BWV 15 - Denn du wirst meine Seele nicht in der Hölle lassen (att. J.L. Bach)

Week 15 (16 April – 21 April 2013)

Recording: Wolfgang Helbich, I Febiarmonici/Alsfelder Vokalensemble; Dorothee Mields, soprano; Henning Voss, counter-tenor; Henning Kaiser, tenor; Ralf Grobe, bass

So right off the bat, for clarification: this week’s cantata is not by Johann Sebastian Bach, but (probably) composed by his second cousin Johann Ludwig Bach (1677-1731), resident of and Kapellmeister in Meiningen, a town about 100 miles as the crow (Krähe) flies southwest of Leipzig. Sometimes referred to as the “Meiningen Bach”, he was a prolific composer of sacred music. Modern sources state that J.S. made a clear copy in his own hand of this cantata and performed it (as well as some of J.L.’s other cantatas) in Leipzig in 1726, thus confounding the subsequent two centuries of Bach cataloguing.
 

Why take time to work on this cantata when about 185 others indisputably by the master’s hand still await my study? For several reasons, principal among which is the very obvious question, when you pick up the piano-vocal score – why did anyone ever think this was composed by J.S? It’s so obvious, looking at the construction of the piece, that this music did not come from his hand. Hubert Parry (in his J.S. Bach biography) picks up on all the clues but fails to solve the mystery: “in some respects…the style is bald and crude”; “the treatment of the strings is dull and commonplace”; “the solo movements are very limited in scope”; “there is a lack of development, a lack of richness in polyphony” and so on. You would have thought the authorship question would have dawned on him at some point – this was not a dense man – but the conventional thinking was that BWV 15 was an early work of J.S. Bach, probably written before 1710. But if you accept that theory, the question then becomes: how do you get from this, to BWV 4, one of the greatest of the choral cantatas and also reputedly of that vintage?

 

Of course, Parry and other biographers of this era were working with very little scholarly information. They were presented in the Breitkopf & Härtel complete edition with a fait accompli – a score based on a manuscript in the master’s own hand, and incidentally the edition was authorized by the Bach-Gesellschaft, which was led by Moritz Hauptmann (a successor of Bach’s at the St. Thomaskirche) and included among its founders Robert Schumann. Would you want to be the person to throw out one of the “surviving” cantatas from the canon based on circumstantial evidence?

I figured if someone had recorded this cantata, I would take a look and a listen – it’s all about learning, correct? And someone has recorded it, along with the other “apocryphal” cantatas. By doing so, Wolfgang Helbich and his excellent orchestra and choir have documented a missing link that could all too easily have been forgotten. (By the way, they have done many similar tasks for the cpo label: another interesting path to investigate).

 

While waiting on the recording to arrive, I sat down with the vocal score and read through it – it’s simple enough that even I can play most of it, and for professional singers it would be pretty easy sight-reading. Time and again, the inescapable truth presented itself – this couldn’t possibly be a J.S. Bach composition. The composer of this work, knowledgeable and a diligent craftsman, had no creative spark. He liked C major. He liked writing vocal parts in thirds. He liked 4/4 and 3/4 time, and he liked ensembles. Thus we have a couple duets, a terzetto, and a brief solo quartet. He preferred, as the CD liner notes would have it “songlike concision” in his arias, which makes them seem truncated. The range of the soprano aria is lower than any that J.S. ever wrote, going down to G3, probably not a note a boy soprano has. Overall the vocal lines do not lie very well: often the orchestration, despite the conductor’s efforts, cancels out the voice.

 

The echoes of the late 17th-century are felt, and at times the use of the brass recalls Handel, who around 1710 was himself a German Kapellmeister. In setting the text about mocking death, J.L. provides word-painting that seems straight out of Baroque opera:

Excerpt from Movement No. 7 (Duetto) - Ich jauchze, ich lache

Ha, ha!

Nevertheless, this is not an unpleasant work to listen to – it’s charming in its way, and where it can have some use today would be as a training vehicle for younger singers at a high school and college level. The tenor aria Entsetzet euch nicht in particular is enjoyable listening, not technically difficult, and lasts only two minutes – perfect for an Easter offertory.  And there’s no better way to appreciate the genius of the Leipzig Bach than to work on a piece like this and then move on to a work by J.S. In fact, my hunch is that you can even appreciate a bit of that genius within this piece – there are some stylistic discontinuities (e.g. the introductions to the duets, and possibly the final page of the closing chorale) that have the distinct feeling of being “improvements”.

But J.L. was by all accounts an estimable man and made his own contribution to music history. From 1711-1731, he was music director of the Meiningen Court Orchestra (Meininger Hofkapelle), then recently founded (1690) but now one of the oldest orchestras in Europe. His successors in that position have included Hans von Bülow, Richard Strauss, and Max Reger – not a bad roster! And today the position is held by…Swiss conductor Philippe Bach.

 

One question I’ve asked myself (and been asked) is whether the BWV sequential approach to studying the cantatas is a good approach. I can’t answer that yet, but what I can say definitely is that – regardless of the order – it is a privilege to be immersed in this world that transcends time and culture, that speaks from and to the very highest aspirations of human nature. This privilege would not be possible for me as a part-time musician and Bach student without the comprehensive resources developed by the late Craig Smith at Emmanuel Church in Boston, who initiated weekly cantata performances as part of worship services http://www.emmanuelboston.org/community/emmanuel-music/. Every week of this project, I have access to an excellent English translation prepared by Pamela Dellal for those programs, saving a huge amount of time – I would never get to spend time actually studying the music if I had to do all that translation!

 

At this link, you will also find an interview with director Peter Sellars, who staged numerous concerts, including cantatas, at Emmanuel Church, and speaks movingly of the “deeply practical” nature of the cantatas, which he believes speak to “lived experiences”. Emmanuel Church, located several blocks from the site of the marathon bombings, performed BWV 112, Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt (The Lord is my shepherd) this past Sunday.