Tag Archives: J.S. Bach Foundation

Two Weimar cantatas for the fourth Sunday of Advent

21 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Advent, Bach's life, Cantatas, Christmas, Leipzig, Weimar

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For the fourth Sunday of Advent, Bach wrote two cantatas in Weimar: Cantata 132 Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn in 1715, and Cantata 147a Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben in 1716.

Bach rewrote Cantata 147, the same way he did that with cantatas 70 and 186, into a cantata for another time of the year in Leipzig, in this case the feast of the Visitation on July 2, 1723. Read more about that here in my post from 2016. I have now updated that post with a link to the wonderful live performance of Cantata 147 by the J.S. Bach Foundation, with with Hana Blažiková, soprano; Margot Oitzinger, alto; Jakob Pilgram, tenor; and Wolf Matthias Friedrich, bass.

Cantata 132 was not transformed into a cantata for another time in the church year in Leipzig, so today’s performances of this cantata still reflect the Advent cantata from Weimar. Watch a beautiful live performance of this cantata by the Netherlands Bach Society here on YouTube. Soloists are Julia Doyle, soprano; Tim Mead, alto; Jan Kobow, tenor; and Dominik Wörner, bass.

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

As I already pointed out in my Advent Calendar earlier this week, the text of the joyful opening aria refers to the story of John the Baptist, who was believed to have come to prepare the way for Jesus, and includes the Isaiah quote as it appears in the scripture: “Messias kömmt an!” (The Messiah is coming). Bach gives this text to the soprano three times, and to give it extra emphasis, each time omits all instrumental accompaniment on those three words.

The rest of the cantata stays close to the story of John the Baptist. The bass aria refers to the Pharisees interrogating John, but then Bach’s text writer (Salomo Franck, who was also the Weimar court librarian) projects the question “Wer bist du?” (Who are you?) onto the believer: ask your conscience: are you a true person or a false person?

As a child, I was enormously impressed by this bass aria, even more than by the wonderful soprano aria at the beginning of the piece. I loved how Max van Egmond sings the “Wer bist du?” text on the Leonhardt recording from 1983. You can find that recording, and read more about those childhood memories, in this blog post from 2016. I had no idea at the time that in those very cool opening notes Bach is quoting this organ piece by Buxtehude. I only learned that this week, by watching the “extra videos” the Netherlands Bach Society provides along with their live recordings on All of Bach.

If you are not following this blog yet, please consider signing up (on the left of this text if you are on a desktop computer, at the bottom of this post when you are reading on a smartphone). This way you won’t miss any posts about the many cantatas Bach wrote for all three Christmas Days (yes there were three in his time), New Year’s Day, and the Sundays after those feast days.

Wieneke Gorter, December 21, 2019.

Second Sunday of Advent

07 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Advent, Bach's life, Cantatas, Leipzig, Weimar

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Tomorrow is the second Sunday of Advent.

When Bach worked in Weimar, he wrote a cantata for each of the 4 Sundays in Advent. However in Leipzig, music (other than chorale singing) was not allowed in the churches in the period between the first Sunday of Advent and Christmas Day. In order to still use (and show off?) the Weimar Advent cantatas in Leipzig he reworked and expanded most of them for other times of the church year in Leipzig.

He truly mastered this rewriting process 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. 

Read much more about the reworking process and about this particular cantata in this Weekly Cantata post from 2016, which now includes a new link to the excellent live video performance by the J.S. Bach Foundation.  

Wieneke Gorter, December 7, 2019.

Cantata movements in organ works

17 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in Bach's life, Cantatas, Chorale cantatas 1724/1725, Leipzig

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Title page of Schübler’s edition of six of Bach’s organ chorales based on cantata movements, known nowadays as the “Schübler Chorales.” The two last lines are instructions on where to purchase more of these: in Leipzig from Bach himself, from his sons in Berlin and Halle, and from the publisher [Schübler] in Zella.

