October 9
Cantata 124 was premiered on January 7, 1725, the day after yesterday’s work. In the past 13 days, Bach premiered seven! new cantatas, each around 20 – 30 minutes in length, written for newly arranged poetry set to music for a four-part choir, soloists and six or more (at times many more) instruments! Just imagine the pace of writing Bach had to maintain, even considering his three weeks of preparation time when no music was performed during Advent.
Think too of how much the Leipzig church choirs and instrumentalists had to work - with Bach leading on the violin - to rehearse these seven new pieces along with the Magnificat on Christmas Day, and how quickly the copyists for the individual choir and instrumental parts had to copy what he had written! If only we could more closely aspire to the diligence and productivity that characterized these musicians and Bach most of all.
His livingroom has been imagined by John Eliot Gardiner (the conductor of this performance of Cantata 124) as a sweatshop of activity, the Master hard at work composing while copyists hurriedly copy the pages he has just finished and his many children play and practice music with students of St. Thomas, where Bach also taught music theory and performance. It really is impossible to imagine how Bach could have created such a vast volume of elaborate, well-crafted music abounding in inspired, varied and complex musical ideas and forms in such a short time, and consistently maintained this writing pace for three annual cycles of cantatas, where a new cantata was written almost every Sunday!
Nonetheless, today we receive from the generous Bach not just a bland, ordinary piece to fit the bill, but this delightful blend of a concerto for oboe d’amore and a four-part chorale. Unlike in other chorale fantasias, the lower voices have little contrapuntal interplay with the soprano, who sings the slow chorale melody (cantus firmus) above, but rather all the voices enter homophonically like the strict four-part chorale I posted yesterday. This richly harmonized four-part chorale is stretched out over a completely separate concerto for the oboe d’amore based on independent instrumental themes. The listener never fails to be astounded by the simultaneous combination of independent musical ideas found in Bach.
The minuet-like character of the concerto and prominent featuring of the mellow sound of the oboe d’amore aptly sets and reflects the devotional message of the chorale, repeated at the beginning and end of every stanza and thus the first and last words of both this fantasia and the entire cantata: “I shall not let my Jesus go.”
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