This year's attempt to play a Bach cantata on every appropriate Sunday and holy day of the year stands a better chance of lasting than my 2013 attempt, which fizzled out at Easter because I hadn't ordered up the right CDs in time (I could have done it via YouTube, but I was too sound- and performance-fussy). With the Hänssler box of Rilling's Bachakademie Edition to hand, and a good online guide to what cantatas should be heard/performed when, I'm all set. I describe how I came round to Rilling, with his superb team of soloists led by Arleen Auger, a choir projecting the meaning of the German texts and various magnificent oboes, in a feature on The Arts Desk.
Properly the listening should have begun at advent, but I started with the perfect aria, "Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn", launching BWV 132, from Auger with oboe obbligato, the day before Christmas Day, and then followed the seasonal route with individual cantatas rather than those making up the Christmas Oratorio. I've made due notes, but should start here by observing the latest two beauties, BWV 28 "Gottlob! Nun geht des Jahren Ende" on New Year's Eve and BWV 171, "Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm", which we listened to on Jill's Bose up in Southrepps on New Year's Day, aka the Feast of the Circumcision or Snip Day. Apologies if in the ensuing I don't dwell much on the text - I shall when Bach illuminates the words in a special way.
Again, Auger led the way, heralded by striking figures from two oboes and oboe da caccia in harmony, in BWV 28, composed in Bach's third year at Leipzig for the end of 1725. There's a double whammy of glory here - the ensuing motet treatment of a chorale is one of Bach's most giddying contrapuntal inspirations, and Gardiner had it performed at the very end of his 2000 Bach Pilgrimage. A tenor recit is haloed by strings and leads to a dancing duet; the final chorale is enhanced by brass (cornet and three trombones).
BWV 171 comes after the three Leipzig cycles and was first performed on New Year's Day 1729. The opening choral fugue starts in old-fashioned style, but the entry of the first trumpet with the theme is a real wake-up call. In Gardiner's words, 'the music suddenly acquires a new lustre and seems propelled forwards to a different era for this assertion of God's all-encompassing dominion and power'. Violin obbligati enrich the tenor and soprano arias (the latter adapted from a number in a secular cantata where the instrument illustrates a 'gentle wind'), while there's typical originality from Bach in the bass's arioso-recitative, with striking illumination from the two oboes. As in BWV 28, but even more strikingly, the brass adds glory to the final chorale.
The above photos of Leipzig's Thomaskirche were taken on what turned out to be a wonderful trip just before Christmas, ostensibly to see and write about the Blüthner Piano Factory - it was enlightening, and write I shall anon - but which opened up to embrace two performances at the Opera (already described lower down the blog) and an afternoon/evening at large in the centre of town.
I won't deny that I got pleasantly teary sitting as near as I could to Bach's grave in the Thomaskirche chancel. His bones had been dug up from the cemetery of the Johanniskirche, placed inside the church in 1900 and moved here following that church's destruction in World War Two in 1949 (it is perhaps even more shocking that the Soviets dynamited the University Church, where Bach was director of holiday services, as late as 1968).
At last I completed the journey which had begun with the unforgettable performance of the B minor Mass by Collegium 1704 around the font where Bach was baptised in Eisenach.
So much has happened to honour Bach in the last few decades. The Nikolaikirche was stripped of the Baroque refurbishing which the composer would have known during his tenure in the 1880s; further re-Gothicization, returning the 'hall' church to how it looked in 1496, took place in the early 1960s. But the biggest restoration took place in time for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death on 28 July 2000. Much of the funding for this and other projects has come from the Thomaskirche-Bach 2000 Assocation, and it's heartening to see the list of names involved in the state-of-the-art Bach Museum opposite the church.
The Bachs lived in the old St Thomas School, which no longer survives, but this house at Thomaskirchof 16 was the residence of their good friends the Boses, a merchant family which had the 16th century building refurbished in Baroque style. The beautifully designed museum rooms are mostly geared towards education about the essence of Bach's music and his life, with plenty of listening posts, but they do include a chest which was identified as late as 2009 as coming from Bach's household (thanks to a seal)
and the restored organ console from the destroyed Johanneskirche at which Bach played in 1743.
There's a nicely displayed room of musical instruments to complement the ones to be seen in the Thomaskirche, including this handsome viola d'amore.
Holiest of holies, though, in the 'Treasure Room' is a magnificent bequest, by far the more brilliant of the only two portraits of Bach painted in his lifetime by Leipzig artist Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 174 and showing Bach holding a score entitled ‘Canon triplex à 6 Voc: per J. S. Bach’. It was bequeathed to the Leipzig Bach Archive by American musicologist and philanthropist William H Scheide, who died last November aged 101 (the other work, far duller, is in the main city museum, which I didn't have time to visit).