There is no cantata for this Sunday, as no figural music was allowed in Leipzig in the 40 days before Easter, with the exception of the feast of the Annunciation (March 25).

For me this means I now finally have time to share some of what I learned during the Bach Festival in Bruges. On Friday January 26 I attended an all-day lecture by Professor Ignace Bossuyt about how Bach “reworked” his own music and the music of others in his compositions. The biggest eye-opener for me was that all Bach’s “Schübler Chorales” for organ (named after their publisher, Johann Georg Schübler) from 1747/1748 are actually arrangements of movements from Bach’s 1724/1725 cycle of cantatas I have been discussing on this blog since June 2017.

While I am not an organist at all, I did grow up in the land of organs and miss hearing them. My mother comes from a family of organists on her mother’s side. When other little boys dreamed of cars, my father dreamed of being an organist and built organ keyboards from blocks at home and would pretend to play them (sadly because of class perception his parents didn’t deem it appropriate to send him for lessons). Thus my parents were extremely picky where we went to church – there had to be a good organist. So I heard my share of Bach chorale preludes and Schübler Chorales, even before I knew what they were.

Because of the funeral service for my mother in the Kloosterkerk in The Hague I already referred to last week, I also have a soft spot for Bach’s “Schübler Chorale” BWV 645, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, because the incomparable Jan Hage (now organist at the Dom Church in Utrecht) played this at the end of the service, as we were walking out behind the coffin. This music, together with smiles of dear friends we passed by, gave me great comfort at a moment that could otherwise have been unbearable. Listen to this chorale, played by Jan Hage on that same organ of the Kloosterkerk in The Hague, here on YouTube. Another wonderful, and historically significant, performance of this chorale by Ton Koopman, on the Silbermann organ* (1714) in the Freiberg Cathedral, Germany, can be found here on YouTube. Bach and Silbermann knew each other, and Bach might have played on this organ too.

What I didn’t know until Professor Bossuyt’s lecture is that this piece of music was taken from the fourth movement of Cantata 140 with the same title. This cantata is officially not part of the 1724/1725 cycle, but in Bach’s head in 1747 it probably was. Bach wrote Cantata 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme in 1731, most likely in an attempt to leave a complete chorale cantata cycle for posterity. During the chorale cantata cycle of 1724/1725, there had been no 26th or 27th Sunday after Trinity (by that time it was already Advent and it is of course no coincidence that Bach uses an Advent chorale in this cantata). Watch the tenor solo from this Cantata 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme by all the tenors and baritones of the Amsterdam Baroque Choir (on a live recording conducted by Ton Koopman) here on YouTube.

I have two more beautiful examples of how Bach arranged an existing chorale cantata movements into his “Schübler Chorales”:

Bach turned the fourth movement of Cantata 93 Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten into the Schübler Chorale with the same title, BWV 647. Watch the duet from Cantata 93 by the J.S. Bach Foundation with soprano Miriam Feuersinger and alto Jan Börner here on Youtube. Watch the Schübler chorale played by Michael Schultheis on the organ of the Basilica in Seligenstadt, Germany, here on YouTube.

The last example is from a cantata that is nowadays not considered a true chorale cantata, but if Bach used it for the Schübler chorales, we can assume that he himself did regard it as such. It is Cantata 6 Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden for Easter Monday in 1725. Hear Dorothee Mields sing the third movement from Cantata 6 live here on YouTube. Then listen here on YouTube to Dutch organist Wim van Beek play the Schübler Chorale with the same title, BWV 549, on the historic Schnitger-Hinsz organ (1740) in the Martini church in Groningen, The Netherlands.

Wieneke Gorter, February 17, 2018, links updated December 2, 2019.

*learn more about the Silbermann organ here.

Bonus Advent cantata

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Advent, Cantatas, Leipzig

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Nuria Rial, my favorite interpreter of the soprano aria from Cantata 36.

In Leipzig in Bach’s time, the period between the first Sunday of Advent and Christmas was a “tempus clausum,” when no figural music was allowed in the churches. So if I would follow Bach’s cantata writing in 1724 very strictly, I would not have any music for you today.

