Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapuntus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 2 – Contrapunctus XIV from “The Art of Fugue” by Johann Sebastian Bach

 

Do you have an “elevator speech” prepared?  An elevator speech refers to a pithy sales pitch or description of services that is brief enough to deliver to a captive audience during a short elevator ride, but substantive enough to give a complete impression of doing business with you and persuasive enough to move a prospect toward closing a sale or referring someone else to do the same.  Business professionals of all stripes are encouraged to prepare such elevator speeches with the aim of turning any short meeting into closed business.  You can think of an elevator speech as a personal abstract, a concise summary of what you are about that gives the broadest overview as clearly as possible.  A good elevator speech should provide a vivid image of what working with you is like, but leave enough to the imagination that the prospect is intrigued to take further steps to making this a reality and filling in the outlines it draws.

Sometimes when I read articles about notable composers in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the gold standard for general research about practically any topic in Western art music, I note that the authors are, in many ways, creating elevator speeches for them.  Actually, they are not so much about the composers themselves as their legacies.  If you had met Handel on the street his description of services would be somewhat different than the way we have come to describe the legacy left by his life and body of work.  When the Grove’s authors write their introductions they are essentially summarizing why we value these musicians and the benefits acquaintance with their work can offer to us, even after multiple centuries.  While the gigantic articles about significant composers are packed with interesting biographical and artistic detail, I often find the little abstracts which precede them to be the most clever and carefully written parts of the article.  And I think my favorite abstract in the Grove’s, one to which I return again and again out of admiration, is that about Johann Sebastian Bach.  His article warrants 55 pages, and its author, Christoph Wolff, summarizes the old master’s legacy thus:

His genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. 

While it was in the former capacity, as a virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that have earned him a unique historical position.  His art was of an encyclopedic nature, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, styles and general achievements of his own and earlier generations which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.

It is densely written and requires considerable study to unpack and appreciate.  But it is also very effectively summarizes what we value about Bach.  Can you imagine him walking around with business cards on which are printed:

Johann Sebastian Bach, organist and composer

My genius combines outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative posers in which forceful original inventiveness and intellectual control are perfectly balanced

Of course not.  Don’t be ridiculous!  Like I said, that’s his legacy.  But let’s take that apart:

Outstanding performing musicianship – I think what this means is that for Bach there was little distinction between performing, improvising, and composing.  As a performer and composer, he was constantly inventive and completely at home, going between them with ease and grace.

Supreme creative powers – That’s a strong word, even a superlative one.  What Wolff is saying here is that no one in the history of music was more creative than Bach, who could create quickly and consistently, and with astounding inspiration, any time any place.

Forceful, originally inventiveness – If you have listened to any amount of Bach and paid attention, perhaps you have been struck by the cascade of remarkably vigorous and finely-wrought musical ideas which are always distinctive, but always speaking clearly in Bach’s voice.  It never ends, nor does the strength with which they are asserted.

Intellectual control – Bach is still heralded as the most intelligent musician ever to live.  Had he been a mathematician or physicist, he would have rivaled Newton and Einstein.  As an author he would have contended with Shakespeare.  Once you know a little bit of how music works it is simply mind-boggling how controlled Bach’s music is on every single level, and consistently so.

Do you get the picture?  It is easy to divinize Bach, but the image I often carry of his music is like that of a god (or a demigod at least), creation full of beauty, detail and inner consistency springing from his mighty finger (see this post).  Bach’s music really does feel like some kind of eternal stream flowing from the source of the very forces that bind the universe.  I think that is what Wolff is saying in his summary.

But Bach was not a god; he was mortal.  And in one particular piece we hear his god-like stream of creation come to a very human halt.  At the end of his life Bach created a collection of fugues and canons all on the same subject, something of a catalog of contrapuntal techniques.  The resulting Art of Fugue, if not necessarily loved, is respected by musicians for the feat of superlative craftsmanship and invention that it is.  Bach did not live to complete his vision.  He came very close, but the final fugue, which promised to work upon four different subjects, evokes the image of Bach’s life force finally and completely ceasing:

 

Can you hear all the elements of Wolff’s description, working in full-bodied force, and suddenly stopping?  From this it seems that Bach’s musicianship sprang complete from his spirit with no necessary refinement by his ears or external editor of any kind.  In a way it is almost a blessing for this to stay unfinished, a fitting image of the valve that closed when Bach died and stopped the flow of the consistent eternal creative force which he had learned to channel.
I’m not sure what Bach’s elevator speech would have been during his lifetime, but I think Christoph Wolff came up with a pretty good one for his legacy.  The qualities Wolff describes are constantly present in every single bar of music composed by the mature Bach.  I once played a chamber piece by Bach, coached by a university professor.  I was astounded by the constant inventiveness of the music and he noticed this.  He said something like “Yeah, there’s just constantly amazing things happening.  The guy was from another planet!”  He wasn’t, but it can often seem that way.  He was mortal after all, and the final fugue of the Art of Fugue shows us this plainly, if tragically, placing the god-like Bach in real space and time.

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MORE Music About Animals, Day 1 – “Sheep May Safely Graze” from the Hunting Cantata by J.S. Bach

This week’s theme is…MORE Music About Animals!  There’s just too much animal fun to contain within a single week…

MORE Music About Animals, Day 1 – “Sheep May Safely Graze” from the Hunting Cantata by J.S. Bach

I think it is easy to form an image of J.S. Bach as a man who was unconditionally driven by the strongest of principles.  This is most certainly largely true – his immortal music (it has stood the test of time magnificently, at least for three centuries, and shows no sign of failing the test anytime soon) seems wrought from the very forces which form the integrity of the universe itself (see this post).  The stories of his life seem to indicate that he held himself to the highest moral and ethical standards (well, there is that one rumor about the company he kept in the organ loft…) and demanded the same of those around him.  His contrapuntal ingenuity  could only have been borne of unceasing labor and adherence to the highest degree of self-critical reflection; there has never been, and perhaps never will be, a musician capable of combining different independent musical lines with such clarity and rigor (see this post).  And many know of his practice of inscribing “Jesus help” and “To God alone be the glory” at the beginning and end, respectively, of every composition he ever penned.  Perhaps it seems excessively humble, but a more charitable reading would be of modesty and submission to the divine will.  The abundance of sacred music in his output breathes with a sincerity that could never be forced or faked – the weekly cantatas he composed for church services in Leipzig are essentially the equivalent of sermons in musical form and Bach clearly meant what he said, er…sang, illuminating theological and moral messages with astounding dimension throughout this incredible body of works (see this post).

