2007 Program Notes

by Larry Worster

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

At the time of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth in Eisenach, the region of Thuringia in central Germany was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose federation of cities and small states that encompassed Germany, Austria, Switzerland, northern Italy, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within this region, musicians found employment in many functions: Stadtpfeifers performed music for civic functions; organists provided accompaniment for church services, tested new organs, and often improvised preludes and other incidental music as necessary; Kapellmeisters oversaw the chapels in the princely courts, selecting and training performers and composing such music as the court demanded for both entertainment and worship; and Kantors undertook responsibility for the musical education and often all other musical activities in a city.

Bach’s family included musicians employed in nearly all of these capacities. His older brother Johann Christoph, a church organist, gave Sebastian his first keyboard lessons after he took responsibility for the child following their father’s death in 1695. Sebastian spent the years 1700-02 in the north of Germany at the Michaelis School of Lüneburg, where he first learned the arts of musical composition and organ playing. After returning to the south, he received his first steady employment as an organist at the St. Blasius Church at Mühlhausen, during which time he composed his earliest cantatas.

From 1708-17, Bach was employed as a chamber musician, concertmaster, and organist at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who encouraged him to write organ music and cantatas. When the duke refused to consider Bach for the position of Kapellmeister in 1717, the composer secured a similar post in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. The young prince was a skilled player of the violin, the bass viol, and harpsichord and employed eighteen instrumentalists at his court. The situation was advantageous for the composition of secular entertainment. During the six years that he spent at Köthen, Bach produced large amounts of orchestral, chamber, and harpsichord music, including the Brandenburg Concerti, keyboard inventions, concerto transcriptions, suites, and the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier (pub. 1722).

Bach was one of many musicians who applied in 1723 for the post of Kantor at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, which included responsibility for both civic music and all of the music for the city’s four largest churches. When Georg Philipp Telemann, the best-known German musician at that time, declined the position, Bach was hired to the job he would hold until his death. Later, he accepted the post of director of the collegium musicum, an amateur society founded by Telemann in 1702 that presented public concerts of secular music. During his twenty-three years of service to the city of Leipzig, he wrote hundreds of cantatas, at least five Passions, several Masses, three oratorios, and a large amount of instrumental music, including most of his published didactic keyboard music.

After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts, most of which were unpublished, passed into the hands of his sons and widow. Changes in musical taste toward the end of his life left his work unappreciated. As Johann Adolph Scheibe noted in 1737, “This man would be the admiration of whole nations if he . . . did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, if he did not darken their beauty with an excess of art.” Composers in Europe, if they knew of him at all, knew only his half dozen or so published keyboard works.

But Baron von Swieten introduced Viennese circles to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in the second half of the eighteenth century, and both Mozart and Beethoven studied his fugal style. Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 was the first of many nineteenth-century revivals of Bach’s choral works. Most nineteenth-century performances of Bach’s choral works emphasized large performing groups; Mendelssohn’s choir for the St. Matthew Passion was around 160, at least five times the total number of singers available to Bach at the Thomaskirche. The formation of the Bach-Gesellschaft (Bach Society) in 1850 eventually led to the publication of the first complete edition of Bach’s works and the first critical biography by Philipp Spitta. Since the 1950s, an increasing number of performing organizations, among them the Boulder Bach Festival, have concentrated on producing historically informed performances using period instruments when possible, appropriately sized forces, and conducted as Bach would have, either from the harpsichord or the violin.

Friday, January 19, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
First United Methodist Church
1421 Spruce Street, Boulder

The Concerto

Bach’s concerti may be grouped by his place of employment. He first began studying the concerto during his service to Duke of Weimar (1708-17) by transcribing concertos of other composers into works for solo harpsichord or organ. The transformed works were most likely performed for courtly entertainment. Among the pieces arranged were at least three concertos from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (1711) as well as works by young Duke Johann Ernst and other minor German composers. Although these works are not original, through the process of transcription Bach learned the features of the Italian concerto and the concertato style that dominated his later works. During his service at Köthen, he began writing original concerti, and many of these are concerti grossi, featuring a small group of soloists, known as the concertino, rather than a single instrument.

The third period of Bach’s development began in 1729 when he became director of the collegium musicum of Leipzig, a position he held nearly continuously until 1741. This organization comprised students, town musicians, amateurs, and culturally-minded citizens who gathered once a week to hold concerts in the popular coffee houses and gardens of Leipzig. No programs of the collegium have ever been found, but during this time Bach transcribed many of his Köthen concerti, as well as works by other composers, into concerti for one to four harpsichords.

