As in music so in life, Bach flows on

Imagine you were the neighbour or the nearest and dearest of Johanna Maria Kees, the widow of Leipzig’s Chief Postmaster, who had requested in her will to have something everyone can sing at her funeral, the popular chorale Jesu, meine Freude (Jesu, my joy), and instead you had to listen to an eleven-movement motet lasting twenty minutes written by a new face in town, Johann Sebastian Bach. He had obligingly allowed you to hum or sing along to just a few bars at the start and finish. Would you have been: A. astonished; B. annoyed; or C. not surprised because you have already heard the stories about Leipzig’s new Thomaskantor?

Fast forward to our own times and the answer is equally difficult to predict. Funerals in our time tend to be solemn and tasteful affairs and mourners might question and deem insensitive words that begin Jesu, meine Freude such as “joy”, “delight” and “treasure” sung to them while the coffin bearing a favourite relative or dear friend lies in plain view. We prefer to cordon off such occasions from recognisable signs of life beyond grasping at the comfort of one of the deceased’s favourite popular songs or an amusing family anecdote. Short and sweet is the order of the day for that customary half-hour time slot at the crematorium. Participation in the music optional.

So will there be Bach at your funeral? Bach himself may have considered it was the right choice for his own funeral, albeit music by one of his forebears with his own added instrumentation. Because if the requirement is for music that has a direct impact on emotions and provides a comforting foretaste of eternal life through heavenly singing then Bach never fails. In the Lutheran context of Bach’s time the requirement would have been more specific – to promote well-being and banish the Devil – while in the broader religious context, Jesus is leading the dead to a better place, hence the expression of joy and delight. Motets, literally words that are sung, were the norm at Lutheran funeral ceremonies, burials and commemorative services and Bach’s motets are some of the best but they do not need to be understood, less still enjoyed, only in relation to funerals. As Bach scholar John Butt asks: 

…did Bach really consider the value and meaning of music to be purely contingent on the use to which it is put and the appropriateness of its style for any particular context… or is it to some degree independent of such considerations, something to be valued on account of its craftsmanship and specifically musical qualities? I will contend that his musical personality inclines more towards the latter. ¹

What follows is a brief overview of some of the motets in Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s programme Bach family motets to be given at Portchester Methodist Church on March 14th 2026: Jesu, meine Freude; Der Geist hilft; Ich lasse dich nicht and Lobet den Herrn. I look at the circumstances of their composition, not entirely funereal, and how Bach was motivated by pride in his family’s musical connections to arrive at a singular approach to writing music. Beyond that, a brief assessment of how Bach and his eldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel took steps to ensure that the posthumous reputation of their family’s musical endeavours could endure and how these, taken together, may provide a glimpse of Bach the person beneath the be-wigged monument that history has made of him.

The funeral (or memorial service) for Johann Maria Kees took place on 18 July 1723 about two months after the 38-year-old Bach had arrived with his second wife, Anna Magdalena, and five children to start work as the Cantor at St Thomas on supplying and directing music for Sundays, feast days and other occasions at four of Leipzig’s Lutheran churches. It is likely he felt the need to make an impression after the humiliating experience of being told he was third choice for the job, his appointment only succeeding because the other two, including Telemann, had declined.

The writing and performance of the motet Jesu, meine Freude BWV 227 was therefore an early assignment for Bach as Thomaskantor following on shortly after the completion of several cantatas including Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben BWV 147 that was written for the Marian feast of the Visitation on 2 July. Never one to let anything first-rate go to waste, Bach based it on his earlier cantata BWV 147a, written in 1716 in Weimar for Advent. For the new work he expanded the Advent cantata’s six movements to ten, arranged in two parts. Part two ends with the chorale, Jesus bleibet meine Freude, which we have all come to know and love as Jesu, joy.  Ironically, in his job interview Bach had to promise the Leipzig authorities that he “would maintain good order in the churches by not writing compositions that were too long or too elaborate.” BWV 147 contains some of Bach’s most compelling and popular music, but it is also thumbing its nose at the bureaucracy of his Leipzig employers and their short-sightedness with regard to appreciating his worth. ² The same “I’ll show them” attitude applies to Jesu, meine Freude, a long and elaborate, bespoke motet for Johanna Kees’s funeral for which at least one of the eleven movements symmetrically arranged around a central fugue, may have been written before he came to Leipzig. Both works, BWV 147 and 227, follow the model of one of Bach’s earliest cantatas, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God’s time is the best time) BWV 106, also known as Actus tragicus, whereby separate movements marked by meter, key changes and double bar lines and a mixture of biblical and chorale texts come across as a single, continuous work lasting around twenty minutes. Whatever reservations the Leipzig recruitment board may have had about appointing Bach in 1723, they must surely have been set aside after hearing that instantly memorable, spiralling melody in the chorale of BWV 147 and the expressive emphasis placed on the words fleischlich (bodily) and geistlich (spiritually) in the fugue at the core (or apex) of Jesu, meine Freude’s ingenious structure. I think they knew they had chosen well: Bach stayed in the post for the rest of his life.