Yes, it is easy to regard Bach as a sort of monument to virtue and proper choice.  And overall this is most certainly true.  There was one manner of behavior, however, that may strike us as a little odd and even off-putting given the pristine image of Bach we have inherited: at certain times J.S. Bach ingratiated himself to aristocrats in hopes of securing patronage.  I think we are all familiar with the idea of being super nice to someone while they seem to have the potential to help us or grant us favor.  It may be cynical to say, but I’m sure you will agree it is true.  If the balance of power is tipped away from us, we behave differently, almost out of instinct.  The obsequious attitude that comes through in the music and letters of Bach in order to do this is simply a formalized expression of this human tendency.  To understand Bach’s motivation in entreating aristocrats in this manner, it is helpful to take some time to understand the economic system which supported the music, visual art, and literature of Bach’s day, known as the patronage system.  Today, we tend to think of art as a capitalist endeavor: if you have a gold record or a successful concert tour it means that you have a lot of satisfied customers, all of whom have paid a little bit to enjoy your product.  All of that revenue adds up, and you profit from it, after paying your expenses out of the gross.  For someone like Bach, it wouldn’t have been his ambition to work within that kind of economic structure (there were commercial devices during this time that resemble capitalism, but it wasn’t the dominant system of support for most of these composers).  Rather, he wanted to find a wealthy aristocrat who would pay his salary in exchange for working in his court and writing music to order, or a civic or ecclesiastical authority (these were sometimes the same thing, as in Lutheran Northern Germany) who would support him in a similar way.  The patronage system supported the creation of almost all the music of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras.  It was breaking down during Beethoven’s time as the ideas of Revolutionary France threatened the monarchical establishment, but even he secured patrons.

Bach held several posts within this system throughout his life, and he was always sending out feelers to keep his options open.  Several of his notable works bear the features of this motivation.  The now famous Brandenburg Concertos, probably the six finest examples of Baroque orchestral writing, were written to curry favor with the Margrave of Brandenburg, and the original edition includes a nauseating, flowery letter to the aristocrat, bursting at the seams with praise and deference.  The B Minor Mass was written by the Lutheran Bach in order to obtain a position in the court of the Catholic Augustus III, Elector of Saxony.  It was presented to the Elector with an accompanying letter asking for such a position, which was eventually granted.  And one of his only remaining cantatas on a secular text, known as the Hunting Cantata, was written as a birthday gift to Christian, Duke of Saxe-Weisenfels, an avid hunter.  It was not from Bach, but from his employer, William Ernest, duke of the neighboring Saxon province of Weimar.  As such, the flattery which dots the libretto is not Bach’s deference, but William’s respect.  Still, Bach paid his respects to Christian vicariously through this commission.

In crafting the libretto of the Hunting Cantata,  the librettist, Weimar court composer Salomon Franck, whose words served as the basis for some of Bach’s later cantatas, borrows a page from the playbook of Jean-Baptiste Lully.  Lully, the inventor of French opera, used them largely to pay tribute to his patron, the flamboyant French monarch, King Louis XIV, aka the Sun King.  Each of Lully’s operas begins with an extensive prologue, essentially a cantata in which mythological figures sing the praises of Louis, usually through some kind of thinly-veiled allegory (see this post).  Franck actually dispenses with the allegory – the mythological characters of the cantata continually refer to Christian by name, expounding upon his love of hunting and his skill and magnanimity as a ruler (an overstatement, by the way – Christian had trouble sticking to his budget and placed his duchy in dire straights).  The most famous excerpt of the Hunting Cantata is the soprano aria “Sheep May Safely Graze”, sung by Pales, the Roman deity of shepherds and livestock.  Her aria is in clear tribute to Christian’s rulership, making obvious reference to another Good Shepherd, the identity of whom would be lost to no one hearing it:

 

Schafe können sicher weiden,

Sheep can safely graze

Wo ein guter Hirte wacht.

where a good shepherd watches over them.

Wo Regenten wohl regieren,

Where rulers are ruling well,

Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren

we may feel peace and rest

Und was Länder glücklich macht.

and what makes countries happy.

This kind of obsequious tribute coming from someone so staid, so uncompromisingly virtuous as Bach seems incongruent with what his values seem to be.  But perhaps it shouldn’t.  In a way, all members of the patronage system, no matter which level they were operating, were just perpetuating the social order as they knew it, which was the best one they could imagine, and which most of them understood to be divinely ordained.  While this kind of behavior strikes us as excessively deferential, it was all part of an elaborate dance which helped society to keep moving one day at a time.  While the efforts to ingratiate himself to aristocrats seems at odds with Bach’s principled approach, perhaps it was some of his most principled behavior of all, designed to pay tribute to the rulers whom God had placed in their positions, and who ensured that business was conducted with order each and every day, for the good of all society.

 

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Rivers, Day 5 – Fugue No. 4 in C# minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 5 – Fugue No. 4 in C# minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach

The great French music teacher Nadia Boulanger once said something to the effect of “What musician does not know Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier?  I would be surprised to hear that someone hadn’t read the Bible.”  In case you don’t know of her, Nadia Boulanger was an unusually influential musical scholar, performer, and pedagogue living and working in Paris through most of the twentieth century.  She had begun her musical career with her aim set on composing, encouraged to do so by no less than Gabriel Faure; her mastery of musical technique is apparent given the recognition of her level of skill in solfege and harmony that is evident from the awards she gained at her conservatory.  But she soon realized her best service could be offered as a scholar and mentor to other musicians.  This is largely thought to be a result of her acknowledging the even stronger creative gifts of her younger sister, Lili, which she sought to cultivate.  Lili Boulanger died tragically young, at age 25, just as the First World War was ending.  Nadia took her death very hard, particularly for the lost potential that went to the grave with Lili, and I imagine it was that which gave her the push to support other composers in their work.  Her connections in the musical life of Paris gave her a secure position by which to absorb the music of the past and observe the music of the present, digesting all of it and assimilating it within her peerless intellect in order to offer just the right teaching at just the right moment.

