Cantatas for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich

This was the first cantata programme in this pilgrimage to take place on what
was for many of us home soil. After three of the most intense weeks of music-
making beginning at Christmas in Weimar, continuing in Berlin over New Year
and in Leipzig and Hamburg at Epiphany, some of the group were concerned
that the special atmosphere might have evaporated, and with it the
extraordinary quality of listening that German audiences bring to this music.
With the Royal Naval College at Greenwich packed to the rafters on two
consecutive evenings we need not have worried.
At first glance one might have thought it a little odd that, for a Sunday in
which the Collect is ‘Unto us a child is born. Hallelujah!’, Bach left us three
cantatas with the titles ‘My God, how long, ah! how long?’ (BWV 155), ‘Ah
God, what deep affliction’ (BWV 3) and ‘My sighs, my tears’ (BWV 13). Was
this just a case of the Lutheran clergy making a fetish of the hair-shirt
approach to life’s woes? The texts of the cantatas inscribe a path from
mourning to consolation – one illuminated by Bach’s music – and, by varying
degrees of emphasis on the Gospel for the day (the miracle of the turning of
water into wine), they employ this as a symbol of the transformation of earthly
troubles into heavenly bliss. They also point to the ‘proper’ time (‘Mine hour is
not yet come’, Jesus said to his mother) at which the believers’ long vigil of
tribulation and doubt will finally end.
We gave the first of the cantatas for this Sunday, BWV 155 Mein Gott,
wie lang, ach lange? (composed in Weimar in 1716), in its revised, Leipzig
version (1724). It traces the progress of the individual soul from isolation and
wretchedness (No.1), by means of encouragement and exhortation from
fellow believers (No.2) and comfort in the word of God (No.3) to a secure and
delighted trust in Christ (No.4). An initial D minor lunge of despair in the upper
strings over a pulsating bass line launches the soprano into her heart-stopping
arioso. An antithesis is soon established between her ‘cup of tears’ which is
‘ever replenished’ and the ‘wine of joy’ which has run out. This turned out to
be a common thread in all three cantatas – the ‘Weinen/Wein’ (weeping/wine)
metaphor serving to show that tribulation is unavoidable if faith is to grow. By

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assigning the first and fourth movements of Salomo Franck’s text to a
soprano, Bach may have been buttressing the Lutheran scaled-down view of
Mary: honoured as the mother of Jesus, yet an intensely human figure. He
first presents her wringing her hands as the ‘wine of joy’ runs out at the Cana
marriage feast, her confidence ‘all but gone’; yet she speaks for all believers
in progressing from intense anxiety (No.1) to a joyful acceptance of Christ’s
word at his chosen time (No.4).
Some time around his fiftieth birthday Bach was presented with a
splendid crystal goblet – perhaps by two ex-pupils, the brothers Krebs –
decorated with grapes and vine leaves. It bears an inscription partly in verse,
partly in segments of a descending chromatic scale, a sure way of getting the
master’s attention. Was it perhaps a coded ploy by the donors, their way of
shaking him out of his disaffection with composing new music for the church,
of rekindling his zest by expressing ‘hopes for life... that only you [Bach] can
give them’? (The Krebs brothers – the name means ‘crab’ – can be read in the
backward or crab-wise motion of the second segment.) One can picture Bach
quaffing the wine from his goblet, fully alert to its engraved Lutheran
admonishment – that to survive life’s ordeals one needs to have faith and
hopes for fulfilment in an afterlife – and recalling the felicitous way he had
found of expressing this very thought some twenty years earlier, the soprano
swirling up to a top G with the words ‘the wine of joy’ as the upper strings
descend in parallel motion.
Traces of that bucolic mood survive in the wide-ranging, chuntering
bassoon which acts as a genial decoration to the consoling message of the
alto/tenor duet. Did this start life as music for one of those celebrated Bach
family reunions? It persists in the bass’s mention of ‘the wine of comfort and
joy’ which lies in wait for those who have passed God’s test of love and faith
(No.3). I find the dancing exuberance of the last aria utterly irresistible – the
way in which the soprano throws caution to the wind, herself into the loving
embrace of the Highest and the text into all kinds of angular, but jaunty,
contortions. The final chorale reveals that confidence has been restored:
when God is most present he is often invisible to the human eye.
Next came BWV 3 Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid, composed as
part of Bach’s second Leipzig cycle in January 1725. The chorale melody of

