Johann Sebastian Bach (31 page)

Apart from the questions surrounding the extent of Bach's cantata output, the exact chronological order of the Weimar works remains uncertain.
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Only four cantatas bear autograph dates, for 1714 (BWV 21 and 61)
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and 1715 (BWV 185 and 132); because of their liturgical designations, we can easily date them to June 17 and December 2, 1714, and July 14 and December 22, 1715. Despite these performance dates, however, most movements of BWV 21 relate to an earlier, undatable version of the work, as does the opening movement of BWV 61. The cantata BWV 18 and the solo cantatas BWV 54 and 199 stem in all likelihood from before the concertmaster appointment. Articulating general theological themes, they seem not to have been conceived for specific dates within the ecclesiastical year. At least for BWV 199, however, a repeat performance is ascertainable, on the eleventh Sunday after Trinity (August 12, 1714). Thus, we can ascribe seven cantata performances (the others are BWV 12, 172, 21, 61, 63, and 152) to the year 1714 following the March 25 inaugural presentation of BWV 182. Yet according to the projected schedule of one cantata every four weeks (Palm Sunday, Jubilate Sunday, Whitsunday, Third Sunday after Trinity, etc.), eleven performances should have taken place from Visitation/Palm Sunday through the Sunday after Christmas (December 30); so four works are lost for 1714. The Christmas cantata BWV 63, in all likelihood performed on Christmas Day 1714, did not fall into the regular monthly schedule, but the musically demanding Christmas season may have called for an accelerated response on Bach's part. Because of its atypically large instrumental ensemble (including 4 trumpets, timpani, and 3 oboes), it may also have been unsuitable for the more intimate performance space of the palace church. Since on high feast days the ducal family occasionally joined the town congregation for services at St. Peter and Paul's Church, both BWV 63 and the similarly opulent Easter cantata BWV 31 (uniquely requiring a five-voice choir together with a large orchestra) may well have been performed there.

Matching the projected schedule for the two subsequent years with the extant cantata repertoire yields similar results, even with the three-month state mourning period (from August 1, 1715) taken into account. The cantatas from Franck's 1715 text collection
Evangelisches Andachts-Opffer
distribute over both years, with BWV 80a, 31, 165, 185, 163, and 132 apparently belonging to 1715 and BWV 155, 161, and 162 to the following year, toward the end of which Bach turned to Franck's
Evangelische Sonnund Festtages-Andachten
, published in 1717 (BWV 70a, 186a, and 147a). So for twenty-four minus three months, only twelve works have survived. The apparent losses cannot be attributed solely to the dispersal of Bach's estate in 1750 and its subsequent misfortunes. (Aside from Bach's missing works, we have no extant compositions at all from the pen of either one of the Dreses.) On the other hand, not a single cantata performance can be traced to 1717, Bach's final Weimar year, suggesting that traditional estimates of numerous material losses have been overstated. Bach may well have refrained from composing any cantatas at all that year, either on the order of a superior or owing to a personal decision. Indeed, events occurring in December 1716 point in that direction.

Johann Samuel Drese died on December 1. Neither the cause of the old capellmeister's death nor the length of time that he may have been completely incapacitated is known, but according to the source evidence for BWV 70a, 186a, and 147a, Bach took over all the musical responsibilities immediately following Drese's death and wrote cantatas for three consecutive Advent Sundays, December 6, 13, and 20 of 1716. The performances on the first two Sundays apparently took place, but the autograph score for the third cantata, BWV 147a, was left unfinished (and completed only later in Leipzig).
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What motivated Bach to break off the work so abruptly? The most plausible reason may be found in an emerging if not already boiling conflict about leadership responsibilities for the court capelle between vice-capellmeister Drese and concertmaster Bach. Not that Bach expected to be chosen over the vice-capellmeister as the new head of the court capelle; on the contrary, his promotion in 1714 to concertmaster “with official rank below that of Vice-Capellmeister Drese” should have made it clear to him that Johann Wilhelm Drese was in line to succeed his father. After all, the younger Drese had been sent to Venice in 1702–3 at the expense of the Weimar court in order “to habilitate himself in music and composition,” and appointed vice-capellmeister not long after his return (see Chapter 5).