By all accounts from her best students, study with Nadia Boulanger was intense, yet playful.  The students who worked with her in Paris could expect coaching in private sessions and weekly group sessions which could include lectures and challenging group activities designed to push everyone to their technical limits.  As a technician, she demanded perfection.  And, from what I’ve gathered, all students in whom she had any confidence were expected to essentially memorize everything about Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  I’ve heard that Nadia Boulanger made it one of her missions to memorize all of Western music.  Yes, you read that right.  One of her students, with whom I have had a bit of experience, explained that she made a discipline of obtaining every score within the Western tradition she could find, copying it by hand, and memorizing it in the process.  This student told me that you could ask her to sing, say, the viola line of the most anonymous symphony by Stamitz and Nadia would do so with poise and in perfect French solfege.  Can you imagine?  Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Franck, Chopin, everyone.  Every single note memorized.  After she had exhausted the music of the past, she turned to her contemporaries and began the same process with Xenakis, Stravinsky, Poulenc, and more.  Can you imagine studying with the possessor of that mind?

What strikes me is that given all of that knowledge, I read more quotes from Boulanger about Bach than any other composer.  “Once you can write a cantata every week like Bach, then you may call yourself a composer, but not until then.”   “Bach doesn’t submit to convention, he creates it.”  For her there was something essential and prime about Bach’s art (for more about why Bach is special to so many musicians, see this post) and it is summed up largely in the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Bach’s music exists in several dimensions, expanding every plane upon which it works into near infinite space.  He was an improviser per excellence and created the most colorful and virtuosic body of solo organ music in existence.  He elevated the art of composing upon the body of Lutheran chorales into a consummate art with his cantatas and passions (For more about Bach’s cantatas, see this post, probing the depths of theology in weekly musical sermons filled with some of the most challenging and beautiful music imaginable.  And in his instrumental works he sought to create encyclopedic volumes of all the polyphonic techniques and approaches with which he was familiar.  Polyphony refers to the art of composing or improvising with multiple voices working simultaneously – it is one of the many challenges of the Western musician’s art.  Toward the end of his life Bach left two incredible catalogs of polyphonic technique, The Art of Fugue and A Musical Offering, the latter composed on an awkward theme provided by Frederick the Great of Prussia as a challenge to Bach’s craft (for more about that, see this post).  Splendid as both of those collections are, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend either of them for beginners.  If you are unfamiliar with Bach’s counterpoint, the very best place to start is his Well-Tempered Clavier, so high in Boulanger’s estimation.

The title of the collection refers to a manner of tuning keyboard instruments so that every single key sounds pleasing.

There are many tuning systems, all with their respective pros and cons.  The system prevalent in Bach’s day, called meantone tuning, made some keys sound very good and others less so.  Apparently Bach was an early champion of the style of tuning popular today, called equal temperament, which assures that all keys will sound pleasing.  Tuning is a complex topic and some musicians study it in great detail.

While Bach sold the collection as a demonstration of temperament, with a prelude and fugue written in every different major and minor key to confirm the benefits, it has become a de facto demonstration of a range of polyphonic techniques that appeals to laymen and connoisseurs alike.  To continue with Boulanger’s comparison, Martin Luther once compared the Bible, I’ve heard, to “A pool in which an elephant can swim and a baby can wade.”  And so it is with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  The first prelude, in C major, has a timeless appeal to the masses, and is also simple enough to be placed in countless intermediate piano method books.  I’m sure you’ve heard it:

 

But the Well-Tempered Clavier also features movements which are dense, challenging, and worthy of years of study in order to unravel their complete mystery (not that the C major prelude isn’t).  The c# minor fugue, a richly symbolic mass of severe polyphonic splendor for 5 equal voices, is a splendid example of this.

 

It combines three different motives, the opening of which serves double duty as a musical representation of a cross (a religious symbol) and Bach’s musical signature, almost spelling Bach’s surname in German pitch classifications.  Later, against this stern figure, Bach introduces a graceful, flowing countersubject in constant eighth notes which is passed around the ensemble serving as a kind of fluid varnish washing over the slow-moving skeletal structure based on the opening motive.  This fluid eighth-note motive is sometimes compared to a stream, Bach in German.

http://bach.nau.edu/clavier/nature/fugues/Fugue04.html
Boulanger returned to the stream of Bach continually, both for herself and her students.  Bach’s legacy is so strong and multi-faceted that it is practically beyond explanation and must be experienced, preferably with a senior musician as one’s guide.  It is Bach’s richness, his vision, his uncompromising approach to musical artistry, the depth of his feeling and knowledge which seems to reach us from the very ideal, that led no less than Ludwig van Beethoven to exclaim “Not Bach but Meer should be his name!”

 

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Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

This week’s theme is…Wittgenstein Wonders! Can you imagine losing your livelihood?  How about your artistic identity?  The Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein made a very promising public debut in 1913, only to lose his right arm to wounds sustained during combat in the First World War.  Undeterred, he resolved to continue his career as a concert pianist and summarily developed ingenious techniques to play convincingly and virtuosically with just his left hand.  He also collaborated with contemporary composers frequently, commissioning some significant works for piano left hand alone, which I wager you would never suspect simply from listening.  This week we explore works written for and championed by Paul Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein Wonders, Day 3 – Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged by Johannes Brahms

 

While Paul Wittgenstein is the most famous example of a dedicated pianist requiring a special repertoire to suit his peculiar physical condition, he is not the only example of this through history.  Nor are the works written especially for him the only examples of composers and arrangers doing the same, and for various reasons.  Here’s a rather comprehensive list of piano music composed or arranged to be played with just the left hand:

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_Piano_works_for_the_left_hand

Camille Saint-Saens, a most intriguing figure to me (for more about him see this post), found himself at various points on the cycle of connoisseurial favor at different times in his life.  Significant to French musical history for his performing, teaching, editing, criticism and advocacy, as a composer he was extraordinarily gifted but unable, I fear, to convince many fellow musicians that his music was truly substantial and enduring.  He was at times subject to criticisms like “Bad music composed well” (ouch!), and toward the end of his life found himself unable to shake his association with light and trivial works like the famously ephemeral Wedding Cake Waltz, composed in 1886 as a gift to his near contemporary and piano duet partner Caroline de Serres née Montigny-Rémaury on the occasion of her second marriage.

Toward the end of her life she underwent a surgical operation which severely limited the functionality of her right hand and so approached Saint-Saens for a set of entertaining and challenging works which she could play with just her left.  Over the course of the resulting 6 Etudes, Opus 135, composed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which Wittgenstein suffered his own comparable personal tragedy, Saint-Saens explores every possible mood, texture and harmonic language, yielding a work of beauty and challenge for any pianist’s digital dexterity.  The fingers almost become their own singers, speaking and acting with utmost independence toward the aim of weaving intricate and convincing polyphonic textures that belie the single hand from which they are woven.  This set would provide important inspiration and education for Maurice Ravel as he set out to create a similarly convincing work for Paul Wittgenstein a mere decade and a half later (see this post).

