However, I never fully realized how incredibly special that instrument must have been at the time, what the exact difference was with regular horns at the time, and how it works. Ironically, as a result of musicians being stuck at home during the pandemic, there are now some excellent educational videos on youtube, which explain all of this much better than I could ever do in writing.

So here goes with the lesson:

For an excellent demonstration of the limitations of natural horns before 1750, please watch the first three and a half minutes of this video by Todd Wiliams from the USA.

Then watch this video by Anneke Scott from the UK, about the corno da tirarsi as reconstructed by Egger.

Thank you Todd Williams and Anneke Scott! If you would like to show your appreciation for Anneke’s efforts, you can buy her a coffee on this website.

There is no doubt in my mind that Bach had already heard about Leipzig’s highly skilled senior Stadtpfeiffer (town piper) Gottfried Reiche before moving to Leipzig in May of 1723. Bach came from a family of town pipers, and in 1721 he married into a family where every single male was a trumpet player (just sit with that for a few seconds). Reiche was of the same generation as Bach’s father-in-law Johann Caspar Wilcke (c. 1660–1733), and both had been trained in Weissenfels, which Olivier Picon qualifies as “probably the most important city in trumpet playing tradition in Germany at that time” in his 2010 thesis about the corno da tirarsi. I can imagine the animated discussions at both the Bach and the Wilcke family gatherings. Reiche’s virtuosity as well as his unusual instruments* must have been a frequent subject!

Now we come to today’s Cantata 105 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht. (Enter not into judgement with Thy servant, O Lord.) It is one of my favorite cantatas, and Bach’s first** Leipzig cantata with a significant solo part for the corno da tirarsi, in the tenor aria. For the educational purpose of this blog as well as for the excellent rendition of the tenor aria I would like to feature the live video by the J.S. Bach Foundation, with Olivier Picon (pictured at the top of this post) playing the corno da tirarsi in the opening chorus, the tenor aria, and the closing chorale. Other soloists are Sibylla Rubens, soprano; Jan Börner, alto; Bernhard Berchtold, tenor; and Tobias Wicky, bass.

Picon initiated the reconstruction of the corno da tirarsi by the Swiss brass instrument firm Egger, which Anneke Scott also refers to in her video. Picon’s thesis from 2010, documenting the reconstruction as well as meticulously analyzing all cantatas that might have possibly been written for this instrument, is still the main source for scholars when discussing the corno da tirarsi. In this work, Picon also shares that Cantata 105 is his favorite cantata to play on the instrument.

Read the German text with English translations of Cantata 105 here, and find the score here.

Of course there’s much more to this cantata than just the unusual instrumentation. In 2021, also as part of a pandemic project, I wrote a post for California Bach Society highlighting all the ways in which this cantata foreshadows the St. Matthew Passion. Please find that post here.

I welcome your questions, comments, or words of encouragement below in the comment-section.

Wieneke Gorter, August 6, 2023.

*Reiche apparently was also the owner and player of another unique instrument, the tromba da tirarsi, or slide trumpet.
**Cantata 24 for the 4th Sunday after Trinity 1723 also features a solo part that might have been meant for the instrument, but opinions about this vary, and even Picon suggests the opening chorus might be played on a tromba da tirarsi (slide trumpet) and the closing chorale on a natural horn.

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

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by cantatasonmymind in Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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BWV 136, BWV 45, corno da tirarsi, Gérard Lesne, Gustav Leonhardt, Harnoncourt, J.S. Bach Foundation, J.S. Bach Stiftung, John Elwes, Kai Wessel, La Chapelle Royale, Leonhardt, Michael Chance, Paul Esswood, Peter Kooij, Philippe Herreweghe, Rene Jacobs

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.

Weekly Cantata is back!

15 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by cantatasonmymind in Cantatas, Chorale cantatas 1724/1725, Leipzig, Trinity

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22nd Sunday after Trinity, Bachipedia.org, Bachstiftung, Balázs Máté, BWV 115, corno da tirarsi, Marc Hantaï, Olivier Picon, Rudolf Lutz

The Servant Sending his Fellow Servant to Prison, from The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, bound in Thesaurus Sacrarum historiarum Veteris et Novi Testamenti, 1585.
Anonymous, Netherlandish. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (not on view).

I’m back! I’m starting with a small step, but stay tuned … a more considerable post is coming next week.

For this coming Sunday, the 22nd Sunday after Trinity, Bach wrote Cantata 89 in 1723, Cantata 115 in 1724, and Cantata 55 in 1726. Two years ago I wrote about the soprano aria from Cantata 115, not really being able to choose between Susanne Rydén with Bach Collegium Japan or Dorothee Mields with Herreweghe. I also included a link to the soprano aria from Cantata 89. Read that post here.