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the first movement is assigned on this occasion to the vocal bass-line
supported by a trombone. Bach takes a simple device and a frequent symbol
of grief in the tragic chaconnes of Baroque opera – six notes in chromatic
descent – and makes it the melodic germ of his entire chorale fantasia: the
introduction, each vocal entry, the instrumental interludes and the coda. His
method is to work from the natural accentuation of the German text (and not
the barlines!) and to underline this with a succession of appoggiaturas and
chromatic harmonies which results in what Gillies Whittaker calls ‘a
fascinating maze of cross-accents such as we find in Tudor choral music’.
Even the effortfully ascending counter-subject reinforces the image of ‘the
narrow path... full of sorrow’. It is only with the mention of going to Heaven
(‘zum Himmel wandern’) that Bach offers us a glimmer of hope through a
radiant ascent by the sopranos to a top A, re-establishing the home key,
though by a circuitous route.
The chorale tune returns (No.2), this time harmonised without frills and
in straightforward diatonic chordal form, each line separated by an ostinato
motif in the continuo (derived from the chorale tune in diminution) and ‘troped’
by recitatives for each of the four solo voices in turn. The following bass aria is
an uncomfortable, tortuous ride for both cello and singer, their lines constantly
criss-crossing each other as it twists and turns to convey ‘Hell’s anguish and
torment’ (the altar painting of St Paul and the viper on the back wall of the
Naval College Chapel seemed to complement this image). This is only the first
line of a six-line stanza, yet Bach extends its influence over all but eight of the
sixty-two bars of the aria’s ‘A’ section – which even the mention of ‘a true
delight in Heaven’ cannot completely dispel.
Bach reserves his most winning music for the E major duet (No.5) sung
in free canon by the soprano and alto to a fugal accompaniment of violins and
oboes d’amore in unison. His achievement here is to prove how, through
joyful singing, one can win the battle to rid oneself of the cares that revolve
within the troubled mind – his equivalent of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, I suppose. It
took me until the ‘B’ section to realise that the melodic outline of the entire
duet (and the purposeful fugal exchanges between all four lines) is based not
on some external musical whim but on aural symbols of the Cross to which
the words refer (‘Jesus helps to bear my cross’), appearing both in the

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melodic shapes inscribed across the stave and in the characteristic use of
double sharps, symbolised by an x. It also refers us back to the sorrowful
heaviness of the opening fantasia and its chromatic expressivity. This is finally
purged in Bach’s plain harmonisation of Martin Moller’s hymn (No.6).
Alfred Dürr once wrote that Bach’s setting of Georg Christian Lehms’
text Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen (BWV 13) ‘illustrates how the imagination
of the Baroque musician is particularly fired by texts dealing with sighing and
pain’. True; but the effect of Bach’s music is hardly typical: read Lehms’ text
and you sense a self-indulgent, wallowing quality; listen to Bach’s music and it
is transforming, every sound pointing beyond itself to a state of heightened
awareness.
Take the opening movement, a slow 12/8 lament for tenor, two
recorders, oboe da caccia and continuo. Remove the oboe da caccia and the
music, complete in itself, is unremitting lamentation. The effect of an added
counter-melody, with decorative arabesques in the oboe da caccia with its
flared brass bell, is to penetrate the anguished texture: to refine and soften the
pain of the dissonances and overall despondency. Eventually the oboe da
caccia takes over the foreground, its influence extending to the recorders, who
with the voice entry abandon their mournful dialogue and play in unison. (In
the sixth bar of the ‘B’ section there is an intriguing similarity to the theme of
the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion in the bass line – a conscious
reference to that monumental Klaglied?) Then in the chorale (No.3), the
imploring conclusion to the alto’s prayer for comfort (No.2), Bach assigns
confident diatonic harmonies to the strings’ decorative surround to the plain
chorale tune, the alto doubled by the three wind instruments from the opening
aria. He thus ensures that an optimistic, wordless answer is implied (and
understood by the listener) to the singer’s rendering of a text full of uncertainty
and questioning.
The fifth movement is surely one of the bleakest of all Bach’s arias. I
remember it from my childhood – from faltering attempts to accompany my
mother’s singing on the violin – but the ‘halo’ of two recorders playing above
the violin was new to me. There is a hypnotic quality in the combination of
violin obbligato doubled at the octave by the white, sepulchral sound of the
recorders. Bach seems determined to rub the listener’s nose in the full misery