But physical necessity is not the only reason that musicians have made arrangements at the piano for just one hand.  Another work that Wittgenstein championed came from the brilliant mind and artistry of Johannes Brahms arranging for the left hand not out of physical necessity, but in order to capture the spirit and astounding economy of means of a work from a previous century that fascinated and compelled him.

While the majority of Bach’s creative efforts were focused on the creation of a noble and varied collection of vocal works based on Lutheran Chorales (see this post), there was one short episode of his professional life which encouraged him to focus more extensively on instrumental music.  The Calvinist religious philosophy held by Prince Leopold, for whom Bach served as director of music during his tenure in Cothen from 1717 to 1723, considered elaborate music to be too sensual and distracting for worship, and so the Lutheran musical sensibilities Bach had been steadily developing lay largely dormant during this time, giving him the opportunity to create some of his best-loved instrumental music.  The orchestral suites, solo cello suites, first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Brandenburg Concertos all come from his time at Cothen, as do the six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.

Ever since their genesis, the sonatas and partitas for solo violin have stood out as supreme examples in the art of condensing thick, complex, harmonically complete, and spiritually profound music into as few strokes as possible for a single staff instrument.  The sonatas and partitas are challenging to listen to (I remember being a bit repulsed by their angular, sometimes harsh sound upon first hearing them as a high schooler), and even more so to play, with their dense polyphony, both implied and explicit, which demands such precision of bowing and fingering and superlative musicianship.  Violinists have used them to refine their technique and powers of interpretation for the last couple centuries.  Most of the movements are brief dances or instrumental genres lasting no more than a few minutes, but of the 30-odd movements of the set one in particular stands out for its length and depth, the Chaconne of the second partita.

Many musicians and listeners have seen fit to relate to the Chaconne as a standalone piece, a world unto itself even without the four other movements of the accompanying partita, such is its scale and gravitas.  Here it is performed on solo violin; you may want to listen to a few minutes of it just to get a taste of its original setting:

Interestingly, Bach may very well have been exercising his latent Lutheran chorale muscles in crafting the Chaconne.  A compelling theory has been asserted that he was in fact, and perhaps subconsciously, embedding numerous chorales from the Lutheran tradition into the monumental texture of the Chaconne as an epitaph to his recently deceased wife.  This performance makes a convincing case for this theory which, even if untrue (although that would be surprising given how well the chorales seem to fit), serves to amplify the haunting and sacred qualities of a musical work which already exhibits both qualities in abundance:

Bach’s great Chaconne has had countless admirers over its couple centuries of existence, all of whom are drawn to its stunning level of integration and economy, including some of the greatest musicians in history.  Johannes Brahms was one such devotee, and it is most probable that it inspired the significant use of variation forms in his own music – see this post.

“On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”

Of course today, the very moment any of us would like to hear Bach’s Chaconne (or any other music), it is as easy as cuing up a video on YouTube over the speedy 4G network (by the way, John Philip Sousa was virulently opposed to the talking machines which began to pervade Western culture during his lifetime for just this reason – he saw the ease of consuming recordings as detrimental to society’s general musicianship and intellectual ambition and testified before congress to this end – for more about Sousa see this post), but Brahms did not have this luxury.  In order to experience the work it was necessary for him to be in the company of one of his favorite violinists, like Joseph Joachim for example.  Since this was a relative rarity (not only to be in his presence, but to be so as he was performing one of the most demanding works in the whole violin repertoire), Brahms did what was, in his mind, the best thing by transcribing it for the piano in a way that preserved much of the performing challenge of the original: he transcribed it for piano left hand, but an octave lower to take advantage of the piano’s deep and resonant bass range.

As a violinist myself, I have never developed sufficient technique to tackle the Chaconne (particularly the triple stop-heavy outer sections –  I have played that mellow, glowing middle section in certain contexts), but I have spent time with it at the piano and I can attest that playing it with two hands is quite a challenge, so I admire Brahms’ impulse to preserve the work’s original spirit.

Paul Wittgenstein had similar admiration for Brahms’ concept, and certainly appreciation for the precedent given his condition, but he also noted a perhaps excessive obsession on Brahms’ part to stay true to Bach’s “text” and therefore not to take certain liberties with the transcription that might have helped the work to speak better in its transplanted medium while still managing to stay true to the original vision.  Thus Wittgenstein deployed clever techniques to fill out the bass even more, providing yet greater sonorous depth to Brahms’ transcription:

While Wittgenstein is certainly the most famous pianist to commission and arrange piano music for one-handed performance, he was also able to draw from precedence in a considerable body of such examples left by some notable Western musicians of previous generations.  Wittgenstein’s ambition and drive to make a career for himself in spite of the injury which threatened him at such a young age motivated him to serve as inspiration for and collaborate in the creation of a notable and concentrated collection of works with which to fill his concert and recital programs.  But he was the culmination and summation of a prior tradition in which other important musicians had been working for reasons bearing varying similarity to his aims.

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Stormy Scherzi, Day 1 – Badinerie from Orchestral Suite No. 2 by Johann Sebastian Bach

This week’s theme is…Stormy Scherzi!  A scherzo is traditionally defined as a “musical joke”, that is, a light-hearted movement that lacks the weight of a good sonata form essay.  And often that’s how they feel.  But, have you ever listened to a “scherzo” that seemed to fit the description of a musical joke, but darkly?  Some scherzi paradoxically combine lightness with intensely determined feelings, sometimes even bordering on malice and despair.  This week we examine some such examples.

Stormy Scherzi, Day 1 – Badinerie from Orchestral Suite No. 2 by Johann Sebastian Bach

 

I once read a thought provoking quote in a volume of dubious credibility.  In spite of the author’s questionable reliability, I was taken with the insight of a certain passage.  The essay is a purported interview with the great Italian opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and at one moment he is recorded to have said something to the effect of “The Italians are unsurpassed at writing heartbreaking melodies in the major mode.”  However reliable the contents of that interview, and the others that make up that book, may be, I think we can all agree on that.  This is particularly true of the Italian romantics (not so much before that) – they managed to hone a style that, while constantly bordering on sentiment, never quite reaches it, always safely remaining within the boundaries of what most would recognize as good taste.  Well, I suppose that’s rather subjective, and perhaps I shouldn’t speak for everyone, but my guess is that’s about the result you would find in a well-executed survey of music historians and opera fans.  Another way to put it would be that Romantic Italian operas are the most tasteful of musical guilty pleasures.

