Johann Sebastian Bach (65 page)

Among Bach's own works, one group of pieces particularly suitable for the Collegium series belongs in the category, popular in the early eighteenth century, of “moral” cantatas, that is, vocal compositions whose lyrical texts deal with virtues and vices (Table 10.3). The so-called
Coffee Cantata
, BWV 211, for example, humorously addresses a theme (coffee addiction) particularly fitting for the locale where it was performed, probably more than once. Repeat performances were likely for these works because they were not related to a specific occasion. Of particular interest to the intellectual audience would have been Bach's dramatic cantata “The Contest between Phoebus and Pan,” BWV 201, in which the composer wittily elaborates, in the form of a singing contest, on the aesthetic criteria for high and low styles of music and presents his own preferences for the sophisticated, learned style of high art vis-à-vis the shallow manners and trivial effects of popular musical fashions. At the same time, this cantata displays the ingenuity with which Bach judiciously embraces elements of popular culture—if only in mythological and academically elevated dress—and effectively wins the laughter over to his side. The aria sung by Pan, the loser of the contest, makes use of one of the stock effects of early comic opera, the rapid repeat of a single syllable, while its pointed poetic and musical perversion, “so wa-a-a-a-ckelt das Herz” (so wobbles the heart), makes a mockery of the device. Thus, Pan receives a fool's cap and Midas, his judge, earns himself ass's ears. This cantata clearly belongs among the first pieces composed for the weekly series; it may well have served as a programmatic season opener for the summer or winter series of 1729 and was repeated in later seasons as well, the last time as late as 1749.
⁴⁹

While it is safe to assume that most if not all of Bach's keyboard pieces from at least 1729 to 1741 (especially parts I, II, and IV of the
Clavier-Übung
series and part II of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
) would have been presented at the weekly concerts, a core repertoire of Bach's chamber music had an even closer connection with Collegium activities (Table 10.4). This is not to say that all works for which only Leipzig materials exist were specifically written for the Collegium; some may be of pre-Leipzig origin, others may have been written for a different purpose, and still others may result from commissions by the likes of the Berlin flutist Michael Gabriel von Fredersdorf (chamberlain to King Friedrich II of Prussia), whose name can be connected with the Flute Sonata BWV 1035 and Bach's trip to Berlin in 1741. Nevertheless, the bulk of what has survived and an even greater lot of lost pieces would surely have been performed at the Collegium concert series; and most of the extant pieces actually suggest Leipzig origins.
⁵⁰

T
ABLE
10.3. Moral Cantatas for the
Ordinaire Concerten

T
ABLE
10.4. Instrumental Music for the
Ordinaire Concerten

Public announcements in the Leipzig press now and then refer to particular concerts. For example, the resumption of the concert series, temporarily suspended during the state mourning period for King Augustus the Strong, is announced for June 17, 1733, at Zimmermann's coffee garden with the following special notice: “The beginning will be made…with a fine concert. It will be maintained week by week, with a new
Clavicymbel
, such as had not been heard here before, and lovers of music as well as virtuosos are expected to be present.” Although Bach became involved with Gottfried Silbermann and his fortepiano constructions in the mid-1730s, the subtle and elusive sound of the first generation of fortepianos would have been unsuitable for outdoor concerts. More likely, the instrument in question was an attractive and powerful new harpsichord, perhaps one with which Bach introduced his new concertos for harpsichord and orchestra to the Leipzig public. “Such as had not been heard here before” may serve as a kind of general motto for Bach's Collegium programs, in which he tried to present the best and the newest in musical repertoire, artists, and instruments. And with the concertos for one, two, three, and four harpsichords, he himself set new standards for the dynamic interplay between keyboard soloist and instrumental ensemble—indeed, he established a new genre that his sons consolidated and that by the end of the century had become the most favored concerto type by far.