So let’s take a detour to 1725. Sometime in that year, Bach wrote a congratulatory cantata for a teacher at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. The cantata, with the title Schwingt freudig euch empor, had nine movements: an opening chorus, four recitatives and three arias. The cantata also featured a closing chorus alternated with recitatives for all the soloists, the way Bach would also use that in the before-last movement of his St. Matthew Passion. For the text of this cantata, please see this entry on Eduard van Hengel’s website. Scroll all the way down to find a table with all the different texts for the different cantatas.

In the fall of 1726, Bach received a request from his previous employer, prince Leopold of Köthen, to write a cantata for this birthday of his second wife, princess Charlotte Friederike Wilhelmine, on November 26 of that year. Scholars think that at the same time Bach was reworking this cantata from 1725 into this Birthday cantata, he was also reworking it into an Advent cantata. However the music of that particular cantata has not survived.

In 1731 Bach again, or finally, was able to make the original of 1725 into an Advent cantata, by replacing all the recitatives with chorales. This is cantata 36 Schwingt freudig euch empor, one of three cantatas for the first Sunday of Advent that have survived. (The other two are Cantata 61 I discussed last year, and Cantata 62 I discussed last week). Again please see Eduard van Hengel’s table of the different texts of all the various cantatas here. Find the English translations of Cantata 36 here, and find the score of Cantata 36 here.

My favorite recording of the entire cantata is the one by Herreweghe from 1997 (from the same album I discussed last week). I like this recording the best because of the most sparkling interpretation of the opening chorus, gorgeous singing by Christoph Prégardien in the tenor solos and by Peter Kooy in the bass aria, and a wonderful soprano/alto duet by Sybilla Rubens and Sarah Connolly. Find this recording here on YouTube. Or follow the links in my post from last week to purchase the entire album of Advent cantatas by Herreweghe. It is a great Christmas gift 🙂 !

If you prefer to watch a live recording, I recommend the one by the J.S. Bach Foundation. They just released the entire video recording of this cantata this week, and this performance contains my absolute favorite interpretation of the soprano aria by Nuria Rial.

Wieneke Gorter, December 9, 2017, links updated and photo added December 3, 2019.

The last weeks of Trinity = bass aria time for Bach (Trinity 23 & 24 in 1724)

26 Sunday Nov 2017

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

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Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, ‘Landscape with a waterfall’, circa 1668, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Last week it was the 7th anniversary of my mother’s passing. I wasn’t sure what to write about that, so ended up not posting that day. If you would like to read more about the woman who still is my main inspiration for this blog, you can read my tribute to her here.

But as it turns out, it is not a bad thing to combine the cantatas Bach wrote for Trinity 23 & 24 in 1724 in one and the same blog post, since they both stand out for their bass arias. It is noteworthy that Bach ended both his 1723 and 1724 Trinity seasons in Leipzig with cantatas featuring impressive bass arias*. That the “End of Life/End of Time/Judgement Day” theme was on every Protestant’s mind in the 18th century around this time of year of course had a lot to do with this. Bach often associates the bass voice with this theme, see for example Cantata 20 O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort, discussed here on this blog.

Regarding Cantata 139 Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott, for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity (which was last week), I prefer the recording by the J.S. Bach Foundation (Bachstiftung). Especially the tenor aria is very well done by tenor Johannes Kaleschke and violinists Renate Steinmann and Martin Korrodi. Update from 2019: when I first wrote about this performance in 2017, the cantata was not available on YouTube in full length, but now it is! You can find it here. For those who can understand (a little) German, there is also a terrific explanation by conductor Rudolf Lutz of everything that happens in the cantata available on YouTube here. You can even download the same worksheet (“Lutzogramm”) as the audience is looking at here.  Rudolf Lutz is at his best here, very clever, witty, and informative. He spent a lot of time prepping for this workshop, including entering entire orchestrations into his “Lady Yamaha,” which is very effective for understanding Bach’s incredible composition. Soloists are Susanne Frei, soprano; Antonia Frey, alto; Johannes Kaleschke, tenor; Ekkehard Abele, bass.