Are you at all familiar with operas by Puccini or his close contemporaries?  You can start to hear it in Verdi, although he does not quite achieve the continuously lush and sensuous quality that pervades Puccini.  Still, he is subject to similar criticism regarding tastefulness at times, particularly his Requiem.  Here’s an example of his writing a heartbreaking tune in the major mode, the finale of Aida, in which the central couple bid farewell to Earth upon being locked in an Egyptian tomb together for the remainder of their lives.  The melody starts around 0:45:

 

Puccini’s operas are ripe with examples of this gift.  Here’s one of his most famous are, “Un bel di” from Madame Butterfly:

 

It’s kind of a rondo, with the refrain in the major mode and the minor mode episodes between more cogently expressing Butterfly’s pain, but the refrains are convincing illustrations of Puccini’s interview statement.

One more example, just because I like it so much, is Pietro Mascagni’s most famous opera, the title of which roughly translates to Rustic Chivalry, a thoroughly heartbreaking and frustrating story about a love that was not meant for this world.  Passages which prove Puccini’s statement pervade the opera, and I encourage you to explore it for this reason, but here is the most famous passage, the orchestral intermezzo which provides a momentary lull from the tension of the story while simultaneously commenting on its emotional turbulence.  It is mostly in major, and creates a mood of exquisite regret and contemplation:

 

How did the Italians do this?  I don’t know, but I do know that sometimes major keys are the best choice for bittersweet subjects and I have made this choice myself in some of the music I have written.  While we often summarize musical modes as “major=happy; minor=sad” (woefully oversimplified, but often it is an effective summary, especially when teaching students at the early stages of their harmonic sophistication), most of us realize the truth is considerably more nuanced than that.  For the Italians in general, feelings were always worn on their sleeves, and the subtle intermix of intentions and emotions was probably the stuff of everyday life.  You could argue that the subtlety required to unleash bitter emotions with major keys actually makes them better-suited for the job than minor keys, and successful execution probes the fabric of our beings; joy and sorrow are one, deep down.  It is rewarding to cause tears with major key works; they actually spring from a deeper source that way.

Here’s another excerpt from Mascagni’s opera that illustrates the inverse effect:

 

It is the introductory song sung by Alfio, who ends up being the story’s antagonist, and is a love song to his profession, driving a peddler’s cart.  It is jovial, lighthearted even.  And it’s ostensibly in the minor mode, illustrating the paradox in the other direction.  But Mascagni wasn’t the only one with the ability to do this.  The literature of music is abundant with examples of playful music in minor keys.  And if it is the Italians who are able to consistently create heartbreaking music in major modes, I would say the flipside is true of the Germans; in German music I tend to notice examples of music written in minor keys that is carefree.  Granted, it’s a rather existential joviality, but such are the Germans.

Scherzi effectively became the artistic domain of the Romantic artists, when Beethoven’s minuets expanded and became a bit maniacal, but they are much older than that, and we can see a few examples in Bach’s output.  Unsurprisingly, they are all in minor keys, at least the ones I have been able to find.  Bach’s legendary intensity essentially demanded that his even his musical jokes be knotted with anguish and single-mindedness of purpose, and this quality was to lay the foundation for subsequent German musical jokes that were similarly laden with existential baggage.  According to my observations it is exceptional to find German scherzos in major keys.  Granted, I’d have to do a more detailed study to confirm that, but I think it’s probably true.

Bach’s most famous musical scherzo is the finale of his second Orchestral Suite.  The most French of his four surviving examples, it bears the French name for musical joke, “badinerie”, although other examples from Bach do indeed bear the name “scherzo”.  The entire suite radiates with French suavite, largely a result of its unusual orchestration, which prominently features a solo flute with the string orchestra.  The solo flute, so favored by Rameau in his mellifluous and transparent orchestral textures, is like milk in the sturdy black coffee of the string band, and each movement serves up a different balance of these flavors.

While the badinerie is in a minor key, none would mistake its playfulness, nor would they find the title inappropriate:

 

Little surprise that if anyone is a tonal pioneer in crafting light-hearted statements out of the materials of the minor mode, it is Papa Bach.  One senses that even in his play he was principled and intensely philosophical.  Can you imagine him really cutting loose?  I suppose everyone does from time to time, but with Bach it is particularly challenging.  What do you imagine he was like when he knew no one was looking?

 

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Weekend Gems #3 – 14 Canons on the first 8 fundamental notes of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach

Weekend Gems #3 – Canons on the first 8 fundamental notes of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach

I wish I had been alive in 1974 to hear the news.  It must have delighted scholars and lovers of Bach’s music the world over.

Many music lovers know Bach’s ingenious Goldberg Variations, written for the keyboard player Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to play for his patron, Count Kaiserling, who suffered from insomnia on account of an ailment and so requested music of “smooth and lively” character to occupy his mind as he suffered.

Bach’s response to the request is a tour-de-force of variation technique, including dances and ingenious canons which vary the lovely, if plain, theme.  The Goldberg Variations were one of the eccentric Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould’s, favorite works and no one plays them quite like he does.  See this post for a taste.

In 1974 Bach’s original published copy of the Goldberg Variations was discovered, and a surprise lay in wait on the final page: 14 canons composed on the first 8 fundamental notes of the aria.  That means the first 8 notes of the bassline, roughly the first complete phrase.  Those note form a pleasing bassline with a clear and idiomatic harmonic progression.

And you wouldn’t think much of them, but Bach’s incomprehensibly fertile mind saw endless possibilities.  I just heard a quote from Ezra Pound: “A genius sees ten possibilities where others see only one”.  I don’t think I have to tell you what Bach is 🙂

Even the number, 14, is significant.  It is a gematriah of Bach’s name: B (2) + A (1) + C (3) + H (8) = 14!  Bach’s mind was never at rest.

Let him blow your mind with these 14 canons, which incorporate a catalogue of contrapuntal techniques that most have never conceived of.  You may hear resonances of other clever pieces from this week.  You can start the series here if you missed it.  Altogether, a great way to cap off an entire week of very clever music!

