Portsmouth Baroque Choir will once again be shining a performative light on niche Baroque repertoire at its concert in Fareham on March 22nd: cantatas by Buxtehude and Kuhnau and an arrangement of Kuhnau by Bach. Performances of works by these composers side by side are infrequent. In fact the chances of any of their music surviving down to our age were slim. With little or no thought among Baroque composers for a lasting musical legacy – for most of their time spent composing they were simply doing a job – almost all of it could have disappeared were it not for the initial efforts of discerning manuscript collectors and subsequent initiatives to perform and record every component of the available repertoire. Contemporary interest is indebted to those music scholars who endeavoured to trace and catalogue the music, among whom, most famously, Wolfgang Schmieder whose thematic catalogue Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis was compiled in 1950, two hundred years after Bach’s death, with a new edition appearing in 1990. How complete is it? Robert Newman at Good Music Guide Classical Music Forum wrote:
researchers say that only around half of J.S. Bach’s music has survived to the present day – the rest having been lost in the years following his death in 1750 when his mountain of musical musical manuscripts were bequeathed to his family and later widely scattered.
Only three of Bach’s five cantata cycles have survived, so that’s 100 works just for starters! But new discoveries continue to be made, again from GMG:
A lost musical score by German composer J.S. Bach was found a few years ago in Japan. The 1728 composition, a wedding cantata numbered today as Cantata BWV ”216,” was found among papers of Japanese pianist Chieko Hara, who died in Japan in 2001 aged 86.
Would it have helped if Bach had a computer? That is a question Ron Butlin endeavoured to answer in Vivaldi and the number three, his surreal compilation of updated composer biographies from Telemann to Nadia Boulanger in which we find the Bach household at breakfast, desperate to cope with the outcome of an appeal raised with the composer’s enormous fan base:
The parcel was half a metre high, cube-shaped and wrapped in shiny red paper. It stood next to his breakfast plate: tied with large wreaths of gold tassel and addressed in a scrolled script of suitably baroque loops and curves. “Not another one!” said Bach, shoving the parcel aside and reaching for the marmalade. He could guess what it contained. Kapellmeisters, however, were expected to be grateful… Ever since that article , ‘If Only Bach Had A Computer’, appeared in the previous month’s Digital Digest, the house had been filling up. Anna Magdalena… was getting more than a little annoyed at the loss of storage space. Her linen cupboards were bulging with monitors, printers and keyboards, there were laptops stacked on the stairs and windowsills; the bath brimmed with new software packages; whenever a door opened or closed, white polystyrene filler drifted across the floor like miniature tumbleweed. Discs were being used as coasters, fibre-optic cable doubled as clothes-lines and, more importantly of course, as goal-netting.
Transpose this chaotic image back to Bach’s paper-based time. Would not a similar image emerge of a household struggling to store and keep tabs on hundreds of sheets of filled manuscript paper on their way to or returned by copyists1, lying in wait for when family members had to clear the house after 1750?
Nowadays, everything that has survived of Bach’s music is available in multiple recordings on numerous streaming platforms or in boxed sets of CDs; his music is performed hourly in some location around the world; Bach is a household name, revered as one of the greatest musicians and composers of all time. For many people, playing or listening to Bach can change the way they see the world helping to retain a hopeful perspective in fractured times.2 So it is difficult for us to comprehend how, in the winter of 1723, Bach was only the third choice after Telemann and Christoph Graupner to succeed Johann Kuhnau, who had died the previous summer, as cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Luckily for Bach3, and for us, first choice Telemann had received a better offer from Hamburg and Graupner’s current employer refused to release him. Bach performed two cantatas, BWV 22 and 23 for his “audition”, at a service on 7 February that year, a tough listen for the examiners. While 22 is full of dance rhythms and pays stylistic homage to his predecessor, Kuhnau, 23 is ornate and dense, anticipating the music of the Passions4.
Assuming Bach was also asked about his CV, the names Kuhnau and Buxtehude would have figured prominently. Kuhnau is better-known as a composer of pictorial pieces for keyboard. He was the first to write a keyboard sonata and his Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) influenced Bach. Less well-known are his sacred cantatas, written as annual cycles, again as Bach was required to provide. Few have survived, mostly thanks to Bach making a collection of them. We will be performing three: his masterpiece Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern for Epiphany 5, Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden (I desire to die in peace’, based on the Song of Simeon) and Gott, sei mir gnädig (Psalm 51, for Ash Wednesday). All three display a mixture of pietist moderation and operatic flare that would be adopted by Handel as well as Bach. Kuhnau also practised as a lawyer, he was a prolific theorist, a talented linguist, and even wrote a satirical novel, Der musicalische Quacksalber (1700) on what he considered to be superficial trends in contemporary music, the operas of Telemann presumably a target. You could say that Kuhnau was the last ‘Renaissance man’. More important for Bach is that for decades Kuhnau had directed the St Thomas choir, the Thomanerchor founded in 1212, although it was not in particularly good shape when Bach took over. But that is another story.
Going back a little further, there was Bach’s famous 260-mile walk from Arnstadt to Lübeck ostensibly to hear the greatest musician of the day, Dietrich Buxtehude, then aged seventy. Bach was given leave to stay one month but he stayed for four, soaking up not only Buxtehude’s organ playing at the Marienkirche (the magnificent roofscape of which dominates our concert poster) but also the weekly concerts (Abendmusik) organised by Buxtehude that included chamber music and dazzling concerted music on a monumental scale involving musicians from several different countries6. Abendmusik was a central cultural event in Lūbeck and was mentioned in travel guides of the time.
