October 5
To reorient the returning or new reader to where these postings were headed, I am now covering the second annual cycle of cantatas that the 39-year-old Bach wrote during his second year employed in Leipzig as the director of music for all four churches in the city. In previous postings, I have covered every cantata Bach wrote up to this point and have sporadically touched on some later works.
The work covered in yesterday’s post was written on December 3, 1724 for the first Sunday in Advent, the start of the new liturgical year. It was customary in Leipzig to observe a time of silence and fasting for the following three Sundays in Advent until Christmas Day, so no works were premiered during these days. This pause allowed Bach a bit of time to prepare the many cantatas that were to be premiered in quick succession for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Days of Christmas, the First Sunday after Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Feast of the Epiphany – in total, six new works in a matter of ~12 days.
The opening movement of the cantata that Bach premiered for Christmas Day of 1724 is - like the chorale fantasia covered yesterday - one of the movements that I consider to be the very best and most perfect in all of Bach’s output … one of those pieces of musical architecture for which it would be impossible to imagine improving in any way. I already covered this movement (BWV 91.1: https://youtu.be/RqGtOXYkyps) on March 27th, 2020 though, along with posting it several times in the months afterwards on Facebook, my work’s Slack channels, and my friend and family personal messages.
The next work Bach premiered that I have not yet covered then was Cantata 121, written for the Second Day of Christmas in 1724. This work is, like most of the other works of the second annual cycle, a chorale cantata – a cantata based on the quoted and paraphrased words of a single Lutheran chorale, opening and closing with movements based on the original chorale melody.
The chorale for this cantata was, like yesterday’s work, written by Martin Luther himself, and so held a special place in Bach’s heart. However, unlike the free and intricate instrumental concerto that abounds in yesterday’s work, the chorale fantasia that opens BWV 121 is written in the archaic motet-style, where all of the instruments, including a four-part brass choir, double the voices exactly. This results in the musical material being thinned out to only the continuo (organ and viola da gamba) and the four intertwining melodies of the choir.
The listener hears quite the opposite of a thinned out musical texture in this hybrid Baroque-Renaissance motet however - Bach often uses these motet-like openings to exhibit some of his densest and most complex counterpoint and harmony. In this case, the extensive contrapuntal work is actually required to fit the archaic, irregularly phrased Phrygian-mode melody of the chorale, which originated in a 5th century Latin hymn, into contemporary tonal music. Despite these efforts and very unusually for choral Baroque works, the movement begins and ends in different and distantly related keys – starting in E minor and closing a whole tone higher in F-sharp minor. (One could almost call it an early example of the progressive harmony of Mahler.)
The listener is taken aback by the complexity and piety of this solemn, medieval sounding prayer music.
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