 

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Really Clever Music, Day 2 – Cancrizan from A Musical Offering by J. S. Bach

This week’s theme is…Really Clever Music!  All lovers of music respond to its mysterious ability to move them, often describing its effect as soul-deep.  Unlike any other art, music most directly communicates emotions and passions extremely convincingly, and that is why it is so loved.  But music works on another level as well, an intellectual one.  Due to its highly mathematical and systematic nature it can be created to satisfy and delight from an entirely different angle.  This angle is often missed in listening because it is usually much easier to see and comprehend this aspect through analysis and score study.  Every piece this week is written by a very clever composer who was able to craft a beautiful piece of music while, at the same time, manipulating the musical medium in a surprising way that may be discovered upon analysis, almost like an easter egg.

Really Clever Music, Day 2 – Cancrizan from A Musical Offering by J. S. Bach

Have you ever sung “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”?  I’ll bet you have.  And better than this, I hope…

Sorry if you’re not a Star Trek fan.  I am 🙂  I’ll bet you’ve sung Row, Row, Row Your Boat like that, where different singers enter with the same melody at different times, thus creating a lively and rich musical texture, right?  Row, Row, Row Your Boat is an example of a round, a kind of song that is written to be sung with staggered entrances.  Other examples of rounds include “Frere Jacque” and “Three Blind Mice”.  And many, many rounds have been written through the history of mankind, but those three are probably the best-known at the moment.

The brilliance of a well-written round is that it makes sense when sung solo (Row, Row, Row Your Boat is a catchy and memorable tune, even when singing as a single-line melody) and also that its underlying chordal structure supports its singing in multiple parts entering at different times so that it always sounds good and makes harmonic sense.  It’s not as easy to balance both of those qualities as the simple and elegant rounds we love to sing make it seem.  There is great craftsmanship packed into those simple little tunes.

A round is a specific type of a larger class of musical technique known as canon.  No, it’s not artillery, and countless music students mistakenly invoke the breed of heavy firearm in writing about the rigorous contrapuntal technique.  The gun has an extra “n” (kind of like dessert vs. desert).  The musical canon, or canonic when used as an adjective, is a very old musical practice, almost certainly older than written history.  It came to be regarded as a “strict” manner of writing music, and justifiably so, because there is nothing more strict than the exact imitation that writing canonically dictates.  The word “canon” is named after the latin word for “law” or “rule”, and is related to the same words as “scriptural canon” and “canon law”.  Writing a canon is really as simple as having the second voice play or sing exactly what the first voice does, just a little later.  It’s up to your compositional technique to observe the guidelines of proper harmony and voice-leading as it plays out.  Just because it is simple doesn’t mean it is easy.

Most composers have written canons.  They are often administered in academic classes as a very challenging and effective way to improve the technique of writing in multiple voices.  Brahms is said to have awoken every day and written at least a few canonic exercises before breakfast (well, maybe it was after breakfast – I’m not sure about that part, but I know it was a daily discipline for him).  No wonder he was so good at counterpoint.  As such they tend to be associated with dry, clinical exercise, and do not typically find themselves grouped in with masterworks of greater scope and substance.  But, for many composers, successfully executing these and other exercises imbues their musical language with a rigor it would otherwise lack.  I’m reminded of reading about Leroy Anderson’s curriculum at Harvard, which included courses in canon and fugue.  I doubt you would ever hear an explicit example of either of those practices in the light works for which he has become known, but I’m sure said works wouldn’t be nearly as tightly-written and polished had it not been for those rigorous studies.

But some composers were more comfortable making techniques like canon a central part of their output than others.  Some composers seem to delight in technique-for-technique’s-sake.  And foremost among this group is the great Johann Sebastian Bach.

If you’ve studied Bach’s history and music to any degree, you’ve probably seen his name associated with supreme mastery of counterpoint, to this day unsurpassed by any other musician known, and perhaps never to be.  He is the undisputed heavyweight champion, and he still holds the belt.  If you want to challenge him for the title and get the belt yourself, you’ll have to make a trip to Leipzig and declare yourself a contender.  But I would brush up on your part-writing first.  Actually, I’m just kidding.  There is not actually a heavyweight championship for contrapuntal writing.  But if there was, Bach would hold it, and no one would dispute it.

Contrapuntal refers to the art of making music out of simultaneous melodic lines.  You can think of it as music in two dimensions: the melodic parts make sense, and the intertwining simultaneous melodic lines also produce harmonies, or chords, at every moment of the musical experience, which also make sense and sound good.  Here’s a relatively straightforward example of Bach’s counterpoint, a Lutheran chorale that he harmonized for 4 part choir:

I say it’s straightforward because in an example like this every part is more or less moving in the same rhythm.  There are other works by Bach in which the counterpoint is much livelier, more rhythmically vital, and rather conversational.  Just start this video and click anywhere in the timeline to get a sense of that:

Canonic writing tends to feel lively and conversational, like that last example, and Bach often incorporated canonic technique into his musical works quite explicitly.  It almost seems like a game he played: to craft rigorous, flawless music and wield it in service of his aesthetic and affective aims.  That takes a special mind, and most musicians would without reservation consider Bach’s mind to be quite special.

Listen to Cantata 83 and skip to 6:10 if you want to cut to the chase:

 

Did you hear how Bach worked in a lively canon between the violins and cellos around the longer, intoned notes of the bass?  It’s easy to miss, so play it again and listen closely.  The text being intoned by the singer translates to “Lord, now let Your servant depart in peace, as You have spoken“ and the strict canon embedded within the accompanying texture gives a little authoritative heft to the setting.  You may not have even noticed that canon had it not been pointed out to you, but in a significant number of contexts Bach was much clearer about his canonic writing.

Toward the end of his life, he visited King Frederick the Great of Prussia, a music-lover of an enlightened despot.  

Frederick the Great, enlightened despot, musical patron, amateur flutist and composer

The monarch gave Bach a bizarre subject and challenged him to turn it into fugues and canons.  The resulting collection, Bach’s Musical Offering, is one of the intellectual glories of Western music.  Bach accepted the King’s challenge and went the proverbial extra mile, compiling 12 canons and ricercars (another contrapuntal genre), plus a sonata for flute, violin and continuo, all based on King Frederick’s theme:

Canonic writing is not always as simple as making a round like Row, Row, Row Your Boat.  Entrances can start at different time intervals, different pitch intervals, and even read the music in different directions.  This particularly wry canon from A Musical Offering is called a cancrizan, often translated as “crab canon”.  It only really has one line of music, and each player reads it from a different direction, one forward, and the other backward, like this:

 

Pretty clever, huh?  You couldn’t change one note of that without ruining it.  Bach seemed to delight in demonstrations of technical skill like this, reveling in technique for its own sake.  Not every musician did, but Bach always created astounding works of genius, worthy of intense study and great appreciation, whenever he did.

