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The cantata in
the broadest sense of the
word - whether as the church
cantata or the patrician,
academic or courtly work of
musical homage and festivity
- accompanied the Arnstadt
and Mühlhausen organist, the
Weimar chamber musician and
court organist, the Köthen
conductor and finally the
Leipzig cantor of St.
Thomas'-Bach-all through his
creative life, although with
fluctuating intensity, with
interruptions and
vacillations that still are
problems to musicological
research down to this very
day. The earliest preserved
cantata ("Denn du wirst
meine Seele nicht in der
Hölle lassen") probably
dates, if it really is by
Bach, from the Arnstadt
period (1704) and is still
completely under the spell
of North and Central German
traditions. In the works of
his Mühlhausen years
(1707-08) - psalm cantatas,
festive music for the
changing of the council and
a funeral work (the "Actus
tragicus") - we sense for
the first time something of
what raises Bach as a
cantata composer so much
higher than all his
contemporaries: the ability
to analyse even the most
feeble text with regard to
its form and content, to
grasp its theological
significance and to
interpret it out of its very
spiritual centre in musical
"speech" that is infinitely
subtle and infinitely
powerful in effect. In
Weimar (1708-17) new duties
pushed the cantata right
into the background to begin
with. It was not until the
Duke commissioned him to
write "new pieces monthly"
for the court services that
Bach once more turned to the
cantata during the years
1714-16, on texts written by
Erdmann Neumeister and
Salomo Franck. Barely thirty
cantatas can be ascribed to
these two years with a
reasonable degree of
certainty. It is most
remarkable that, on the
other and, no courtly
funeral music has been
preserved from the entire
Weimar period, although
there must have been a
considerable demand for such
works. It is conceivable
that many a lost work,
supplied with a new text by
Bach himself, lives on among
the Weimar church cantatas.
In the years Bach spent at
Köthen (1717-23), on the
other hand, it is the
composition: of works for
courtly occasions of homage
and festivity that come to
the fore, entirely in
keeping with Bach's duties
as Court Conductor. It is
only during the last few
months he spent at Köthen
that we find him composing a
series of church cantatas
once again, and these were
already intended for
Leipzig. It was in Leipzig
that the majority of the
great church cantatas came
into being, all of them -
according to the most recent
research - during his first
few years of office at
Leipzig and comprising
between three and a maximum
of five complete series for
all the Sundays and feast
days of the ecclesiastical
year. But just as suddenly
as it began, this amazing
creative flow, in which this
magnificent series of
cantatas arose, appears to
have ended again. It is
possible that Bach's regular
composition of cantatas
stopped as early as 1726;
from 1729 at the latest it
is evident that other tasks
largely absorbed his
creative energy,
particularly the direction
of the students’ Collegium
Musicum with its perpetual
demand for fashionable
instrumental music. More
than 50 cantatas for courtly
and civic occasions have
indeed been recorded from
later years, but considered
over a period of 24 years
and compared with the
productivity of his first
years in Leipzig they do not
amount to very much. We are
left with the picture of an
enigmatic silence in a
sphere which has ever
counted as the central
category in Bach's creative
output.
But we only need cast a
superficial glance at the
more than 200 oí the
master's cantatas that have
come down to us in order to
see that this conception of
their position in Bach's
total output is fully
justified. Bach has
investigated their texts
with regard to both their
meaning and their wording
with incomparable
penetration, piercing
intellect and unshakeable
faith, whether they are
passages from the Bible,
hymns, sacred poems by his
contemporaries or sacredly
trimmed poetry for courtly
occasions. He has
transformed and interpreted
these texts through his
music with incomparable
powers of invention and
formation, he has revealed
their essence and, at the
same time, translated the
imagery and emotional
content of each of their
ideas into musical images
and emotions. The perfect
blending of word and note,
the combination of idea
synthesis and depiction of
each detail of the text, the
joint effect of the baroque
magnificence of the musical
forms and the highly
differentiated attention to
detail, the skillful balance
between contrapuntal,
melodic and harmonic means
in the service of the word
and, not least, the
inexhaustible fertility and
greatness of a musical
imagination that is able to
create from the most feeble
‘occasional’ text a world of
musical characters - all
this is what raises the
cantata composer Bach so
much higher than his own and
every other age and their
historically determined
character, and imparts a
lasting quality to his
works. It is not their texts
alone and not their music
alone that makes them
immortal - it is the
combination of word and note
into a higher unit, into a
new significance that first
imparts to them the power of
survival and makes them what
they are above all else:
perfect works of art.
The two works recorded here
belong among the most
remarkable and individual of
Bach’s cantatas as regards
their form, and among the
most outstanding as regards
their content. They can
hardly be placed in any
customary formal categories;
they consciously avoid all
that is usual, this
principle even being carried
into the sphere of
instrumentation while
totally dominating the
general musical scheme and
formal details. Instead they
seek the particular, the
introvert, private and
intimate sphere of
expression, the rifinement
of chamber music and
carefully chosen musical
language. Pietistic
traditions - which in Bach’s
cantata output may well have
played a role that is still
largely unclarified - here
appear to have been melted
into a personal idiom whose
individuality and power of
expression can hardly find
their equal in any of the
master’s other cantata
compositions.