Understandably, Bach’s concerti show influences from Vivaldi’s works, the most obvious being their three-movement form. Additionally, outer movements are structured as a concertato dialogue between the ripieno (the whole orchestra) and the soloist(s). Ritornello form, in which a ritornello theme opens and closes each movement as well as setting off the soloist’s episodes, is usually present in these movements. Since the soloist’s episodes may not be thematically related, the ritornello serves as a unifying force. While the virtuosic skills of the soloists are always aptly displayed in the first movement, and expressly highlighted in the third movement, the middle movements often contain expressive cantabile melodies.

The harpsichord concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach are of great significance in the history of European art music; however, their importance does not lie in their musical content as much as in Bach’s choice of the harpsichord as a solo instrument. For Bach, the compositions were but a small part of the many works that he produced to fulfill the demands of his employment. As passed on to the next generation of composers through the hands of his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, the concept of the keyboard concerto initiated a new genre of composition that became a favorite of the composers of the Viennese Classical School.

Sacred Vocal Works

Sacred German dramatic music of the 1700s, as epitomized by the works of Bach, is one of many forms of music influenced by the musical innovations that occurred in northern Italy nearly a century earlier. Bach’s sacred works are characterized by a common set of elements: movements dominated by a single musical idea or Affekt; a mixture of Biblical text and newly authored poetry; and the selection of instruments appropriate to either the text or the occasion for which the work was composed. Bach’s passions, although stylistically similar to his cantatas, are larger works that tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. A brief historical introduction will provide the perspective necessary to fully appreciate these works.

From the late 1500s, groups of Italian scholars of classical Greek culture began to decry the predominant renaissance forms of a cappella polyphonic music: the mass, motet, chanson, and madrigal. In their place, they proposed a new type of vocal setting called monody, in which a solo vocal part would be supported by unobtrusive accompaniment. In such music, they argued, the melody would be freed to recapture expressive power described by Plato and Aristotle. With the advent of the dramatic monodic style came the birth of recitative and aria that enabled the creation of opera, oratorio, and cantata. Early cantatas were largely secular and, as seen in the more than 600 cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), often comprised little more than two recitatives followed by arias.

A second Italian innovation that affected the development of the cantata was the principle of concertato, or concerted music, in which contrasting solo, choral, and instrumental sections are placed side by side in a single movement. The use of concertato effects is extremely striking in the compositions of Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni, organists at the Church of St. Mark in Venice from 1566 to 1612. The unusual physical design of St. Mark’s, featuring multiple choir lofts, was especially conducive to sectional contrasts in dynamics, instrumentation, and spatial separation. Although this principle is a familiar feature of the concerto in which an instrument or small group of instruments is contrasted with the tutti or whole orchestra, early Baroque music labeled “concerto” was usually church music for voices and instruments. This style of music was common in Germanic lands, and most of Bach’s predecessors wrote sacred concertos. Bach’s sacred dramatic music differs from its Italian relatives by the incorporation of numerous choruses and the variety of texts: sections of the Bible, Psalms, expressive poetic texts, and the texts of chorales (Lutheran hymns). The personal nature of the inserted texts brings the worshippers into the drama, projecting both the individual’s meditations as arias and the congregation’s reactions as chorales.

While cantatas were a regular feature of the Lutheran Sunday service, oratorios and passions were composed for the special days of Good Friday, Christmas, and Ascension Day. The passions, because they tell the story of Christ’s death, are Bach’s largest creations in this style. Although he created two passions using the gospel of John, and one each using the texts of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, only one St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion have survived in their entirety. Although sacred works in Latin form a smaller part of the composer’s output, they are some of his most significant works and include the Magnificat and B minor Mass, as well as his four Latin motets.

Notes on Individual Pieces:

Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C Major
Bach orchestral suites occupy a small part of his oeuvre, numbering only four. He was very familiar with suite form, composing numerous works of this genre for harpsichord, violin, and cello. The Orchestral Suite No. 1, most likely composed during Bach’s Köthen period, has strong French influences as seen in the movements using in the dance rhythms of the French court. In addition, the opening overture of the suite retains the dotted rhythms, tripartite slow-fast-slow form, and majestic style of the classic French overture.