Here’s another popular video which features this crab canon, and shows its brilliance on yet another level, probably a few.  I tend to lose count after a little while…

 

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Caffeinated Music, Day 1 – Coffee Cantata by J. S. Bach

This week’s theme is…Caffeinated Music!  The satisfying and enormously popular beverage known as coffee migrated to Europe from the Middle East through Venetian trade routes late in the 1500s.  Initially met with suspicion for its origins, coffee nonetheless wasted no time in winning over Western culture, boasting countless devotees within a century and inspiring plant after plant of coffee house establishments, which remain centers of philosophy and culture to this day.  Numerous artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and other influential Europeans consumed coffee in awe-inspiring quantities, often prepared through elaborate and eccentric rituals.  Every piece this week was written by or inspired by a great coffee drinker.

Caffeinated Music, Day 1 – Coffee Cantata by J. S. Bach

While it is certainly well documented that many European composers and creative figures were crazy about their coffee, there is only one example of a musician composing a work about coffee, at least as far as I’ve found.  It is the famous Coffee Cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach.  I remember when I was just getting into classical music, during my high school career.  One of the ways that I grew my collection of recorded music was through the BMG Record Club, and the glossy magazine-like catalogues made entertaining reading in addition to serving their practical purpose.  The concept of the record club fell by the wayside right as Napster was on the rise and file sharing loomed large on the horizon.  The writing was on the wall, and tech visionaries began to see that within a decade most recorded music purchased by consumers would be purely digital, no optical storage medium necessary.  Of course CDs are still around, but it is so easy now to listen to almost anything on YouTube, or to spend a mere dollar or two in the moment and buy that one track you want from iTunes or Amazon.  But in my teens, record clubs like BMG and Columbia House presented an economical way to grow a music collection, and their slick glossy catalogues were the marketing medium of choice, bolstered by all those crazy offers (“Buy 2 at regular price, get 5 for $3.99 plus 1 FREE, plus shipping and handling!!!”).  I spent many hours browsing through those catalogues, developing my sense of the scope of European art music, and at the same time continually adding to shopping lists that were always far beyond my budget, with regard to both money and listening time.  The BMG catalogues gave short little blurbs about each album and a brief, italicized list of some of the works contained therein.  One album that caught my eye was German Bach-enthusiast and conductor Helmuth Rilling’s 2-disc set of Bach’s secular cantatas, which included the Hunt Cantata and the…Coffee Cantata.  That gave me pause.  A piece of classical music about coffee?  Really?  There’s got to be a story there.  And there certainly is 🙂

The story actually begins, as far as Western history is concerned, with Pope Clement VIII, who reigned from 1592 to 1605.  While his pontificate  was occupied by all the typical ecclesiastical and foreign relations you may expect during this era, his papacy stands out in that he ought to have the thanks of coffee lovers everywhere for permitting its consumption to Catholics, which was certainly instrumental in the spread of the beverage to all parts of Europe and beyond.

Pope Clement VIII, who approved coffee consumption for his flock

Originating in Arab lands, coffee was regarded with a high level of suspicion as it made its way to Europe at the end of the sixteenth century.  Closely associated by European Christians with Islam and its blasphemous doctrines – coffee was actually used during certain Islamic rituals at the time – many of them came to regard the drink as satanic and sought to ban its consumption.  His Holiness, upon delightedly tasting coffee for the first time in 1600, however, is reported to have said  “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”  That story may very well be apocryphal, but it is fun to think that is how it happened.  At any rate, it was around this time that coffee began its triumphant occupation of Europe, which it enjoys to this day, proceeding to make its way to all the great urban centers, caffeinating people of all stripes, and steadily building its reputation for getting the lead out and stimulating productivity throughout the day.

Coffee houses began to open all around the continent, beginning with London in the 1650s.  Leipzig got its first one in 1694, although the most famous such establishment in Bach’s city came to be Café Zimmerman, erected in 1715.  In addition to supplying the citizens of Leipzig with the black tonic they so craved, it also served as a meeting place for members of the city’s cultured middle class, and a concert venue for performances by the Collegium Musicum, a sort of amateur musical ensemble founded by Telemann and later directed by Bach.  Amateur they may have been, but they had some terrific music composed just for them, including Bach’s Coffee Cantata.

Bach never composed an opera, although many would say this delightful little work for 3 singers and orchestra comes close.  With a libretto by Picander, who supplied the texts of many of Bach’s sacred cantatas and passions, the Coffee Cantata is a tongue-in-cheek dialogue between a father (whose German name, Schlendrian, literally translates to “stick-in-the-mud”) and his daughter, Lieschen, who looooooooooooooves coffee, and excessively enough to cause her father concern.  The drama is a series of pleas and threats from father to daughter intended to curtail her intake, but to no avail, and the three characters finish the cantata by singing a chorus that extols the joys of drinking coffee.

Bach was not known for his light-hearted music (or light-hearted personality, for that matter), but in the Coffee Cantata it seems he was able to let loose a bit and paint Schlendrian as a comic buffoon.  His first aria is rollicking and self-important.  But my favorite movement of the cantata is the aria that follows, which is Lieschen’s love song to coffee.  A plaintive tune accompanied by solo flute that trips along like a brisk minuet, Lieschen’s aria could easily be mistaken for a wistfully pious love song to Jesus Christ from any of Bach’s sacred works.  The opening flute solo is a terrific example of Bach’s fortspinnung manner of meandering through different keys along its soulful and introspective journey towards a cadence.  Oh, and the preceding recitative contains one of the best lines from any of Bach’s vocal works, “If I couldn’t, three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat.”

The absurd satire in Bach’s Coffee Cantata indicates that, in spite of Europeans’ ravenous and passionate consumption of the commodity, they were still not entirely at peace with the associations of its origin, even with the Pope’s blessing.  Or perhaps they were uncomfortable with its powerful psychotropic effects, even if it was able to stimulate greater productivity by its consumers.  Whatever it was, Bach’s Coffee Cantata seems to represent the struggle and, ultimately, acceptance, that many devoutly Christian Europeans may have experienced in assimilating coffee consumption into their lives.  Clearly Bach was a fan himself, and perhaps penning this odd little cantata helped him to reconcile his taste for his beloved drug of choice with his steadfastly moral character.  Listen to the whole cantata here:

More info about Bach’s Coffee Cantata:

http://www.playbuzz.com/wfmtrx10/10-facts-abouts-bachs-coffee-opera-you-need-to-know

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Music about Time and Clocks, Day 1 – “Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben?” by Johann Sebastian Bach

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Time and Clocks!  Every piece of music this week deals with time or timepieces in an interesting way.  None of us can escape the existential dilemma to which time subjects us and dealing with that can motivate humor or deep contemplation.  This week we will experience a mix of both and plenty that is in between.  If you think about it, music is constantly governed by time.  It necessarily exists in time and is always regulated by a meter which musicians often describe as simply the music’s “time”.  But beyond these obvious artifacts of its nature, many musicians have used the medium to explore and illustrate time in other ways.

