The Bach Experience
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Marsh Chapel at Boston University THE BACH EXPERIENCE Listeners’ Companion 2018|2019 THE BACH EXPERIENCE Listeners’ Companion 2018|2019 Notes by Brett Kostrzewski Contents Foreword v September 30, 2018 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gerichtmit deinem Knecht BWV105 1 November 18, 2018 Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgendein Schmetz sei BWV46 5 February 10, 2019 Herr Jesu Christ,wahr’ Mensch und Gott BWV 127 9 April 7, 2019 Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? BWV8 13 Foreword The 2018–2019 Bach Experience at Marsh Chapel marks my fourth year of involvement as annotator, and the second that we have produced this expanded Listeners’ Companion. I remain as grateful, as I was in 2015, for Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett’s invitation to contribute my writing to the Bach Experience, and I am honored to share with you the fruits of my continued study of Johann Sebastian Bach’s remarkable corpus of church cantatas. This year’s Bach Experience divides neatly into two pairs. The first two cantatas were heard on successive Sundays in Leipzig—on 25 July and 1 August 1723, respectively—and you are fortunate to hear them in succession here. The pair, composed only two months after Bach took on his post as Thomaskantor, represent two of his finest accomplishments of the genre, all the more remarkable for appearing on ordinary Sundays in the middle of the summer. I point out some of the compositional elements that link the two cantatas; perhaps you will discover more. The second pair of cantatas were composed during Bach’s second full year in Leipzig, when he took to composing a complete cycle of cantatas primarily based on Lutheran chorales, known as his “chorale cantatas.” I often find the chorale cantatas difficult to write about at length; while their technical aspects are fascinating, particularly Bach’s integration of the chorale melodies, I find their aural experience far more rewarding than anything I could contribute in these notes. Bach followed a more consistent compositional template for his chorale cantatas, making the sheer wealth of invention across that cycle all the more impressive. As I wrote last year in this space, I hope that this expanded format of annotations serves to enhance your experience of these four beautiful compositions and to facilitate further exploration of their musical and cultural richness. I once again offer my thanks to Dr. Jarrett, Justin Blackwell, Music at Marsh Chapel, and, most of all, my readers for inviting my participation in their experience of Bach’s immeasurable musical gifts. Brett Kostrzewski September 2018 Boston Brett Kostrzewski is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at Boston University, where he focuses primarily on the polyphony of Josquin des Prez and his contemporaries, under the advisement of Joshua Rifkin and Victor Coelho. In addition to the Bach Experience at Marsh Chapel, Kostrzewski has supplied notes for the Bach Akademie Charlotte, the Back Bay Chorale, the Boston University choral and instrumental ensembles, the Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses, the Boston Choral Ensemble, and others. He has also studied choral conducting at Boston University, under Drs. Ann Howard Jones and Scott Allen Jarrett. In addition to his work as a musicologist, he co-founded the vocal ensemble Sourcework, and currently serves as the Director of Music at St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine in Boston. He welcomes correspondence at [email protected]. v September 30, 2018 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht BWV105 Cantata for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity Epistle: 1 Corinthians 10:6–13 Gospel: Luke 16:1–9 First performed: 25 July 1723 Forces: SATB chorus, SATB solos, corno (played by trumpet in today’s performance), two oboes, strings, and continuo It is difficult to imagine a composition such as this one turning up on any given Sunday in Bach’s Leipzig. Barely two months on the job, Bach served up one of his most exceptional cantatas: rich in pathos, elegant in craftsmanship, and unflinching in its depiction of the Lutheran fear of judgment alleviated only by the blood of Christ. Written for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity on 25 July 1723, the great Bach scholar Alfred Dürr understandably numbered this cantata “among the most sublime descriptions of the soul in baroque and Christian art.” The anonymous libretto of Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht BWV105 follows a template found in most of Bach’s early Leipzig cantatas, in which a bipartite poetic text is sandwiched between an opening chorus drawn directly from Scripture and a concluding four-part chorale verse. The two parts of this libretto are drawn from the Scripture lessons for that Sunday. In the excerpt