The suite is scored for a pair of oboes, a bassoon, strings, and continuo. The Ouverture opens with a dignified but elegant Grave, whose middle section is a lively fugato based on a trumpet-signal-like theme. Six binary-form dances follow, alternating in rhythm, tempo, and mood. Four of these dances are doubled, the Gavotte, Menuet, Bourrée, and Passe-Pied. In this form, the first dance recurs after the second without the repeated sections in the original. Many of these movements contain sections with lighter scoring, resembling the trio section of the minuets of classical-era symphonies.

Violin Concerto No. 1
The Concerto in a is one of the few of Bach’s concerti that exist in two forms: the original concerto for violin originating from the Köthen period and the later Concerto in g, a transcription of the original for harpsichord from the Leipzig collegium musicum period. The first movement opens with a lively fanfare-like ritornello theme followed by solo episodes that are filled with running scales and arpeggios. The delicately ornamented melody in the relative major key that dominates the second movement is introduced by a theme first presented over a pulsating bass pedal tone. A more delicate texture without the bass alternates with sections in which the pedal returns. The work closes with a ceaselessly rushing gigue movement, containing solo sections that highlight the violinist’s abilities at performing both complex figuration and cross-string arpeggiations.

Magnificat in D Major with added Christmas sections
The Magnificat is Mary’s song of praise to God upon her recognition as the mother of the Lord by her cousin Elizabeth. Traditionally, this text would have been sung at Sunday Vespers in the vernacular and on Christmas Day in Latin. Bach first composed a setting of the Magnificat in E-flat major for his first Christmas in Leipzig in 1723. He later removed the sections that were more appropriate for the original Christmas performance and transposed it to D. Although the shortened version is more often performed today, this performance will include the four Christmas “insertions” as the third, seventh, ninth, and twelfth movements. Bach’s understanding of the work’s importance in the church is apparent in his choice of the festive orchestra including three trumpets, timpani, pairs of flutes and oboes, a bassoon, string orchestra, harpsichord and organ. This setting of the Magnificat resembles a cantata except that, because of the nature of the text, Bach composed none of the da capo arias so prevalent in the poetic sections of his cantatas.

The festive atmosphere is immediately established by the opening trumpet fanfares and the fanfare-like pronouncements of the choir. The joyful mood is carried on by the rising arpeggios of the soprano’s aria “Et exultavit.” The next movement is a minimally accompanied setting of “Vom Himmel Hoch,” in which the chorale melody appears in the sustained notes of the soprano. The following aria for the other soprano, “Quia respexit,” is characterized by a descending phrase in both the obbligato oboe d’amore and soprano’s melody projecting an affect appropriate for Mary’s lowly station in life. Without a break, the choir completes Mary’s text with “Omnes generationes.” The bass’s aria “Quia fecit” is accompanied by the most minimal of accompaniment. Bach’s choice of the bass voice is consistent with his use of this voice for Jesus and the Holy Ghost in his other works, for in this aria the text tells specifically of the “great things” that God has done for Mary. Contrasting strongly with this movement is the following joyous chorale fantasia on “Freut Euch und Jubliliert.” The gently lilting “Et misericordia,” sung by the alto and tenor with accompaniment by the orchestra and two flutes, is one of Bach’s simplest settings, including almost no melismas. The straighforwardness of this setting is offset by the following chorus, in which an extremely long and melismatic statement of “Fecit poteniam” is presented by sequential voices: tenor, alto, soprano II, bass, and soprano I. The polyphonic intensity of this section is balanced by the power of the simple chordal closing. A threefold exclamation of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” separates this movement from the following “Deposuit” and “Esurientes,” which contain some of the best examples of Bach’s word painting, in which words are musically illustrated by appropriate descending and ascending phrases. In opposition to the other three “Christmas insertions,” Virga Jesse Floruit is not set for chorus, but rather as a florid duet between soprano and bass with the most minimal of accompaniments. Two oboi play the melody to the psalm tone tonus peregrinus, to which the Magnificat has traditionally been chanted, as a cantus firmus in “Suscepit Israel.” The closing two choruses fall into three distinct sections each with its own musical procedure: “Sicut locutus,” a fugal exposition; “Gloria,” a cascading series of overlapping imitative entrances; and the final “Sicut erat,” a reprise of the opening triumphant chorus.

Saturday, January 20, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
First United Methodist Church
1421 Spruce Street, Boulder

Harpsichord Concerto No. 1
The Harpsichord Concerto No. 1, BWV 1052 comes from1738 during Bach’s period of activity with the Leipzig collegium musicum, also known as the Telemann Society for its founder. As with many of the works from this period, it appears to be a transcription of one of his earlier works, in this case a lost violin concerto. The circumstances that led Bach to “recycle” some of his own output were in part the magnitude of this duties in Leipzig, as music director of the St. Thomas School and provider of music for both of the principal churches of the city. Much of his music for the collegium falls into this category.