Day 1 – “Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben?” by Johann Sebastian Bach

Do you ever feel like your time is running out?

It is easy to get the sense from studying his life and works that Johann Sebastian Bach was a man who tended to take things pretty seriously.  While there is that one story about his duel with a sub-par bassoonist (I’ve heard Bach’s scolding insult “zippelfaggotist”, usually translated into English as “nanny goat bassoonist”, although I’ve heard of more extreme translations too), Bach’s personality, as it is typically reported, radiates with a fierce intensity and the overall impression given by the evidence seems to indicate a psyche and outlook generally free of levity.  This does not seem to be true of many other luminaries of classical music.  From Mozart we have correspondence riddled with potty humor when writing to close company.  Haydn’s music is full of sardonic puns and clever devices in spite of its general aristocratic propriety.  There are accounts of Handel roaring with laughter, and even Vivaldi’s music seems to indicate a lighter outlook than might otherwise be expected from a life like his (hence my wife Heidi’s predilection for Vivaldi over Bach in general, counter to me – indeed I once heard a choir director observe that there are “Bach people” and “Vivaldi people”; our tragically divided house bears out this disheartening reality).  But with Bach we have none of that.  And perhaps devotees of Bach, myself included, can easily fall into the trap of taking themselves too seriously.  Perhaps.  But those who are find themselves fed by him at the deepest level would not trade the near-superhuman craftsmanship and profoundly philosophical touch of Bach’s art for all the gags in Pauly (Shore’s) canon.  That’s a Buddhism joke.  Look it up.

What is sometimes surprising about Bach’s music is that it does not necessarily feel super-serious in the listening, and Bach is able to treat subjects that ought to be dark in a way that is oddly comforting but still completely consistent with their essence.  Take the example of Cantata No. 8.  I recommend you listen to the opening chorus before reading on.  This is from my favorite recording, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe, whom I love for his “creamy” interpretations of Bach’s sacred choral works.  The opening chorus runs until about 6:40.

After hearing only 10 seconds of this chorus more than a decade ago it immediately became one of my favorite, if not my very favorite, of Bach’s works and remains so as of this writing.  I simply could not believe the evocative and ethereal soundscape that Bach created – with Herreweghe’s help; I am not similarly taken with other recordings I have heard.  And if you’re aware of Bach’s professional duties in Leipzig then you know that it probably took him 2 days, max, to pen that entire movement, which is astounding in and of itself.  I think it deserves to be better known that is, but on the other hand I’m also happy to keep this as a well-kept secret.   Sometimes I’ll play this for a fellow musician and, while they can usually tell that it is J.S. Bach, they recognize that there is something unusual, something odd and intriguing about the movement.  I’ve never exactly been able to put my finger on exactly what, but it is clear to me that this is a special piece of music, even among Bach’s output, which is no small statement.

Think about how that piece made you feel.  Probably kind of wistful, strangely at peace but with a bit of an edge, evoking a true sense of wonder, and enveloped in something that is moving along beyond your control, but not in a dreadful way.  That’s my reaction anyway, and I could go on and on, so nuanced is it.  But what do you think it’s about?  It has words, so you know there is a concrete meaning.  And you might be just a little shocked to learn it is actually about death.  Here is the German text and translation:

Cantata for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? Meine Zeit läuft immer hin, Und des alten Adams Erben, Unter denen ich auch bin, Haben dies zum Vaterteil, Daß sie eine kleine Weil Arm und elend sein auf Erden Und denn selber Erde werden.	Dearest God, when will I die? My time runs away continually, and the old legacy of Adam, which includes me as well, has this as its inheritance; for a little time to be poor and wretched on the earth and then to become earth itself.

Bach did not write this text himself.  He inherited it from from the Lutheran hymnody that had been steadily accumulating over the course of the 2 centuries that had passed since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.  Lutheran hymns were, as they are today, summaries of theological doctrine and commentary, condensed, often brilliantly so, into just a few lines of metered poetry, and set to simple tunes that congregations could easily learn and sing throughout their church-going lives.  One of these hymn tunes is embedded in this cantata chorus, as they often were in such works, and the lyrics of Bach’s setting remain unchanged from the original text by Bach’s contemporary Caspar Neumann, a Lutheran clergyman and professor.  So, as the congregation sang this hymn on Sunday they would be reminded of all the themes covered by this thought-provoking text: fleeting time, human mortality and wretchedness inherited from Adam’s original sin, and an abiding, if paradoxical, longing for death to be united with God in heaven.  Life is short and hard, but at the end is the eternal reward of the faithful Christian.  It expresses the religious sensibility of somehow being simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to death, and conversely, life, I suppose.

And Bach nails it.  Immediately.  The piece has a restless motion created by the pizzicato strings which seem to mark time ticking along, while the oboes d’amore (think oboes, in the alto register with a softer tone) play a florid duet of sinewy, interlocking, imitative lines that seem to reach heavenward like the human longing for divine comfort.  Then, at the first cadence (0:10), an unexpected and arresting feature: 24 short, repeated notes in the flute.  This device recurs at major cadences and then becomes a kind of arpeggiated accompaniment to the rest of the orchestra in certain episodes of the chorus.  This is probably the most explicit illustration of time ticking away in the piece and I’ve never come across anything else quite like it in Common Practice.  Only Bach would do that.  Only Bach could do that.

Doesn’t this work sum up the existential dilemma of mortality?  Our time ticks away, hastening toward death, and we are not sure whether to embrace it in anticipation of the veil’s opposite side, or cling to our fleeting time like a raft adrift.  Religious or not, I think we can all relate.  In the words of conductor John Eliot Gardiner:
“More than any other composer, Bach’s music reminds us that we have a common, human heritage.  Although steeped in the Lutheran liturgy, his church music carries a universal message of hope and faith which can touch us all, regardless of our culture, religion or musical knowledge.”

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