Buxtehude’s own music might have disappeared but for the compilation of manuscripts made by Swedish organist Gustaf Düben, including over 100 by Buxtehude. While the memory of Buxtehude lived on as a skilled organist and composer of organ music, mostly written in the first half of his life, his sacred vocal music, from the second half, was utterly forgotten until the early twentieth century when scholars began rediscovering it. Buxtehude composed his vocal works not to order but entirely on his own initiative, which meant that he was able to achieve a higher standard of quality for that time. The possibility of achieving such a level of professional freedom while carrying out the duties of a church musician established the model for the likes of Handel, Telemann and Bach.
Our concert begins with Buxtehude’s Advent cantata Ihr lieben Christen, freut euch nun and the second half includes Jesu, meine Freude that Bach must surely have heard while in Lūbeck as his later, well-known setting shares striking similarities including key and palindromic form. The concert ends joyfully with a Magnificat setting attributed to Buxtehude. While some scholars believe the score bears all the marks of Buxtehude’s style, others point out that it bears no resemblance to any of his known works and that it looks and sounds more like Lully or Carissimi. But then Buxtehude, like Bach, was a master at imitation.
To reinforce the Bach connection we’ll be singing the funeral motet Der Gerechte kömmt um, attributed to Bach. It is a vernacular re-working (contrafactum) of a Latin motet Tristis est anima mea by Kuhnau. Believed to have been written 1730-5, it bears several hallmarks of Bach’s style: paired wind instruments in the accompaniment, subtle harmonic recolouring and heightened expression. The instrumental introduction foreshadows Mozart and just before the end there is an astonishing moment, very rare for those times, of measured silence.
For this concert of choral rarities Portsmouth Baroque Choir is delighted to be joined by members of the Consort of Twelve. Additional instrumental colour and all vocal solos will be drawn from the Choir.
Footnotes
- The first, principal copyist of Bach’s cantata parts was Johann Kuhnau’s nephew, Johann Andreas. ↩︎
- For instance, peacemaker Donald Reeves “The thing about Bach’s music is that it anticipates. It’s always anticipating, always moving forward, never stops, never goes backwards. The work I do shifts between peace building and the music of Bach. We have to deal with all the difficulties that we find. You have to have that strength of energy to move forward and rejuvenate—that’s hope and that’s what the music does for me. It really heals the spirit and makes me feel I want to carry on this work of building bridges, creating peace. Peace building is in Bach’s music. There is an enormous ache, a great longing for union with God, for union with the whole of creation where heaven and earth can meet. ↩︎
- Luckily for Bach? We know that Bach had reservations about the lower status of the post he was applying for in Leipzig. John Eliot Gardiner writes: “Not having been a Thomaner himself and having previously never worked in Leipzig (as far as we know), he had no inside information as to the potential obstacles other than via professional hearsay or gossip. The allure of the Thomaner choir and the quality of its music-making might have been suggested to him by Adam Immanuel Welding, who had been a prefect in the 1680s under Schelle, when the choir was in its prime, and later became Bach’s landlord and fellow musician at the Weimar Court. If so, this rosy image could have been shattered when Bach and Kuhnau met face to face in April 1716 as joint assessors of the new organ in Halle. We have a detailed menu of the sumptuous dinner that they consumed at the Golden Ring tavern, which together with th lavish quantity of wine and beer set before them, may have been enough to loosen Kuhnau’s tongue as to the pitfalls of the job- the paucity of musical resources, the back-stabbing and the wearisome challenges to his authority”. Gardiner Music in the castle of heaven ↩︎
- Kuhnau composed a St Mark Passion but only a fragment of it has survived. “Its disappearance… deprives us of an immediate comparison with which to gauge the degree of continuity or novelty represented by the first appearance of Bach’s John Passion in Leipzig three years later. Still, Kuhnau provided Bach with a precedent for a Leipzig Passion that relied on unadulterated biblical narrative as its core, and, apparently, punctuated by 200-year-old chorales, several turbae and arias set to new texts of lyrical commentary” (Gardiner, op. cit) ↩︎
- “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern” (How lovely shines the morning star) is a Lutheran hymn by Philipp Nicolai written in 1597. Nicolai wrote the text in response to an outbreak of the Plague and published the hymn in 1599 as part of a collection titled Frewdenspiegel deß ewigen Lebens (‘Mirror of the joys of eternal life’). It was used by many composers of the period. Dieterich Buxtehude used it (BuxWV223), as did Johann Kuhnau. Michael Praetorius. Bach’s second cantata cycle (1725) ends with another setting, subsequently referred to as BWV1.
↩︎ - With these evening concerts, Buxtehude and his predecessor Tunder, who founded them, were the first to introduce church concerts independent of religious services. They had been designed initially to entertain business people at the Lübeck stock exchange. Buxtehude developed a fixed format to run in Trinity and Advent: the Lübeck business community contributed funds and the concerts were open to the general public free of charge. The series continued up until the start of the 19th century. There is a wonderful recreation of Abendmusik from Buxtehude’s time on the Vox Luminis album Buxtehude: Abendmusiken (2018) ↩︎