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and wretchedness of life here below, the idea he adumbrated in the first of
these three cantatas but here raises to a different level of meditational
intensity. Having up to this point taken the edge off Lehms’ doleful words, he
is now in a position to do the opposite: where the text postulates a ‘beam of
joy’ as the culmination of all the ‘groaning and piteous weeping [which] cannot
ease sorrow’s sickness’ Bach, in his modified ABA da capo form, virtually
ignores this step by step advance from gloom to confidence. He lifts the
shroud of dissonant and angular harmony only in temporary and inconclusive
imitation of the ‘heavenward glance’ (bars 51-52). This is but a prelude to a
full-scale recapitulation of the first section in the sub-dominant, the music
plunged again into darkness as though intent on exploring new agonies of
mind and soul. With your pulse and mind slowed down, your senses
sharpened, you becomes alert to each tiny detail. The aria is hugely
demanding of the performers in its exceptional length, intensity of expression
and degree of exposure (we were incredibly lucky that Gerry Finley was
willing to step in at the last moment). It is even more harrowing than that other
Epiphany aria for bass ‘Lass, o Welt, mich aus Verachtung in betrübter
Einsamkeit’ (BWV 123/5), which we gave in Leipzig two weeks ago. Only the
consoling beauty of Heinrich Isaak’s tune to ‘Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen’
– used so poignantly in the St Matthew Passion – could follow this in Bach’s
consummate harmonisation.
What a setting for Bach’s music Nicholas Hawksmoor’s design for the
great chapel at Greenwich might have provided! Conceived in a fit of wild
baroque experimentation around 1699 as the centrepiece of the grandest
group of buildings to be built in early eighteenth-century England (to which he,
Wren and Vanbrugh all contributed), the chapel project then went to sleep for
three decades. It was eventually remodelled on a much more modest scale by
James (‘Athenian’) Stuart in the 1780s. With its shallow vaults and facing
galleries, it has the cool neo-classical elegance of a later generation – which
by and large turned its back on the likes of Hawksmoor and Bach.

Cantatas for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

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If asked what kind of opera composer Bach would have been, I would point
immediately to BWV 81 Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?. For it seems to
me that nothing in his secular cantatas, despite their titles as dramma per
musica, is remotely as vividly theatrical or indeed operatic as this amazing
work, first performed in Leipzig on 30 January 1724. It is one of only a handful
of cantatas in which Bach seizes on a dramatic incident from the Gospel of
the day – here Matthew’s account of Jesus calming the violent storm on Lake
Galilee which threatens to capsize the boat in which he and his disciples are
sailing – and makes it the basis of a metaphor pertinent to the Christians of
his day: life as a sea voyage.
Jesus’ sleep on board ship is the initial backdrop to an eerie meditation
on the terrors of abandonment in a godless world – cue for a pair of old-
fashioned recorders (so often associated in Bach’s music with contemplations
of death as well as sleep) to be added to the string band. Nor is it a surprise
that Bach gives this opening aria to an alto, the voice he regularly turned to for
expressions of contrition, fear and lamenting. Here he challenges the singer
with a serious technical (and symbolic) endurance test, to hold a low B flat
without quavering for ten slow beats (twice!) and then to go on to evoke the
gaping abyss of approaching death. There is also a balance problem to
resolve: of blending the pair of fixed-volume recorders sounding an octave
above the strings – which are, of course, dynamically flexible – while retaining
maximum expressivity. Life without Jesus (his soporific silence lasts all the
way through the first three numbers) causes his disciples and later
generations acute anguish and a sense of alienation which comes to the
surface in the tenor recitative (No.2) with dislocated, dissonant harmonies.
One thinks of Psalm 13: ‘How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how
long wilt thou hide thy face from me?’, and of the guiding star precious to all
mariners and to the magi.
Suddenly the storm bursts. It is astonishing what a vivid scena Bach
can create from a simple 3/8 allegro in G major just for strings. A continuous
spume of violent demisemiquavers in the first violins set against a thudding
pulsation in the other instruments reaches ear-splitting cracks on the 7/6/4/2
flat chords to convey the rage of ‘Belial’s waters’ beating against the tiny