BWV 18, intended for
Sexagesima Sunday, was
presumably given its first
performance at the Palace
Church in Weimar in 1714 or
1715. Bach later used it
again at Leipzig (1724?),
transposing it from G minor
to A minor and enriching the
instrumentation by two
recorders doubling the first
and second viola parts at
the octave, thus altering
only the tone colours, not
the structure of the
composition. (It is this
second version that is heard
in our recording.) The text,
which was also set to music
by Telemann, is taken from
Erdmann Neumeister’s third
yearly series of cantata
texts (1711), and deals with
the Gospel lesson for that
Sunday on the miraculous
power of the Word of God. An
extensive Bible quotation
from Isiah 55, verses 10-11
(“For as the rain cometh
down, and the snow from
heaven .... so shall my word
be that goeth forth out of
my mouth ...”), is followed
by devotional reflections in
Neumeister’s pictorial yet
dry style: the recitative
requesting that God might
prepare the heart of the
devout Christian for the
reception of the Divine Word
(punctuated by extracts from
the German Litany) and an
aria that sets up God’s Word
as the highest “treasure of
the soul” as against the
deceptive treasures of Satan
and the base world. As a
conclusion we hear the
eighth verse of one of the
most venerable hymns of the
German protestant church:
Lazarus Spengler’s “Durch
Adams Fall ist ganz
verderbt” (1524).
Bach has built on this
remarkably concise and not
very inspiring text to form
a magnificent work, whose
main weight lies in the two
recitatives and whose
instrumentation (2
recorders, 4 violas and
continuo parts) differs just
as widely from the usual
pattern as does the formal
scheme. The introductory
Sinfonia is a mighty
chaconne. Its theme,
together with its subsidiary
motif and its note for note
repetition of the first
twenty bars at the end,
clearly indicates how
intensively Bach occupied
himself with the fashionable
Italian instrumental
concerto during his years in
Weimar. We also see,
however, with what
sovereignty he adapted the
new ideas coming from this
direction into his own
language. The recitative on
the biblical text, with its
powerful imagery, is set for
whole stretches as a canon
between the solo voice and
the continuo bass - a
feature found with striking
frequency in Bach’s Weimar
cantatas. Of course, the
canon here symbolizes - as
so often - the “canonic”
strictness of the law of
God’s Word. The magnificent
‘accompagnato’ for tenor and
bass that follows, into
which the choir sings its
Litany extracts a line at a
time in archaic soprano
intonation, is also partly canonic. The
gripping imagery of the
recitative melismata on
“berauben” (robbing),
“Verfolgung” (persecution)
and “Irregehen” (erring) are
typical examples of the
impetuous expressiveness of
the young Bach’s musical
language, as are also the
excited “fort, fort” (away,
away) cries in the middle
section of the otherwise
tender, introvert soprano
aria. The work closes with a
chorale setting of great
harmonic richness.
BWV 152, for the
Sunday after Christmas, was
probably composed at Weimar.
Spitta rightly classed it
among “Bach’s most
remarkable products”. The
text is from Salomo Franck’s
“Evangelisches
Andachtsopfer” (1715), and
forms a regular sequence of
aria-recitative-aria-recitative-duet,
regular, that is, in the
sense of Neumeister’s
cantata form, but colourless
in its poetic diction and
ideas and only loosely
related to the Gospel text
for that Sunday. Out of this
harmless text, Bach has
called into being a miracle
of musical finesse,
sensitivity and profundity,
which takes quite seriously
the feeble reflection of
pietistic fervour in
Franck’s verses, letting the
gentle strength of faith and
humble devotion of a pious
soul find expression in an
incomparably tender,
slightly austere, completely
personal musical language.
It is significant that both
choir and chorale melody are
completely missing in this
cantata, and that the
instrumentation has the solo
character of chamber music
and is of carefully chosen
finesse (recorder, oboe,
viola d’amore, viola da
gamba, continuo). Everything
here is adjusted to the
individual and his private,
very personally coloured
devotion.
At the beginning we have a
modified French Overture: a
short Adagio followed by an
almost capricious Allegro
Fugue whose theme was a
short time later
incorporated into the A
major Organ Fugue BWV 536 in
a slightly varied version.
This is followed by an
intricate bass aria with
oboe and a partly canonic
bass recitative full of
powerful musical images such
as the famous leap of a
tenth from F sharp to D
sharp (or A to F sharp, see
below). The aria that now
follows, for soprano with
recorder and viola d’amore,
trasforms the arid allegory
of the text into a tender
depiction of dedicated,
pietistic love of Jesus
interwoven with echoes of
Christmas rejoicing. After
the second, simpler bass
recitative, the soloists -
symbolizing the pietistic
“soul” and the voice of
Jesus - join in a delicate
duet in the rhythm of a
fervent, contemplative
Loure, a truly mystical
“dance of the souls”, with
which the work comes to an
end.
It should further be noted
that Bach wrote down the
cantata in E minor (allowing
for the high “choir” pitch
of the Weimar Palace Organ),
thus actually intending it
to sound in G minor (a minor
third higher than written).
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