 

Bach's Collegium activities were not confined to the weekly “ordinary” concerts at Zimmermann's coffeehouse. The first known event outside the series in the form of “extraordinary” concerts (
extraordinaire Concerten
) was the performance of the cantata BWV Anh. 11 for the name day in 1732 of Augustus the Strong, presented less than half a year before the king's death (the works previously performed in the king's honor, BWV Anh. 9 and BWV 193a, had been guest performances during Schott's Collegium directorship). Soon after the accession to the throne of his son, King August III, Bach started a loose sequence of special concerts dedicated almost exclusively to the electoral-royal house in Dresden, for birthdays, name days, and political events, sometimes in the presence of royal family members (Table 10.5). In contrast to the weekly series, for which few details and no programs are known, the extraordinary concerts are generally well documented, with most of the librettos, many scores, and even performing materials extant, usually with verifiable dates, often accompanied by reports in newspapers and chronicles as well as receipts and other archival references. We know, for example, that Bach usually collected 50 talers for composing a cantata in honor of the royal family,
⁵¹
a fee equivalent to half of his fixed annual salary (and, incidentally, the same fee Mozart requested when he was commissioned to write his Requiem in 1791). This explains how attractive these special concerts, which were occasionally sponsored by Leipzig University (BWV Anh. 9, BWV 215, BWV Anh. 13), must have been for him. In a number of instances, the Breitkopf music-publishing firm's invoices to Bach (for the printing of the text both in presentation copies for the honorees and in plain booklets for the general public)
⁵²
provide information about the attendance, based on the number of copies for sale: for indoor performances at Zimmermann's coffeehouse, 150 (BWV 205a, 214) or 200 copies (BWV 206); for outdoor performances in Zimmermann's coffee garden, also 150 (BWV 207a, 215) or 200 copies (BWV Anh. 12, BWV 213); but for outdoor performances in front of the royal residence, Apel House on the south side of the market square, and in the presence of the king, 312 (BWV Anh. 11), 600 (BWV Anh. 13), and even 700 copies (BWV215). The sum 700 was the equivalent to over 2 percent of the city's entire population of some 30,000, but the Leipzig chronicler Riemer reported that for this prominent event “many people came in from the country to see it”
⁵³
with nonpaying spectators added, the market square must have been crowded to capacity.

We are also informed by Riemer about the performances themselves. We learn, for example, about the gala style in which the first anniversary of the Saxon elector Friedrich August II's accession as king of Poland was celebrated on October 5, 1734, with the presentation of the cantata “Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen,” BWV 215, in the presence of the royal couple:

 

About nine o'clock in the evening the students [at the University] here presented Their Majesties with a most submissive evening serenade [BWV 215] with trumpets and drums, which the Hon. Capellmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantor at St. Thomas's, had composed. For this, six hundred students carried wax tapers, and four Counts acted as marshals in presenting the [text of the] music. The procession made its way up to the King's residence [Apel House]. When the musicians had reached the
Wage
[weigh house on the north flank of the market square], the trumpets and drums went up on it, while others took their places in another choir at the
Rathaus
. When the text was presented, the four counts were permitted to kiss the Royal hands, and afterward his Royal Majesty together with his Royal Consort and the Royal Princes did not leave the windows until the music was over, and listened most graciously and liked it well.
⁵⁴

 

The performance of this
Cantata gratulatoria in adventum Regis
, its nine movements lasting well over thirty minutes, was preceded by a formal entrance march and accompanied by a processional piece with trumpets and drums (the music has not survived).
⁵⁵
The polychoral design, with the separate positioning of the brass section (3 trumpets and timpani) from the rest of the instrumental ensemble (2 transverse flutes, 2 oboes, strings, and continuo), is further reinforced by the double choirs—Bach's only secular cantata requiring eight vocal parts (two each of SATB; concertists were in choir I). On the day after the performance, Bach's principal trumpeter and senior member of the town music company, the sixty-seven-year-old Gottfried Reiche, collapsed in front of his house on the Stadtpfeifergasse and died of a stroke. “And this supposedly came about because he suffered great strains from playing on the previous day at the royal music, and the smoke from the torches had also caused him much discomfort.”
⁵⁶