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vessel. The overall effect is similar to one of Handel’s more powerful operatic
‘rage’ arias, demanding an equivalent virtuosity of rapid passagework by both
tenor and violins but imbued with vastly more harmonic tension. Three times
Bach halts the momentum mid-storm, as it were, for two-bar ‘close-ups’ of the
storm-tossed mariner. Though intensely real, the tempest is also an emblem
of the godless forces which threaten to engulf the lone Christian as he stands
up to his taunters.
Jesus, now awake (how could he possibly have slept through all that
racket?), rebukes his disciples for their lack of faith. In an arioso with
straightforward continuo accompaniment (it is almost a two-part invention) the
bass soloist assumes the role of vox Christi. After the colourful drama of the
preceding scena the very spareness and repetitiveness of the music is
striking. One wonders whether there is an element of dramatic realism here –
of yawn-induced irritation and rebuke (all those repeated warums) – or even of
mild satire: is this perhaps another of those occasions when Bach is having a
bit of fun at the expense of his Leipzig theological task-masters?
There follows a second seascape, just as remarkable as the earlier
tempest, in the form of an aria for bass, two oboes d’amore and strings. The
strings in octaves evoke the pull of the tides, the undertow and the waves
welling up only to be checked at the point of breaking by Jesus’ commands
‘Schweig! Schweig!’ (‘Be silent!’) and ‘Verstumme!’ (‘Be still!’). Neither Bach’s
autograph score nor the original parts contain any helpful indication of
articulation (which of course does not necessarily preclude their introduction in
his performances). We experimented with different slur-permutations and with
localised crescendi aborted one beat earlier than their natural wave-crest.
These seemed to work idiomatically and pictorially, as did the final ritornello
played smoothly and softly, now obedient as it were to Christ’s commands.
The stilling of the storm is implicit both in the alto soloist’s concluding
recitative (No.6) and in the final chorale, the seventh verse of Johann Franck’s
hymn Jesu, meine Freude – a perfect conclusion to this extraordinary and
genuine dramma per musica.
The land-locked Bach might never have witnessed an actual storm at
sea, but one of his favourite authors, the seventeenth-century theologian
Heinrich Müller, could certainly have done: he lived in Rostock on the Baltic

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coast and commentated eloquently on this particular incident in Matthew’s
gospel. For the true believer to travel in ‘Christ’s little ship’ is, metaphorically,
to experience the buffetings of life and bad weather, but to come through
unscathed: ‘the paradox of total peace in the midst of turbulence’. A
tropological interpretation of this biblical event was, one would have hoped,
sufficient justification for Bach’s brilliantly inventive and, yes, dramatic
treatment, and a foretaste of his St John Passion, whose premiere lay just
over two months away. But we can be sure that it would have ruffled the
feathers of Leipzig councilmen like Dr Steger who, nine months earlier, had
voted for Bach as Cantor with the implied proviso ‘that he should make
compositions that were not theatrical’.
There was no danger of bathos in Bach’s sequel for the same Sunday
the following year: it did not exist! Easter came so early in 1725 there was no
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, and it was not until ten years later, just after
the first performance of his Christmas Oratorio, that Bach sat down to
compose BWV 14 Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit. Here he reverts
deliberately to the chorale-based structure of his second Leipzig cycle, taking
as his starting point Luther’s hymn (a paraphrase of Psalm 124) which,
apparently, had been sung on this Sunday in Leipzig from time immemorial.
But instead of opening with a chorale fantasia he sets himself a fresh
challenge: to present each chorale line equally between the four vocal parts
(doubled by strings), first in fugal exposition and immediately answered by its
inversion, and then in augmentation by unison oboes and corno di caccia.
This creates a complex polyphony in five real parts (six, when the continuo
line peels off from doubling the vocal bass), and suggests an affinity in
technique and even mood with the opening chorus of BWV 80 Ein feste Burg.
It is a defiant, awe-inspiring riposte to the earlier Jesus schläft, one which
presents a clear image of God’s indispensable protection to the beleaguered
community of believers – ‘We who are such a tiny band’ – by means of the
dense web of supporting counterpoint. Both of the ensuing arias are
considerably easier on the ear, though technically demanding. The one for
soprano (No.2) with string textures reminiscent of Brandenburg No.3 features
the horn in its highest register (referred to in the autograph part as Corne. par
force and tromba), defiant in support of the singer’s show of strength against

