Three Jewels from Three Bach Masterpieces

Overview

There are over 1,000 Bach compositions that we know of, and that number doesn’t include the manuscripts that may have been lost after his death. (Reports of his compositions being used to wrap cheese, or as insect-repelling wrappers on trees, or indeed as kindling, are almost certainly apocryphal.) Like Mozart, Bach’s output was so prodigious that, ironically, he’s known best for relatively few of them. Once pieces become part of an established repertoire they tend to get re-programmed frequently. (If I have to sit through one more performance of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Natchmusik I think I’ll lose my mind.)

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, programmed a concert with three fairly well-known but not overdone works in a concert centered around the theme of “Hope’s Journey.”¹ Although I have no idea what the thinking process was for the artistic committee’s choices, we’re doing a piece from a cantata, an oratorio, and a full-blown mass. I’ll take up the definition of each as I discuss the piece.

“Wir eilen schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten” from Cantata 78

On to the first one, then, from Cantata 78, Jesu, der du meine Seele, which translates literally to “Jesus, You Who My Soul,” but which is usually rendered “Jesus, You Who Wrested (Rescued) My Soul.” “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten” is the specific section discussed here. The moment I heard the first notes of this piece I thought, “That’s the piece that the Harlem Boys’ Choir sings in that Bach documentary with Brian Blessed!” Turns out it’s the Brooklyn Boys’ Choir, but everything else was correct. If you’ve never watched The Joy of Bach you must, must do so. Full info is given at the end of this post about how to access this wonderful documentary. Blessed is the genial host narrator and also Bach himself, with excellent performances in both roles. (If you’re of, ahem, a certain age, you’ll remember Blessed as the actor who played Caesar Augustus in the 1970’s British TV series I, Claudius, in which he was also excellent.) In less than an hour you’ll get a rich overview of this prolific composer’s life and ongoing influence today.

A cantata is “an unstaged secular or sacred composition, with several movements, for single voice or voices (alternating aria, duet, recitative, full chorus, etc.), normally accompanied by instruments. The vocal equivalent of sonata.”² If you’ve been a member of a church choir at any time in your life, you’ll probably remember performing a cantata for Christmas or Easter. These modern works are usually somewhere around an hour long, with much rehearsing in the couple of weeks leading up to the performance. But this wasn’t the type of cantata Bach was writing. His were typically shorter, around 20 minutes, but they were produced much more frequently—such as once a week. Yes, a week. And guess what? Not only did Bach write these cantatas, he rehearsed them and directed their performances. He was expected during his time in Leipzig as music director of two churches and also a celebrated boys‘ choir to produce these works as part of the Lutheran liturgical year, with a cantata for each Sunday’s Scripture reading, and also for any stray holidays or other special events, such as weddings. The format for these works usually involved an opening and closing chorale, with the middle sections comprised of solos or duets. A small chamber instrumental group was the typical accompaniment. The great Wikipedia tells us that “some of these cantatas were adapted (at least in part) from work he had composed before his Leipzig era,” and it’s also true that Bach often used already-existing chorale melodies as the basis for some sections. Still, that was a lot of work. I hope I’m not insulting the great man when I call him the Stephen King of Baroque church music.

The cantata from which our selection is taken is labeled as being “for the 14^th Sunday after Trinity.” The Feast of the Holy Trinity takes place on the last Sunday in May, marking the start of the church year’s second half. I looked up the Scripture references to be read on that 14th Sunday and found what I think forms the basis for the words, from the Jewish Bible/Old Testament book of Proverbs: “I have taught thee in the way of wisdom, and led thee in the paths of righteousness. When thou goest, thy gait shall not be strait [Thou shalt walk at liberty without offence], and when thou runnest, thou shalt not fall.”³ These lines promise God’s followers that they will be put on a clear path if they follow him, but since these followers are human they’re not perfect. The music itself portrays the idea of “eager yet faltering” footsteps. “Bach must often have composed movements of this kind in a single evening. One wonders if he may have put his pipe down on his composing desk after creating a jewel of this kind and allowed himself to think, ‘Well, that was a good evening’s work.’”⁴

Since I added some notes on pronunciation of the original German in the audio version of this post, I am repeating some of those ideas here even though of course the German is written and not spoken here. Most choral groups singing in a foreign language will get some help with pronunciation from either the director or an experienced member. There are several people in my own choir who can fulfill that duty; we even have a member who speaks Swedish and could help us with a Swedish carol we sang for Christmas one year. In addition, there are often YouTube or other online resources that can help. One principle to keep in mind, though, is that your singing pronunciation is always going to be different from your speaking. When my choir sang Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs in Oct. 2023 we accessed a brief video in which the author of the texts, the poet Hila Plitmann, read the lines aloud and gave a few tips on Hebrew pronunciation. But she also pointed out that she was emphasizing some sounds, especially the guttural ones, more emphatically than would be appropriate when actually singing the pieces.

I include two performance videos here. The first is performed as Bach wrote it, a duet for soprano and alto voices. But what voices! And what a challenging tempo. Then, the second, the aforementioned Brooklyn Boys’ Chorus, two minutes of unalloyed joy.