But although Bach accepted the organizational arrangements of 1714 and did not expect a promotion to capellmeister while Johann Wilhelm Drese was active, he made an extraordinary contribution to the cantata repertoire for the
Himmelsburg
—extraordinary even considering the incomplete transmission of his works. Two major factors stimulated Bach's interest in the cantata genre, which went through a conceptual transformation after 1710 and which he himself had been able to explore only sporadically. The most important was the collaboration with Salomo Franck, an erudite poet of considerable accomplishments. With Franck providing the librettos for nearly all of Bach's cantatas written in Weimar from 1714 on, the composer was given the chance to work with lyrics of very high quality, in both form and content. Franck's elegant poetic language and the pure, straightforward theological message in his sacred texts provided Bach with an ideal vehicle for his own musical thoughts and, in general, for the advancement of his compositional art. The other main factor was the professional competence and versatility of the Weimar court capelle as well as the congenial and intimate space available at the palace church for the performance of sacred music.

The performance space accounts for the predominantly chamber-music-like character of the Weimar cantatas and their scoring for a smallish yet colorful ensemble. The repertoire exhibits a great diversity in the choice of instruments, the size of the ensemble notwithstanding (see Table 6.3). While he stuck to no standard scoring patterns, Bach made one fundamental change in the spring of 1715: he moved from the traditional German (and also French-style) five-part string score (with two violas), which had prevailed in his cantatas up to and including the Easter cantata BWV 31, to the Italianate four-part score (with one viola), which he now established as a new norm. Apart from this change, Bach's instrumental ensembles vary from a pure string body—to a mixed group involving one or more winds. Particularly distinctive colors are featured in BWV 152, whose delicate five-part ensemble comprises recorder, oboe, viola d'amore, viola da gamba, and basso continuo. Many cantatas begin with an elaborate Sinfonia or Sonata (BWV 12, 18, 21, 31, 152, 182), and all contain arias with ornate instrumental obbligati, sometimes of unusual makeup—BWV 163/3 (3rd movement) uses two obbligato cellos. Even where only a pure string ensemble is called for, as in BWV 161/3, the dense imitative treatment of the homogeneous score immediately draws the listener's attention.

The vocal dimension of the cantatas is equally attractive and varied, both in the choral sections and in the solo movements. The spectrum of choruses ranges from the traditional concertato motet (BWV 21/1), chorale motet (BWV 182/7), fugue (BWV 182/2), freer concerto type (BWV 31/1), and extended bipartite form (BWV 63/1 and 7) to highly innovative settings such as chorale elaboration in overture style (BWV 61/1), chaconne with motet (BWV 12/2), and choral litany in combination with a solo recitative (BWV 18/3). The recitatives and arias demand from the singers no less technical proficiency than the instrumental parts require of their players. Italianate melodic declamation and phrasing with emphatic expression (BWV 21/3: “Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not”) prevails from 1714 on. Expansive vocal duet structures occur in some movements (BWV 21/8 and 152/2: Christ and Soul in dialogue) and sophisticated textures in others (BWV 54/1: dissonant pulsating chords at the very beginning; 54/3: chromatic counterpoint). Four-part chorale settings are not yet the standardized feature in the Weimar cantatas that they later become in the Leipzig works; some cantatas lack chorales entirely (BWV 54, 63, 152), while others feature chorale harmonizations with an embellished instrumental discant (BWV 12/7, 172/6, 31/9). In the
Himmelsburg
cantatas, beginning in 1715 and in line with their chamber-music-like qualities, Bach conspicuously de-emphasizes the role of the chorus by confining it to plain concluding chorales (BWV 132, 155, 161–63, 165, and 185).

Taken together, the impressive series of cantatas written between 1713 and 1716 amount to a systematic exploration of nearly all compositional possibilities that could be drawn into vocal-instrumental music—in terms of genre, form, technique, scoring, and texture on the broader level, and metric-rhythmic patterns, key choices, thematic treatment, and harmonic designs on the narrower. Of particular importance to Bach was the challenge of matching his fluent and increasingly complex musical language with the structured prose and poetry of the cantata librettos at his disposal. The texts by Neumeister, Lehms, and Franck offered cantata forms based on combinations of such diverse literary sources as biblical quotations, modern poetic verses, and traditional hymns. Although three general patterns prevail (see Table 6.4), the distribution, sequence, and type of movements exhibit an overall formal flexibility.