I still recommend the Herreweghe recording from 2017 for an overall recording of this cantata. However, sometimes it is nice to *see* a performance, and I would like to celebrate an important event in the world of Bach Cantata recordings that happened in the past year: The J.S. Bach Foundation in Switzerland (Bachstiftung) decided to make all their live video recordings of their Bach cantata performances available on YouTube, in full length. Previously, they had only made one movement of each cantata available on YouTube, and one would have to purchase the DVD or buy a live stream subscription in order to see the rest of the cantata.

So in this post I would like to share the Bachstiftung recording of Cantata 115. It was recorded on October 21, 2016, and published to YouTube on October 26, 2018.

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

What is so special about this video recording is that you can see wonderful flutist Marc Hantaï at work in the opening chorus and in the soprano aria. He doesn’t appear on video that often, and they made a good choice to put him in front, so you can see his playing, and of course this way also the microphones pick up his sound better. (to hear more of what I believe is his playing, go to this post).

Other instrumentalists to watch in this video: Olivier Picon on corno da tirarsi, and Balázs Máté on violoncello piccolo. Only three cantatas (46, 162, and 67) show the full name corno da tirarsi written in the manuscript, but there are 27 cantatas from Leipzig requiring a corno in which that part is not playable on a natural horn, so must have been written for this corno da tirarsi as well. Cantata 115 is included in that group. Bach is the only composer who ever mentioned this instrument in writing, and most probably his principal brass player Gottfried Reiche was the only one who ever played it. After Reiche’s death in 1734 Bach did not write for this instrument anymore, and for repeat performances of any cantatas containing a corno da tirarsi part, Bach rewrote it for other instruments. Read more about this in Olivier Picon’s article on the “corno da tirarsi” from 2010. The 27 cantatas are mentioned on page 22 of the article.

To find more of the Bachstiftung videos, search their Archive on their Bachipedia.org website. Most of the videos are “unlisted” on YouTube, so you won’t find them by doing a search within YouTube. Or, for the Dutch readers of this blog, you can use Eduard van Hengel’s new website (another terrific event of this past year!) and click on the links for all YouTube recordings he conveniently provides at the top of each page under the header “Beluister” (for an example, see the one for Cantata 115 here).

Wieneke Gorter, November 15, 2019.

First Sunday after Easter 1724

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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

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Alex Potter, Bach, cantatas, corno da tirarsi, Jos van Veldhoven, Peter Kooy, Thomas Hobbs, tromba da tirarsi

caravaggio_-_the_incredulity_of_saint_thomas

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, 1601-1602, Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam, Germany

In the past two weeks I ran out of time to work on this blog because of being sick, performing concerts with California Bach Society, and being on a trial jury for the first time since becoming a United States citizen in 2011. So this post for the First Sunday after Easter in 1724 is post-dated, and short, but contains lots of information to learn more about this beautiful cantata.

Previously in 1724: Bach “premiered” his Passion according to St. John on Good Friday, April 7, 1724. Then he ran out of time and energy and, without too much care for detail and text illustration, created cantatas out of existing music for Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday of that year.

This means that the first new composition he wrote after the St. John Passion was this cantata 67 Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ (keep thinking of Jesus Christ), based on the Gospel text of Jesus appearing to his disciples. A famous cantata, already known and admired in the early 19th century, especially because of the dramatic fourth movement for choir and bass, which Bach would later transform into the Gloria of his Missa Brevis in A (BWV 234).

For the background of this cantata I will refer you to the experts, in this 15-minute video by the Netherlands Bach Society, published within their AllofBach series. The video is in Dutch, with English subtitles. It talks about Bach including a flute (not a recorder!) for the first time in a cantata, the meaning behind the text, and the use of the slide-trumpet “corno da tirarsi.”

Listen to and watch their performance here, find the text here, and find the score here. The Netherlands Bach Society, conducted by Jos van Veldhoven, with countertenor Alex Potter, tenor Thomas Hobbs, and bass Peter Kooij.

Wieneke Gorter, April 30, 2017.

Trinity 8: the start of the shorter cantata

16 Saturday Jul 2016

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

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Bach Collegium Japan, BWV 136, BWV 167, BWV 234, BWV 24, BWV 75, BWV 76, corno da tirarsi, Kai Wessel, Makoto Sakurada, Masaaki Suzuki, Peter Kooij, Trinity 8

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 8^th 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.