Symmetrical plan for the texts used in the 11 movements of Jesu, meine Freud. ³

John Eliot Gardiner asks “to what extent did Bach share Luther’s overwhelming terror of death “the one misery that makes us more miserable than all other creatures”? Was he convinced by the rewards of salvation? Evidence, he suggested, lies in that early work Actus tragicus. If its date of composition – 1707 – is right, then Bach was still only twenty-two, preparing to set up home with his wife-to-be, second cousin Maria Barbara. He was helped in this by the legacy of his uncle Tobias who had died in August 1707 and some have suggested that Actus Tragicus was written for Tobias’s funeral. Another possibility is that it was written in memoriam Susanne Tilesius, the sister of a friend who died young leaving a husband and four children, much the same as Bach himself had suffered on being orphaned twelve years earlier. At the core of Actus tragicus the words ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ are repeated over and over again as if to demonstrate how faith embodied in music might deprive death of its sting and power to terrify. Indeed, the single, constant spiritual motif underpinning all the motets (most notably Komm, Jesu, komm) is the idea that Christ is present at the side of believers at the moment of their death, leaving behind the vicissitudes of earthly life; a Christ who consoles them and sets them on the path to eternal light. Bach’s music “never stops praying” as the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág famously declared. ⁴. Praying, yes, and working hard at it by inventing music of astonishing originality right from the outset of his career as composer, always pushing at the limits of received practice.

By the way, that’s a good story about Jesu, meine Freude and the post-master’s wife’s funeral, but it is probably not how it came about. Research undertaken in Leipzig since the 1990s uncovered the order of service for the Kees funeral and there is no reference to any music by Bach! Meanwhile, Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has suggested that Bach may have composed the motet for the education of his new choirs in both composition techniques and theology. In parts, this motet does indeed involve a thorough vocal work-out, so many things to think about and look at on the page, such as that all-important fugal entry, where phrases are heading, verbal clarity and taking a breath. Theologically, the motet reads as a test case in juxtaposing Johann Franck’s vivid and personal hymn stanzas (Trotz! Trotz! Trotz dem alten Drachen!/ I defy the old dragon) and stern verses from Chapter 8 of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Wer aber Christi Geist nicht hat, der ist nicht sein/ Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his). And if arriving in Leipzig meant that Bach could give their musicians a timely lesson in musical self-improvement, bear in mind that 1723 was also the year when Bach brought together his Inventions and Sinfonias BWV 772–801, the Two- and Three-Part Inventions, every aspiring young keyboard player’s first encounter with Bach. These were originally written as Praeambula and Fantasiae in the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, pieces for his eldest son that were rewritten as musical exercises for his students and Bach prefaced the collection as “Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.” The masterful analysis by Laurence Dreyfus of the first of those Inventions demonstrates how Bach “carried out a good idea”, disclosing “an obsession with inventive processes even in the context of a small, pedagogical work” whereby the music “invents itself in order to uncover previously unsuspected discoveries”. This “pursuit of purposeful design was itself highly unusual for the its time”. ⁵ While most scholars agree on 1723 as the year Jesu, meine Freude was written, chorale settings from the motet are included in the Dietel manuscript from around 1735, providing a latest verifiable dating. ⁶ Whether training material or funeral component, this motet has long been regarded as one of Bach’s greatest achievements in the genre and was the first of his motets to be recorded. ⁷. Bach was always praying: he was also always teaching.