 

These text forms required Bach to sharpen his sense of musical contrast and continuity in designing multimovement structures. But more important, they supplied him with a rich and diversified body of expository material for which he developed a musical language that underscored its innate meaning. With scholarly zeal, Bach immersed himself here in the compositional opportunity he had sought in early 1714 when he negotiated for the concertmaster position.

Returning to the question of the original size of Bach's Weimar cantata output, we can find a clue in the court's allocations of music paper. Three paper deliveries of one ream (480 sheets) each were made to Bach in October 1714, June 1715, and May 1717,
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and he (and his copyists) could not have used this supply (amounting to 5,760 pages) for anything but the fulfillment of official musical duties. Yet Bach's surviving Weimar cantata scores and parts in their entirety, including those composed before October 1714, as well as copies of vocal works by other composers, make up barely one-fourth of a single ream. In other words, measuring Bach's vocal productivity from October 1714 through the end of 1717 by paper deliveries and disregarding the possibility that he used more than that, the survival rate of Weimar performing materials amounts to at most 15 to 20 percent—and this includes not only the materials related to the cantata repertoire, but also to the keyboard and instrumental ensemble works and to other composers' pieces copied for the Weimar court capelle (see Table 6.5).
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T
ABLE
6.4. Weimar Cantata Types

Because so relatively few of the original musical sources from Bach's Weimar period have come down to us, they do not convey a balanced picture of his activities as court organist, chamber musician, and concertmaster. And given what has survived, the disproportionate relationship between materials from the last three years in Weimar and the first six is particularly troublesome. Should Bach's creative output not have been fairly equal over the nine and a half years? Where in the realm of instrumental ensemble music and keyboard works is the rough equivalent to the cantata repertoire from 1714–16? Happily, a large number of secondary sources, notably copies made by Bach's students, supplement the hopelessly incomplete autograph materials and shed some light on the Weimar keyboard repertoire. While confirming what the Obituary says, that “he wrote most of his organ works” there,
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the copies do not permit a reliable survey, much less a precise chronology. Nevertheless, among the large number of separately transmitted organ chorales, most early versions of the Great Eighteen (BWV 651–668) originated after 1708, and all of them were written before 1717. Moreover, the bulk of the preludes (toccatas, fantasias) and fugues (notably BWV 538, 540, 541, 542, 545, and 564), the
Pièce d'Orgue
, BWV 572, and the concertos BWV 592–596 stem from the court organist period. As for the harpsichord repertoire, larger work groups that belong to the later Weimar years (after 1714) include at least the concerto transcriptions BWV 972–987, the so-called
English Suites
(suites
avec prélude
), the
Chromatic Fantasy
, BWV 903, and the beginnings of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
.

In addition to his palace church duties as court organist and concertmaster, Bach would have taken part throughout his Weimar tenure in the secular activities of the court capelle, certainly in his capacity as harpsichordist and violinist but surely also as composer of keyboard pieces, chamber music, and orchestral works. Whether or not Bach's apparent retreat in 1717 from cantata composition was voluntary, he may at that point have increased his output of instrumental music (although the extant sources are too spotty to allow us to draw firm conclusions). However, based on the supposition that the Sinfonia in F major, BWV 1046a, an early version of the B
randenburg Concerto
No. 1, may have served as an instrumental introduction to the performance of the
Hunt Cantata
, BWV 208, in 1713, 1716, or both, and in light of additional considerations, we can say that most and perhaps all of the
Brandenburg Concertos
may date from the Weimar years (see Chapter 7). At any rate, their generally “conservative” style raises questions about a Cöthen origin, and the principal source for the six concertos is the 1723 presentation copy prepared for the Margrave of Brandenburg from revised versions. Moreover, their compositional concept as
Concerts avec plusieurs instruments
—that is, compositions capitalizing on the endless adaptability of the concerto principle and on the exploration of multiple and daring instrumental combinations—fits nowhere better than it does in the Weimar cantata repertoire. More than any period in Bach's creative life, the Weimar years catalyzed the formation and consolidation of his personal style—a response to the modern Italian concerto style.