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the enemy’s ‘tyranny’. Bach wisely did not attempt to emulate his prodigious
seascapes from BWV 81 and here makes only passing reference to the storm
in the angular tenor recitative (No.3) and a vigorous gavotte-derived aria for
bass and two oboes (No.4) which focuses on God’s rebuff to the ‘violent
waves’ of enemies which ‘rage against us’. The gentle lapping motion of
unthreatening passing quavers in the final chorale is perhaps accidental, since
the imagery has now switched to the soul’s escape from the fowler’s snare.
With comparatively little for the choir in these cantatas – both for
Epiphany 2 and 4 – I decided to include the longest of Bach’s motets, BWV
227 Jesu, meine Freude (which happens to be one of the set hymns for the
feast) to both this and the Greenwich programmes. Even after countless
attempts over many years to get to its heart, I still find it hugely – and
rewardingly – challenging. One needs to ensure that there are none of ‘those
primordial collisions between song and words’ (George Steiner), and to relish
both its fruitful interleaving of St Paul’s stern homilies to the Romans with
Johann Franck’s vivid and sometimes sugary hymn stanzas and the way Bach
harmonises them with matchless ingenuity. Fashionable musicology would
have it that the motet is a compilation, put together from the rump of ‘Es ist
nun nichts’ (movement 2) and the central fugue ‘Ihr aber seid nicht fleischlich’.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone but Bach could possibly have concocted
the brilliant, chiastic structure of this eleven-movement motet, and done so as
the very first stage of its compositional planning.
With only two cantatas for Epiphany 4 there was room for another
aquatic cantata, BWV 26 Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig, composed in
November 1724, which would otherwise not have got a look-in during our
cantata pilgrimage (with Easter coming so late, there was no twenty-fourth
Sunday after Trinity in 2000). Like several of Bach’s late Trinity season
cantatas its central theme is the brevity of human life and the futility of earthly
hopes. Bach bases his cantata on a paraphrase of the thirteen verses of a
hymn by Michael Franck (1652), which was included in the Leipzig and
Dresden hymn schedules for this Sunday. The instrumental ritornello to the
opening chorale fantasia is a stupendous piece of musical confectionery. Long
before the first statement of Franck’s hymn (sopranos doubled by cornetto)
Bach establishes the simile of man’s life to a rising mist which will soon

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disperse. Fleet-footed scales, crossing and recrossing, joining and dividing,
create a mood of phantasmal vapour – a brilliant elaboration of an idea which
first came to him in Weimar (1714/16) when he composed an organ chorale to
a simplified version of Franck’s hymn (BWV 644).
In his second stanza Franck compares the course of human life to
‘rushing water’ shooting down a mountainside before disappearing, an image
dear to the Romantic poets. Could Goethe have known Franck’s hymn when
he wrote his marvellous ‘Gesang der Geister über der Wassern’ (‘Song of the
spirits over the waters’) in Weimar some time in the 1780s? There seems to
me to be a proto-Romantic gestalt to the way Bach sets Franck’s verse for
tenor, flute, violin and continuo (No.2), each musician required to keep
changing functions – to respond, imitate, echo or double one another – while
variously contributing to the insistent onwardness of the tumbling torrent. It is
a technique Schubert might have admired when he came to set Goethe’s
poem to music for male voice choir – no less than four times. Life as misty
vapour, then as a mountain torrent; now Bach has to deal with material
breakdown, the moment when ‘all things shatter and collapse in ruin’ (No.4).
He scores this Totentanz for three oboes and continuo supporting his bass
soloist in a mock bourrée. Where one would expect this trinity of oboes to
establish a mood of earthly (even evangelical) pomp, with the stirring entry of
the singer their role becomes gradually more subversive and pictorial, firstly in
the throbbing accompaniment which seems to undermine the fabric of those
‘earthly pleasures’ by which men are seduced, then through jagged figures to
represent the tongues of flame which will soon reduce them to ashes, and
finally in hurtling semiquaver scales of 6/4 chords for those ‘surging waves’
which will tear all worldly things apart. Perhaps most imaginative of all are the
two brief secco recitatives in which Bach depicts fleeting human aspiration
(No.3) and the way even the god-like eminence of the rich will one day be
turned to dust (No.5). Both the declamation and the word-painting are superb.
Each of them could stand alone, both as eschatology and as Bach’s way of
encapsulating the message in music of phenomenal economy and
trenchancy.
The interior of Romsey Abbey is a revelation in the way it seems to
combine uncluttered gracefulness with a beautifully proportioned

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Romanesque sturdiness. It cries out for music. Founded as a nunnery by King
Alfred’s son Edward in 907, it was sacked by the Danes, rebuilt by the Saxons
and then again by the Normans. It was saved from becoming a picturesque
ruin at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries by an inspired decision of
the citizens of Romsey in 1544 to buy it for £100 as their parish church. The
nave is flanked by three decks of arcade, gallery and clerestory. As the eye
moves westwards you realise that the last three arches, the two final bays of
the gallery and almost the entire clerestory are early Gothic, not Norman.
Then, one bay before the crossing, the rhythm changes: here, squattest of all,
are a pair of giant cylindrical columns two storeys high. Everywhere there are
signs of the twelfth and thirteenth-century masons experimenting with new
styles and motifs from abroad – just as Bach did when he first encountered
the Italian concerto. What did those stone-carved figures peering down at us
from the projecting corbels make of all this?

© John Eliot Gardiner 2006

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