However, since the subject of this post is bass arias … the best interpretation of the extremely unusual bass aria appears on the Bach Collegium Japan recording. Peter Kooy does a fabulous job bringing out the different character for the 11 (!) different sections of the aria. I created a playlist on Spotify of this Bach Collegium Japan recording here. Soloists are Yukari Nonoshita, soprano; Robin Blaze, countertenor; Makoto Sakurada, tenor (he doesn’t convince me or capture my attention, and I find his pronunciation of the word “getrost” a bit distracting); Peter Kooy, bass.

Find the text of Cantata 139 here, and the score here.

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Peter Kooy

Peter Kooy/Bach Collegium Japan again wins “best interpretation of the bass aria” in Cantata 26 Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig for the 24th Sunday after Trinity in 1724. Listen to Bach Collegium Japan’s recording via a playlist I created here on Spotify. This cantata was released on the same album as Cantata 139, so the soloists are again Soloists are Yukari Nonoshita, soprano; Robin Blaze, countertenor; Makoto Sakurada, tenor; and Peter Kooy, bass. 

Find the text of Cantata 26 here, and the score here.

And what a bass aria this is! The calmly babbling brook from the lovely tenor aria earlier in the cantata has become a white water river in this bass aria. And the combination of bass voice with the oboes makes me think of Hades in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Peter Kooy is great and my mother loved him very much, but in my humble opinion, the luckiest people today are those attending the cantata service in the Kloosterkerk in The Hague, Netherlands, where my good friend and favorite Bach bass Marc Pantus will be singing this aria. The Kloosterkerk was also my mother’s church for the last decade of her life, so I have now successfully circled back to her in this post, and miss her much more today than I did last week.

Wieneke Gorter, November 26, 2017, updated November 21 & 24, 2019.

*The first cantata Bach ever wrote for this particular time of year was Cantata 163 in Weimar. It contains a bass aria accompanied by two cellos, an instrumentation Bach never ever used after that.  The last two cantatas of the 1723 Trinity season were Cantatas 90 and 70. Read my post about Cantata 90 for the 25th Sunday after Trinity here and my post about Cantata 70 for the 26th Sunday after Trinity here.

Wedding music for the 20th Sunday after Trinity, with a gorgeous soprano aria

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Cantatas, Leipzig, Trinity

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Bachsaal_Schloss_Koethen

The mirror-hall, now called “Bach hall” in Köthen, where Bach worked from 1717 to 1723.

A concert weekend, successful, but fueled almost exclusively by adrenaline; the overwhelming fatigue thus following; my favorite breakfast cook/violin practice coach/morning chauffeur/bedtime enforcer away on a business trip all week; much needed family hike on Saturday; me not being superwoman: It sometimes leads to a late blog post 🙂 Thank you for understanding.

The 1724 cantata for yesterday, Cantata 180 Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele (Adorn yourself, beloved soul) is full of luster, with an opening chorus, a tenor/flute aria and a soprano/orchestra aria that make me think of the orchestral suites Bach wrote at the court of Köthen between 1717 and 1723. With all this joy already from the beginning, it sounds like a wedding cantata.

The recording I appreciate most is the one by the Swiss J.S. Bach Foundation, because I feel they bring the most light into the opening chorus and the soprano aria, illustrate the “knocking” the best in the tenor aria, and the singers do a great job bringing out the text. Soloists: Maria Christina Kiehr, soprano; Jan Börner, counter-tenor; Julius Pfeifer, tenor; and Fabrice Hayoz, bass.  The entire recording is only available on Amazon, but worth the extra trouble to get it. This is not a plug for Amazon at all, but for the artists. It was their choice to make their recordings available this way, and not offer them on Spotify or YouTube (except for one single track per cantata).