This is manuscript heaven, too. The full autograph score and the individual parts of the Cantata BWV 20, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort', can be seen in the museum together for the first time ever. The former is in a superb little exhibition on Bach and Luther, finishing on 28 January, which also includes a grand Luther Bible with Bach's name inscribed in his own hand.
I left the Museum after dark, though there was abundant life in town as the Leipzigers flocked to the stalls of the Christmas Market, which spreads outwards along most streets from the central Markt. And I did just manage to see the outlandish interior of the Nikolaikirche, redone long after Bach was master there, between 1784 and 1797, in neo-classical style by J F C Dauthe. The palm columns are something else.
Handsome as it unquestionably is from the exterior, the Nikolaikirche is celebrated now as the peaceful source of protests which led to the fall of the East German regime in Autumn 1989. The Rev. C Führer's description of those events in the green pamphlet is movingly phrased, especially as it heads towards the quiet denouement of 7 October:
...the prayers for peace took place in unbelievable calm and concentration. Shortly before the end, before the Bishop gave his blessing, appeals by Professor Masur, chief conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and others who supported our call for non-violence, were read out. The solidarity between church, art, music and the gospel was of importance in the threatening situation of those days.
The prayers for peace ended with the Bishop's blessing and the urgent call for non-violence. More than 2,000 people leaving the church were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands - an unforgettable moment. Two hands are necessary to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing so that you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time. The miracle occurred.
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22 comments:
In the presence of your as always splendid and indeed this lovely piece I find it difficult to enter my ( usual) point about real politik.....but the protests in Leipzig ( as in the case of the popular movements in Poland and the Baltic States and elsewhere ) did NOT lead to the fall of the communist regime. That was the result of the change in Moscow - the USSR Central Committee knew - to an extent - what they were doing when they elected Gorbachov as General Secretary. The whole system in USSR was not working - economically, socially and even militarily in the face of American wealth and therefore power. The small number of men at the top realised that they had lost. But not all agreed. Had the counter revolution in Moscow succeeded ( I was in connection with events at the time and the counter revolutionaries had no hope but they might have done had things been a bit different) the Russian tanks would have swept away any local protest as they did in Hungary (1953) and Czechoslovakia ( 1968) and in effect Poland ( in the 1980s). Of course once Soviet protection for the East German regime had been ( secretly) withdrawn the peaceful protest in Leipzig could succeed, as the door was open to a final push. But let no one assume that a ruthless regime in command of the army will not crush those who try to overthrow them however peaceful and however admirable the protest. Look perhaps at Syria. " I brook no doubt of my mastery. I rule until I die"
I meant in the GDR. You're giving me the familiar bigger picture. You may be right that conditions at the top are what make the final change, but assembled millions set the ball rolling in parallel.
Now, about Bach?
Whenever I put on a Bach cantata, as I did earlier today, I think of your earlier cantata project and now your resolution to begin again. At the time of your first go round, I collected on Spotify the Gardiner project CDs (with those magnificent photographs) and also found and collected the liner notes for many of the volumes. So, in honor of your renewed commitment to the project, I pulled out BWV 132, in particular to listen to that perfect aria you noted. I don't know what makes an aria perfect, but this one is certainly lovely. Gardiner's liner notes, as most likely you already know, but in case not, have this to say about it:
"Yet in preparing the way of the Lord, Bach’s soprano has a much tougher task in her opening aria than Handel’s tenor, being expected to negotiate melismas of first 60 and then 84 continuous semiquavers that lead on to five further sustained beats, all with the insouciant grace and fleet-footed buoyancy befitting a slowish gigue or a French loure."
I was also intrigued by the rough low accompaniment for the second aria, and Gardiner's commentary on that is typically deeply informed and astute:
"Franck adapts the priests’ interrogation of John the Baptist in the Gospel reading – ‘Wer bist du?’ – to Christ probing the depths of the Christian’s conscience, which explains why Bach assigned the second aria (No.3) to his bass soloist, his lines criss-crossing with those of the bass instruments – cello, bassoon, violone and organ. There is nothing especially euphonious about such low-pitched tonal clusters, but one’s attention is held by Bach’s determination to express all that the text implies: the vigorous, declamatory denunciation of sin and hypocrisy and the insistent use of a questioning four-note figura corta (a device that pervades his early organ and clavier music), from which only the cello figuration manages to break away."
An enjoyable listen, with thanks for the prompt.
Yes, his observations are superbly detailed and, of course, he's lived with the music, so they're bound to be perceptive. I realised I was being sketchy above. And while I haven't read Gardiner's notes to the new cantatas I'm listening to (there will be no repeats of those I followed in 2015), you remind me to get down from the shelves the instalments I have and make sure I read him. Happy I now have Rilling and his superb soloists as guides, though - JEG's became so hit and miss that I lost a bit of enthusiasm for him. Suzuki likewise. Soon I'll be back at the Klemperer approach...