Though not strictly speaking part of his Collegium activities, Bach was at times commissioned to write secular works for performances outside of Leipzig. Two such occasions, which involved members of the landed gentry, are documented and suggest that for these purposes the ensembles were recruited from the Collegium membership. On September 28, 1737, Bach performed one of his most extended secular cantatas, “Angenehmes Wiederau,” BWV 30a, at the estate of Johann Christian von Hennicke in Wiederau, some twelve miles southwest of Leipzig; its twelve movements take up more than three-quarters of an hour. This homage to Hennicke, chamberlain of the Naumburg, Merseburg, and Zeitz cathedral chapters and a member of the electoral cabinet, was prompted by his acquisition of the Wiederau manor in the fall of 1737. A similar event occurred on August 30, 1742, when Bach presented his
Cantate burlesque
“Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet,” BWV 212, an homage to Carl Heinrich von Dieskau at his Kleinzschocher estate near Leipzig. Dieskau, the district captain of Leipzig, also held court positions in Dresden, first as “Directeur des Plaisirs” and from 1747 as director of the royal capelle and chamber music. The text of this so-called
Peasant Cantata
is written in an Upper Saxon dialect, and the piece is emphatically burlesque in tone. The overture parodies a rustic ensemble with a three-part peasant trio of violin, viola, and double bass, its apparently unmotivated shifts suggesting a potpourri of dances. At various points in the work, moreover, Bach quotes snatches of popular tunes of the day: in movement 3, the “grandfather's dance” “With me and you into the feather bed” (“Mit mir und dir ins Federbett”); in movement 8, the
Folies d'Espagne
; and in movement 16, the drinking song “How can a thousand ducats help us” (“Was helfen uns tausend Dukaten”). This last secular cantata of Bach's may actually mark one of his final engagements with his Collegium Musicum. It also recalls Forkel's statement at the end of his biography that, “notwithstanding the main tendency of his genius to the great and sublime, he [Bach] sometimes composed and performed something gay and even jocose; his cheerfulness and joking were those of a sage.”

Like his sacred cantatas, Bach's occasional secular works were often finished just before they had to be performed. According to Bach's own colophon (
Fine | D[eo] S[oli] Gl[oria]. | 1733. | den 7 Dec.
), the score of “Tönet, ihr Pauken,” BWV 214, for example, was completed on the day preceding its performance. For the composition of “Preise dein Glücke,” BWV 215, only three days in all were available to Bach because the royal family had decided on very short notice to attend the 1734 Michaelmas Fair in Leipzig; he therefore used for the opening movement a reworked version of “Es lebe der König,” BWV Anh. 11/1, composed two years earlier. Four homage librettos (BWV 193a, Anh. 11–12, BWV 213, BWV 30a, and BWV 212) were delivered by Picander, who made a specialty of this kind of
ad hoc
poetry, for which he and similar rhymesmiths were sneered at as “congratulators” by poets like Gottsched, who considered themselves of a higher class (although Gottsched himself provided the text for BWV Anh. 13). The favorite format of Bach and his librettists for these secular cantatas was the
dramma per musica
, a term that also designated opera. And indeed, in both textual dramaturgy and musical design, there was no difference between the genres, the main distinction being that cantatas were shorter and unstaged. And as in opera seria, the subjects and dramatis personae were ordinarily drawn from classical mythology: Apollo, Hercules, Mars, Pallas, and other familiar figures engage in the dialogues. Alternatives occur in librettos dealing with figurative myths (Mercury and Apollo representing Leipzig) or with philosophical and political topics involving allegorical figures (lust and virtue, providence and piety; or the Pleiße [Leipzig's river] along with the Elbe [Dresden's river] representing Saxony, the Weichsel River Poland, and the Danube River Hapsburg Austria).