The first and last movements of the concerto are structured in the usual ritornello form, in which a unison statement of the ritornello theme opens and closes an expansive dialogue between harpsichord and orchestra. Both movements provide ample sections for the harpsichordist to demonstrate virtuosic execution of arpeggiations, ornamentation, and running figures. Each contains cadenza-like passages toward the end of the movement, the first more extensive than the last. By contrast, a gentle, sometimes serene, sometimes sorrowful solo melody in minor key opens the second movement. The darkly pulsating orchestral accompaniment continues throughout the movement as the harpsichord ornaments the expressive melody.

Brandenburg Concerto No. 1
The Brandenburg Concerti, dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg on 24 March 1721, came from Bach’s Köthen period. The set of six concerti grossi apparently lay unplayed in the Margrave’s library until well after his death. At that time they were not valued enough to be listed in the inventory by the composer’s name but rather were among the “concertos by various masters” valued at mere pennies. They were probably never intended for the Margrave’s orchestra to perform as they were presented to him as scores with no accompanying individual parts. Although the originals have never been located, the manuscripts appear to be only copies requested by the Margrave, who made Bach’s acquaintance in Berlin during the winter of 1718-19. Understandably, these concerti show influences from Vivaldi’s works. Except for the first, each is cast in a three-movement form; all feature a concertato dialogue between orchestra and soloists in the outer movements; and the outer movements are in ritornello form, in which a repeating theme opens and closes each movement as well as sets off the soloists’ episodes. Since the solo themes are not thematically related, the ritornello theme serves as a unifying element. While the virtuosic skills of the soloists are always aptly displayed in the first and third movements, the middle movements often contain expressive cantabile melodies.

The first movement of the first concerto was composed as an introductory movement to the Hunting Cantata, BWV 208, written in Bach’s Weimar years for the birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels. The solo instruments, three oboes and a violin, are joined by a pair of horns, which would have been appropriate for the hunting theme of the secular cantata. This work is unusual in that it is the only one of the Brandenburgs that has four movements. The opening movement is suitably bold in its theme and solo episodes. The second movement is based on successive presentations of a falling motive in the solo instruments, while the third, with its insistent repeated-note theme, contains lengthy solo episodes in which the violin and oboes are given cadenza-like passages. The final minuet and trio has an inserted middle section in the polonaise rhythm. This movement seems almost out of place, belonging more to the style of the orchestral suites.

Easter Oratorio
Bach wrote three major works that dealt with dramatic episodes from the life of Christ other than his crucifixion. He called these works oratorios and composed one each for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension. Each is based on an enlarged cantata form, and all assign individual vocal parts to persons of the drama. The Easter Oratorio focuses on the excitement sparked by the discovery of the empty grave of Christ and the varied reactions of sadness, uncertainty, and expected joy that this caused in the onlookers. The narrative and commentary on the events are divided among the four solo roles: the apostles Peter and John are sung by the tenor and bass, Mary the mother of James by the soprano, and Mary Magdalene by the alto. The text, by an unknown writer, perhaps Picander, is typical of the florid religious poetry of the Baroque.

Although the orchestral sinfonia that opens the oratorio sets a mood of joy and urgency with its vigorous rhythms and festive scoring, a sorrowful adagio for strings and solo oboe quickly changes the atmosphere. Excitement returns with the chorus “Kommt Eilet und Laufet,” urging the group to the sepulcher. The rest of the body of the oratorio consists of a series of alternating recitatives and arias, the texts of which both reflect on the empty grave and express the feelings of the participants. The first recitative by all solo voices reveals the fear and uncertainty about Christ’s disappearance. The same mood suffuses the contemplative and sorrowful soprano aria “Seele, deine Spezereien,” accompanied by obbligato flute. A second recitative by the bass, tenor, and alto expresses the hope that the cause of the empty grave is Christ’s resurrection. Woodwinds and strings accompany the lullaby-like tenor aria, in which death is seen as but a sleep before salvation. Longing and hope to see Jesus again are the subject of the following recitative and arioso by the two female voices and in the subsequent alto aria “Saget, saget mir geschwinde” accompanied by oboe d’amore. The last recitative by the solo bass bans sadness and pain, and restores joy with the knowledge that Christ is alive. The full orchestra with trumpets and timpani accompany the brief but jubilant chorus of praise and thankfulness that closes the oratorio.