Yes, I know what you mean, even from BWV 132, about the hit and miss. I didn't care for the contralto, e.g. I didn't, by the way, think you were sketchy, but rather giving some brief impressions to give a sense. I appreciated them, and also your pointing the way to these cantatas, all of which made for a pleasurable afternoon!
Time with Bach is never wasted - in fact, the older I get, the more I think it's perhaps the greatest pleasure musical life can offer. Though Schubert and Richard Strauss will always be my personal first recourses for sheer delight.
Where does Mozart appear ?
Yes, naturally I thought about it, but it's not usually Mozart I take off the shelves - probably because the operas need to be listened through as a whole, and I still personally prefer Schubert's sonatas and chamber music to Mozart's, which isn't an objective stance. The late symphonies and piano concertos, certainly. I can only repeat the saw that Bach is God, Mozart is Man (though Bach can be very human too).
I think that in Mozart there is to a degree an embrace and even a welcoming of worldly vanity
Which simply means our common humanity and frailty, no?
Our common humanity is of course central. But I am trying rather incompetently to make another point. The Church of England had in a baptismal vow the avoidance of " the vanities of this wicked world". The world is wicked in many ways, but the Church was pointing to attributes of grandeur, pleasure in success, elaborate cultures, some elements of pride. By "vanity" the church means I think that these elements are shallow and undesirable. I would suggest otherwise and accept these attributes as part of a true and as I would define it a moral life, which the ( protestant ) church does not, as witnessed by the misery caused over centuries by the Calvinist religion. With Bach one is translated to a world above, but in Mozart I would suggest an acceptance of worldly vanity similar to the one I have tried to describe.
Fair enough. Still doesn't invalidate my other response - whatever some branches of the church think of it, human frailty is all it comes down to. Mozart understands and forgives that, and in his own way he too transcends it.
I think we agree. But I cannot resist drawing your attention to the Renaissance man's dismissal of human frailty
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension,how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! "
Alberti said much the same
That is no dismissal. It is spoken by a man (Hamlet) who is out of love with life and who continues: 'And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so.' If anyone understood human frailty, it was Shakespeare.
I appreciate that this is another of Damant's sidelines, but what Hamlet says is a statement of Renaissance man's confidence in mankind - even though Hamlet used it in the context you correctly mention. Man is the master of all things, said Alberti - I leap ! I bound !. In my youth I though that the Renaissance had updated the Greeks, but now I see that the Greeks were right, and we are under the threat of dark forces, in our minds, and in the madness of crowds, so that the rationality and supreme confidence of the Renaissance is overwhelmed. Thus I suppose that I come back to human frailty
Which is why Shakespeare is the rightful heir of Sophocles and Euripides. The darkness never went away - think of all the horrors even in Renaissance Italy (the siege of Rome, for instance). Think of Gesualdo. And alongside Shakespeare there's Webster, always seeing the skull beneath the skin. Every age contains its opposite. And Mozart was so often dismissed as a playful child of the rococo, when he was giving us the demonism of Don Giovanni and the painful truths of Cosi.
I shall be following you on this religiously (hmmm no joke intended) but as you know I don't have quite the enthusiasm for Bach as you do. But if anyone can convert me I'm sure it will be you.
Your photo of that rather exotic interior of the Nikolaikirche reminded me of a music and word service we went to there. A splendid organ as I recall.
The Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has created an interesting programme that we went to on our 39th anniversary - dinner and Bach! It looked at what went into making the music possible beyond the composing - instrument making, paper and ink making, clothing, social and class divisions in Leipzig of the time, venues, a fascinating segment on gut strings. A mixture of video, live narrations and excerpts from letters and newspapers but of course at the centre of it all was Bach and his music... they move around the stage in various combinations playing from memory. I've made it all sound a bit "tricky" but given the quality of the music, the music making and the research that went into it, it was quite a remarkable evening.
Where did this Tafelmusik event take place? Sounds fascinating. We need more events like this. Was just talking to the director of the London Handel Festival, who has an idea to have Prima Donnas rehearsing or warming up in various Georgian houses around Handel's Mayfair; the spectators are then asked to choose their favourite.
I hope it only needs a nudge to love the cantatas. And if you love Arleen Auger - who could not, a compatriot of yours I believe - then splash out on the Rilling box and sample at leisure.
I only heard the organ in the Thomaskirche, or rather one of them as a new 'Bach' organ has been funded in there. The story of October 1989 in the Nikolaikircher is an amazing and moving one, as I'm sure you were made aware when you were there.
It was November 23 of this year. Here's a link to a short video from their media site. They have several of these type of concerts in their repertoire.
https://www.tafelmusik.org/media-room/js-bach-circle-creation
Canada, I see - so in PEI or Ottawa?
In PEI... I haven't left the Island now in a year.... time to go somewhere exotic...
Of course 'exotic' is usually where one is not. I'm sure I would find aspects of PEI exotic (not least the fact that every island, at least one smaller than England, Wales and Scotland, seems exotic to me).
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