If you prefer to listen on YouTube, this recording by McCreesh/Gabrieli Consort & Players is a good alternative. (Ann Monoyios, soprano; Angus Davidson, counter-tenor; Charles Daniels, tenor; Peter Harvey, bass). The soprano aria on this recording is fabulous, but because of some–to me–distracting issues with pronunciation and text-expression in other movements, I prefer the Bach Foundation recording overall.

Find the German text with English translation here, and the score here.

Why all this luster in this cantata? In Bach’s time, the Gospel reading for this Sunday, the parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22: 1-14) was seen in relation to the union of the faithful with Christ, both during communion as well as during the heavenly banquet in the afterlife. If you then realize that that union between the soul of the faithful and Christ was in that time often compared to the marriage between bride and groom, it was not unusual to present something that sounds like wedding music on this communion Sunday.  Expressing the love-like relationship of Jesus and the soul was not a foreign concept for Bach. He did it beautifully in the duet in Cantata 21 from Weimar (read my post about that cantata here) and later also in Cantata 140 Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.**

In addition to this important link to the Bible texts, I think Bach might have an ulterior motive to bring so much splendor in a cantata for a Communion Sunday. On those Sundays, the congregations in the Leipzig churches would have been larger, and more prominent (read: wish-to-be-seen) families would have been present. Having followed Bach’s cantata compositions in the order he wrote them in Leipzig for almost two years now, I am seeing this pattern around large events in Leipzig: important audience = time to show off his star players and singers and his composition skills.

In his lecture (in German, but the music examples are universal), Rudolf Lutz, the director of the J.S. Bach Foundation, points out all the musical elements that make the opening chorus so utterly joyful and full of splendor. If you start watching at 19 minutes, you can see/hear how he shows that the bass notes are already signs of happiness, similar to the way how Bach expresses that in his Magnificat from 1723 and his Cantata 140. He then goes on to explain how the recorders build a “dome” over all of it, and the unisono violins and viola express the utter pleasure of lovers, or as Lutz says: “I love you, I love you, I say it to you again! Oh! Ah!”

In the tenor aria Christ is knocking on the door of the believer. This is a reference to the Revelations chapter from the Bible. When Bach received the libretto for this cantata, he must have thought back to an earlier cantata in which this Bible text was quoted literally: Cantata 61 Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland from Weimar. In that cantata, the “Vox Christi” bass sings:

Siehe, ich stehe vor der Tür und klopfe an.
So jemand meine Stimme hören wird und die Tür auftun,
zu dem werde ich eingehen
und das Abendmahl mit ihm halten und er mit mir.

See, I stand before the door and knock.
If anyone will hear my voice
and open the door
I shall go in
and have supper with him and he with me.

This recitative/arioso is accompanied by staccato continuo, illustrating the knocking. Bach uses this feature again in the continuo for this tenor aria from Cantata 180. Except this Christ is more impatient than the one from Cantata 61. For the rest it is pure blissful music, again putting Bach’s fabulous flute player in the spotlight. The theme of the flute part is likely based on the first three notes of the chorale melody. Julius Pfeifer does a great job singing this on the Bach Founation recording. Another fabulous recording of this aria is the one by Cristoph Prégardien on the Christophe Coin CD. Listen to it here.

Christophe Coin is, by the way, also the guest artist on the Bach Foundation recording of this cantata, doing a fabulous job playing violoncello piccolo in the soprano chorale.  If you really can’t or don’t want to listen to that recording on Amazon, you can still catch a bit of it on Youtube: their video of the soprano aria only, with Maria Christina Kiehr. Sublime interpretation by all, with levity, freedom, and abandon in the orchestra and superb singing by Kiehr. If you wonder where you know here voice from: she appears on many Savall recordings alongside Montserrat Figueras.

Wieneke Gorter, October 30, 2017

** Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme was really also a Trinity, almost Advent, cantata, but is nowadays better known as “The Wedding Cantata” (incorrectly suggesting that Bach wrote only one Wedding cantata) because of that subject matter.