Thanks to the survival of the autograph manuscript, there is more certainty about the date and circumstances of Der Geist hilft BWV 226. It is inscribed as being composed for the burial ceremonies on October 21st 1729 of Johann Heinrich Ernesti, formerly Rector of St Thomas’s School, eminent theologian and Professor of Poetry at Leipzig University. Rector Ernesti would have been one of the Board members who initially rejected Bach for the ThomasKantor post. ⁸ It invokes the Holy Spirit as intercessor for humans afflicted by their failings. It consists of a large-scale movement for eight voices, in three distinct sections which are nonetheless performed without a break, followed by a simple harmonised chorale sung by the two choirs in unison, beseeching the Holy Spirit that, through its agency ‘we may pass through death and life to thee’. The motet is especially noteworthy for its representation of the power of the Holy Spirit in the opening idea that spirals upwards in three-voiced harmony.

Bach was a scholar composer, one of the first, historically aware of the importance of his work. At the age of fifty he began to compile as much material and information as he could find relating to his family’s long involvement with music and he took steps to ensure that this family archive would be kept safe, first with his son Carl Philip Emanuel. Naturally, no such endeavour is complete nor foolproof and new material relating to Bach continues to turn up in publishers’ archives and in locations surprisingly remote from the Leipzig hub, as Christoph Wolff (Harvard University and Bach Achiv Leipzig)  demonstrated in a fascinating talk in April last year. ⁹ One of his most famous finds was the re-discovery of the Old Bach Archive in Kiev in 1999, which had gone missing since the 2nd World War – it had been carried off as booty by Soviet troops. Incredibly, the discovery was made on the eve of the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. Two items from the Archive have particular relevance to Bach’s reverence for his family forebears, elder cousin Johann Christoph in particular, to whom he referred to as a “profound composer”. ¹⁰. They are (1) the earliest known source for the eight-voiced motet Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn and (2) instrumental parts added in J S Bach’s hand to Johann Christoph’s motet Lieber Herr Gott, Wecke Uns Auf.

Ich lasse dich nicht, du segnest mich denn BWV 1164 (confusingly also number BWV 1165) is still relegated by some scholars to an appendix (BWVAnh159) as parts of it are attributed to Johann Christoph. John Eliot Gardiner believes the motet could have been written explicitly as an homage to Johann Christoph:

Was Bach copying or composing here? We cannot be totally sure, but from the evidence of the way the score is presented it suggests this was indeed composed by Bach, in which case it is the earliest surviving motet of his, dating from c.1712/3, or possibly earlier, when he was employed at the Ducal court in Weimar. In terms of style it gives the impression of occupying a midway point between that of Johann Christoph Bach and, say, Fürchte dich nicht. Indeed it feels almost like a tribute from Bach to his elder cousin ¹¹

The entry for this motet in the Bach Cantatas website notes that it may have been composed in 1713, possibly for the funeral of the Mayor of Arnstadt’s wife, Margarethe Feldhaus (née Wedemann), who was also the aunt of Maria Barbara, Bach’s first wife. Again, a strange choice of text to modern ears, the bulk of it taken from the passage in Genesis where Jacob wrestles with God – And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me – with the words mein Jesu inserted, so that the actors are changed from Jacob and God to the dead person’s soul and Jesus. These same words were used again for the cantata Ich lasse dich nicht, BWV 157 written in early 1727 for the memorial service of Johann Christoph von Ponickau, a Saxon nobleman and chamberlain on 6th February 1727. Note that 1727 is also the year Bach composed the St Matthew Passion. The opening ritornello of the cantata is very similar to the final chorus of the Passion and although the cantata ends on an optimistic note, the opening movements approach the Passion arias in their vocal complexity and heightened, dolorous expressiveness.

Lieber Herr Gott, Wecke Uns Auf (Dear Lord God, Wake Us Up) was written by Johann Christoph Bach in 1672. Bach arranged an instrumental accompaniment, colla parte, to the motet a few months before his death in 1750, supposedly to be performed at his own funeral. Christoph Wolff claims that no later manuscript bears Bach’s handwriting:

It is an extraordinarily expressive piece that gives us an insight into Bach’s funeral, about which we basically knew next to nothing beyond that Bach was put in an oak casket and given a free hearse. ¹²

With this funeral selection Bach placed himself in the context of his family, thinking back to the music of the previous generation and forward to his own children, nine of whom were living. Here was a work by his most distinguished ancestor that had set to music a traditional prayer text whose words anticipated life after death and to which Bach added the instrumental colour of wind and strings. Professor Wolff said the manuscript reveals that “the ailing old man clearly had trouble writing. The lettering is unwieldy – uneven, stiff, disproportionately large, and disjunct.” ¹³.