Note the partial translation included onscreen, which doesn’t match perfectly with the word-for-word rendering but which conveys the spirit of the piece:

“Ruht Wohl” from the St. John’s Passion Oratorio

There are two terms here that need to be defined: “oratorio” and “passion.” A clear description of an oratorio is: “an unstaged drama or narrative of Biblical events composed for voices (alternating aria, narrator, recitative, full chorus, etc.) and accompanied by instruments.” And a “passion,” in the Christian sense, is the story of the last days of Jesus’ life on earth, usually from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem through to his death and, possibly, resurrection. The word is taken from Latin patior, “to suffer, bear, endure.” It gets a little confusing to us moderns to hear the word used in this way, as nowadays we automatically think of it as denoting emotions, especially romantic ones. Indeed, “passion has gradually but significantly evolved from an explicitly religious term concerning suffering to the modern equivalent of enthusiasm or love.”⁵

The title means “Rest Well,” and is addressed to the dead Jesus as he lies in the tomb. It’s the next-to-last section in the composition as a whole, leading quite naturally from the idea of the death of Jesus to the deaths of those singing, with a prayer asking “Let my body, in its little sleeping chamber,/absolutely softly, without any anguish or pain,/rest until the last day!”

Here’s the text and its translation:

Here’s a lovely performance by the Netherlands Bach Society. Their notes are quite helpful, including this information: “The St John Passion was the first Passion Bach had written as cantor in Leipzig. The Passion story as told in the Gospel of John is different from that told by the other three evangelists – Matthew, Luke and Mark. John’s version places the emphasis on Christ’s divine origin. Throughout his suffering, this divine origin still plays a role and nowhere is Jesus as human as in the other gospels.“

“Dona Nobis Pacem” from Mass in B Minor

With this piece we move into the greatest musical accomplishment of Bach, and, in the opinion of many musical critics, one of the greatest achievements in all of classical music. One critic has said that “The Mass in B minor is the consecration of a whole life.” Bach finished this monumental work only one year before his death in 1750 and never heard it performed in its entirety. A “Mass” is “the sacred liturgy first of the Roman Catholic church, and later of the Lutheran and Anglican rites, in which the Last Supper of Jesus, or Holy Eucharist, is celebrated. Derived from the priest’s last words “Ite missa est” (the table is concluded).” There are distinct differences between the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran services, and only the first two major sections, the Kyrie and the Gloria, are typically performed in a Lutheran church.

One obvious question about this work, therefore, is: Why did Bach write a complete Latin mass that would not be used in a Lutheran church but only in a Roman Catholic one? The definitive answer is that we don’t know–the composer left no explanation behind. There has always been speculation that Bach at least started the work as a way of getting into the good graces of the newly-crowned Roman Catholic Augustus III, one of whose titles was “Elector of Saxony.” The city of Leipzig, where Bach lived for the last 27 years of his life, was in Saxony. But Bach presented Augustus in 1733 with only a partial version of the Mass, one that used just the sections common to both Lutheran and Catholic church services. Then, years later, he expanded that earlier work into the entire Mass, probably as a way of ensuring that this grand creation would have the widest audience possible. Even if we’re not on the same level of genius as Bach (and who is?), I would venture to guess that we’ve all had the experience of getting totally immersed in a project and doing far more than we’d originally planned. It’s doubtful that Bach got up one morning and said to himself, ‘I’m going to produce a work that sums up everything I’ve accomplished in sacred music over my entire composing lifetime.’ But that’s what he ended up doing, however it came about.

The “Dona Nobis Pacem” is the final section of the regular Mass, with those words as the only text, translated simply as “Give us Peace.” “Bach’s music transcends the quiet, meditative prayer we might expect. Instead, it’s a soaring, almost defiant musical statement. As it develops, reaching increasingly higher, we hear a single musical subject appear in one voice and then another. This persistent musical line seems to be communicating a message which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.”⁶

My preference for including performance videos in these posts is usually for live concert recordings, but in this case I’m including an album cut since it’s directed by the great Robert Shaw. Below this one, though, I do include a concert video.

Notes on this post:

1. If you’re reading this post before March 8 & 9, 2024, and you live in the Denver metro area, be sure to make plans to attend this concert. Here’s the link to the website: Cherry Creek Chorale. Click on the “Buy Tickets” button at the top of the page. If you’re a little early and tickets aren’t on sale yet, be sure to remind yourself to come back later! ↩︎
2. All three definitions of the types of works discussed in this post–cantata, oratorio, and Mass–are taken from the website BrainMass. ↩︎
3. Proverbs 4:11-12, 1599 Geneva Bible translation—the nearest I could come to something sort of Martin Luther-y. ↩︎
4. From an unbelievable website, The Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, A Listener and Student Guide, by Julian Mincham, Chapter 14 BWV 78 Jesu, der du meine Seele ↩︎
5. The Metamorphosis of Passion ↩︎
6. Dona Nobis Pacem: Six Musical Invocations of Peace ↩︎

And now for the promised information on the Joy of Bach documentary. It’s available on YouTube, and I’m including the best-quality version I saw online, which ain’t all that great. If you want something a little higher-res, though, you can access it through Amazon Prime.