from his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs his readers to avoid those sins which doomed the Israelites in the wilderness: “Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.” (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:6) The libretto therefore opens with a Psalm verse and recitative-aria pair that reflect on the stain of sin and the inevitable wrath of God’s righteous judgment. But the Gospel excerpt, the parable of the untrustworthy manager recounted by Luke, offers hope for the believer who places his or her faith in Christ: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” (cf. Luke 16:9) The second recitative-aria pair and concluding chorale verse therefore linger in the hopeful believer’s deliverance from hell afforded by Christ’s Passion. All of this is achieved through subtle references not just to these two excerpts, but to other Psalms, Epistles, and books of the Old Testament— further supporting speculations that Bach’s early Leipzig librettist had training as a preacher and/or theologian. 1 The elegance of this cantata, with its neatly balanced forms and creative instrumentation, reveals the naturalness with which Bach was able to compose such masterworks at breakneck speed. The autograph score suggests that the obbligato oboe and corno occurred to him only after composing the music for the arias; and that only later still did he appear to add them to the opening chorus. (The corno part is played in our performance by a trumpet. Furthermore, we dispense with the corno doubling in the opening chorus.) Notice, for example, the way in which he later sketched the obbligato corno line on top of the already-composed first violin line of the tenor aria, shown in the accompanying figure. The opening chorus sets Psalm 143:2, accompanied by continuo and strings, the violins doubled by oboes and corno. Its opening texture, of pulsing eighth notes in the continuo and slow-moving suspended lines in the melodic instruments, foreshadows the opening chorus of the St. John Passion BWV244; similar, too, are the vocal exclamations of “Herr” (“Lord”) that punctuate the entrances of the singers in both choruses, leading one to wonder if Bach looked back on this chorus when he began writing the Passion the following spring. The first part of the chorus, in a common-time Adagio, lingers on the first sentence of the Psalm verse within a self-contained musical structure. Following the instrumental ritornello, the singers are accompanied by continuo alone as they introduce a pointillistic contrapuntal figure marked by seemingly haphazard exclamations of “Herr.” The vocal section moves to the dominant, where the ritornello is then repeated; when the vocalists resume after the ritornello, new counterpoint in the melodic instruments accompanies them. A short bridge of new material, audible by a descending sequence in the continuo and an exclamation of “Herr” on successive beats by each voice in turn, leads back to the closing ritornello, but this time with the singers joining the instruments. A long pedal on the dominant leads to an allegro alla breve section which sets the second sentence of the Psalm verse, here a sturdy fugue that creates drama not just in its various compositional iterations, but also in the rhetorical use of piano and even pianissimo before a sudden return to forte. Bach saves instrumental doubling for the climactic final statements of the chorus. A short recitative introduces the poetic text on guilt and sin; the aria that follows stands as one of Bach’s most exquisite and heartwrenching. The text of this recitative-aria pair identifies the mark of a faithful Christian: not sinlessness, but acknowledgment of sin; not perfection in acts, but perfection in faith. The “trembling” and “wavering” (zittern und wanken) of the sinner’s conscience are depicted by the oboe’s opening motive (which itself recalls one of the contrapuntal figures from the opening chorus), but the aria’s most stunning effect is its omission of the continuo—creating a sense of rootlessness, a special effect reserved by Bach for 2 only a handful of particularly affective moments. The viola provides a semblance of structure, again with pulsing eighth notes, below shimmering sixteenth notes in the violins. The strophic aria demonstrates Bach’s skill at weaving breathtaking contours and melodic lines that germinate from a simple four-note motive. Bach depicts a sinner humbled by his or her conscience, standing before God in righteous pain and sorrow. The recitative for bass that follows, in an arioso style with its elaborate string accompaniment, transitions from the sinner’s pain to the redemptive love of Christ: Wohl aber dem, der senen Bürgen weiß: “Fortunate though is he who knows his Guarantor.” The warmth of the recitative, in the traditional voice type assigned to Christ’s words in dramatic tellings of the Passion, comforts the believer in the face of the Father’s judgment.