Cantatas in Christ Church

PROGRAM NOTES

Christoph Graupner has the distinction (along with Telemann) of having turned down the offer of the post as Thomaskantor (director of music at the church of St. Thomas, or the Thomaskirche, a very distinguished position) in Leipzig before it was offered to (and accepted by) J. S. Bach. Graupner was an alumnus of the Thomasschule, where he had studied keyboard and composition with Johann Kuhnau, Bach's predecessor as Thomaskantor. Graupner spent a few years as harpsichordist at the opera house at the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg, for which he also composed several operas. From there he was recruited to the court of the Landgrave of Darmstadt, where he remained for the rest of his life. The Landgrave had hired Graupner to provide music for his court opera. However, the small court was unable to continue this expensive undertaking for very long, and Graupner's main output was instead to be cantatas, of which more than 1400(!) remain, most of them written for the Sunday services at the court church. The two solo cantatas on our program were both written for Sundays in December of 1711, not long after his arrival in Darmstadt in 1709. Although similar in form (aria-recitative-chorale-recitative-aria), they differ in mood; Angenehmes Waßerbad (Pleasant waterbath) is a joyful tribute to the anticipation of a better afterlife through the sacrament of baptism, while Furcht und Zagen (Fear and doubt) expresses fear of being found lacking on judgement day, with the listener being exhorted to right their ways while it is still possible. Influences from the opera can be heard throughout Graupner's cantata ouevre, for example in his use of da capo arias, and in the palette of sounds in his instrumentation. Worth pointing out is Graupner's distinctive treatment of the chorales, embellishing the simple chorale tune with a vivacious bass line in Angenehmes Waßerbad, and with a string of eighth notes in the violins in Furcht und Zagen.

Johann Gottfried Walther, born one year before Johann Sebastian Bach, and a cousin of his on his mother's side, served as organist in the city of Weimar for most of his career. Although an accomplished organist and composer, his greatest contribution to music history is without doubt the Musicalisches Lexicon, the first comprehensive music dictionary including both musical terms and musician biographies, drawing from a wide range of sources going all the way back to antiquity. His musical ouevre included, according to his own count, 78 works by other composers which he arranged for keyboard. The violin concerto by noted Bolognese composer and violinist Giuseppe Torelli, Op. 8 No. 8, adapted for organ by Walther, is a good example of the genre.

We are blessed here in Rochester to have an instrument, the Craighead-Saunders organ in Christ Church, that gives us an idea of the sound world inhabited by Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries. When preparing a program such as the one we are performing for you tonight, we need to take into consideration not only the sound of the organ in this space (much different from the small portative organs now often used for this repertoire), but also the pitch of the organ. Our baroque instruments are generally tuned to Kammerton (chamber pitch), A=415 Hz (one half-step lower than the modern standard of A=440 Hz), while the organ is tuned to Chorton (choir pitch), A=465 Hz, a whole step higher than Kammerton (and a half step higher than A=440 Hz). String players and singers can adjust to different pitch levels; winds cannot. Luckily for us, Bach was confronted by the same problem at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and from his surviving performing parts we know how he solved it. Cantatas were performed there with the orchestral instruments and singers in Kammerton, while the organ was given a part transposed a whole step down, thus matching the pitch of the other instruments.

Bach was appointed as Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723. The Thomaskantor was not just the director of music at the Thomaskirche; he oversaw the music in all of the city's churches, supervised the town musicians, and was the civic director of music. He was also the third-ranking official in the Thomasschule (St. Thomas school) adjoining the church, responsible not only for training the students in music (they made up the bulk of the choirs in the city's churches), but also in Latin. (Bach was never enthusiastic about this part of the job, and in fact paid someone else to teach Latin for him.) When Bach began as Thomaskantor in 1723, he immediately set to work to produce a full cycle of cantatas for the church year, the text of each cantata expounding on the Bible readings of the Sunday for which it was written. This was followed by a second cycle the next year, with a third cycle appearing over the next several years. While many of these cantatas were first written in Leipzig, Bach also reworked and repeated works from his pre-existing oeuvre (the number of original cantatas from his Leipzig period is nevertheless very impressive). Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen was composed in 1726, for the 20th Sunday after Trinity (Pentecost), and the gospel passage of the day contains the parable of the royal wedding feast. In Bach's cantata this theme is expressed in the traditional form of a dialogue between Jesus and the faithful soul as his expectant bride. The cantata opens with a glorious sinfonia for organ accompanied by strings and oboe d'amore, probably reworked from an earlier concerto movement now lost (another version of it does remain, as the last movement of the harpsichord concerto in E major, BWV 1053). The organ is heard as a solo instrument throughout the cantata, while the soprano aria Ich bin herrlich, ich bin schön (I am glorious, I am beautiful) features solos by the oboe d'amore and the violoncello piccolo (a slightly smaller cello with an additional string, for ease of playing in the higher register). The final duet movement combines the last verse of the well-known chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, sung by the soprano, with newly written text sung by the bass, and a jubilant solo organ part, all brilliantly shaped by Bach into this joyful conclusion of the cantata.