The final item in Portsmouth Baroque Choir’s concert is the four-part motet Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden BWV 230 its festive Hallelujah ending prone to getting audiences to their feet, a song of praise that appears inappropriate to us as funeral music (unless one is from New Orleans) although a rendering of Psalm 117 would not have seemed out of place at a memorial service in Bach’s time when, as already stated above, death was regarded as a joyful release from life’s vicissitudes. It is the least wordy of the motets but even so, to is interesting here to compare Bach’s motet settings with his cantatas. The motets maintain a choral texture throughout: there are no designated solo movements even though individual voice lines may occasionally drop out. Furthermore, whereas in many cantata choruses a relatively short text (e.g. one verse of a chorale) will be stretched over the course of a lengthy movement, in the motets the text comes thick and fast. Indeed, the essence of the German motet style which Bach adopted and developed is the pre-eminence of the text; the music derives its impact, its Affekt, directly from the sound and shape of the words, rather than by association, pictorial or theological.

Nothing has come to light that links Lobet den Herrn with any specific funeral or memorial. It is presumed to have been written during Bach’s Weimar period but was only published for the first time in 1821 from a manuscript attributed to “signor Bach”, separate from the other famous motets that had been published in 1802-3. Some scholars have pointed to the instrumental style of writing for voices, how that might denote inexperience or even incompetence, although any singer will tell you that Bach almost always demands instrument-like virtuosity, “the agility of a tightrope walker, never more so than in the motets”. ¹⁴

Does it help performers to know what Bach looked like? This portrait was painted just two years before he died. How did he look when he arrived in Leipzig, the composer of cantatas and motets?

 

There are several images of Bach in circulation, but only one is authenticated and it has cemented a stereotypical impression of be-wigged authority in our minds whenever his name is mentioned. Another portrait alters that impression: it is in the process of being authenticated by the Bach Archiv and it shows Bach the young concertmeister in Weimar, captioned “the famous organ player and organ builder”. He was not a builder of organs but was certainly a consultant. Beyond the revealing caption, researchers have noted that the hair style parted down the middle, is similar to that of his father as portrayed. Where’s the wig? Bach wore a wig consistently when on duty in Leipzig but only for court occasions in Weimar.

The name Bach translates aptly into English as ‘stream’, a body of water that has provided an inexhaustible source of nurture, fascination and delight. For the 19th-century it tended to mean ‘monument’ or ‘deity’. Here’s Berlioz, not renowned for understatement: “There is but one God – Bach – and Mendelssohn is his prophet”. Bach the supreme Lutheran cantor was even elevated to the level of a primary author of the New Testament and was commonly accorded the title of ‘The ‘Fifth Evangelist’! ¹⁵ Others, such as Liszt and Brahms sought truth in the music and understood its lessons well, lessons that were absorbed further by Busoni, Reger and Webern, the neo-classical style and its slogan “back to Bach” proving irresistible to Stravinsky, Hindemith and a host of 20th-century followers, all supported by academic research that has sought to remove the mystery, occasionally casting Bach more as chemist than sorcerer in his deft manipulation of elements and compositional formulae. Thanks to the work of the Bach Archiv in preserving and uncovering original sources, the status and reputation of J S Bach and his family has continued to grow, leading to better-informed performance practice, Here’s British composer and avid listener Robin Holloway writing in 2025 about Bach:

it’s difficult to think of any composer, performer, lover of music, for whom Bach is not the Grand Central meeting-point/exchange-rate/gold-standard/source-and-goal. He represents music itself at its essence: what it is, what it is for. ¹⁶

The wordiness of the motets is deliberate and remote in sentiment from present-day thinking. But the musical settings, that demonstrably have more to do with the processes of classical rhetoric than musicological obsessions with binary and ternary structures (how section B follows section A) always succeed and astonish however familiar their patterns may seem superficially. With Bach the music is as serious as your life, especially for the performer. This closing quote is about another intellectual colossus, one you may well not have heard of even though Einstein considered him one of the most original creative minds in scientific history – Josiah Willard Gibbs – but for me it applies equally well to what I understand Bach was up to in his music: “all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.” ¹⁷

Always praying, always teaching, always inventing, always inspiring. Why ever would you not have Bach played at your funeral? Start by taking your pick on March 14th from nine motets by Bach and his forebears.

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