Cantata for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity- Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ

G sharp minor isn't a friendly key to play in at the best of times. With its four sharps and a double-sharp, it's the musical equivalent of picking over barbed wire. In Bach's day, it would have been even more painful. The tuning systems that were used made nice friendly keys like C major and G major sound even more rich and in tune than they do today. But the pay-back was that if you played in remote keys with more than a few sharps and flats, the effect was unnerving at best- and at worst like having pins driven into your forehead. This necessarily wasn't considered a bad thing. Bach's generation liked to keep the characters of the individual keys, without smoothing them all out like modern tuning systems (A much more technical explanation of this is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament) . And so when you hear a sudden chord of G sharp minor played on instruments of Bach's time, it shoots right through you.

And unbalanced discord shooting through harmonious relationship is precisely what this week's cantata is all about. It all starts off very solidly and almost pompously. A stately opening chorus, with fanfare-like interjections for the “Friedefürst”- the Prince of Peace- ends with a solid, confident declaration: “D'rum wir allein in Namen dein Zu deinen Vater schreien”. It's a common enough sentiment in Lutheran theology: only through Jesus' name do we call to the Father. And the word “schreien” resolves downwards in a confident A major chord.

But the second movement tears this apart- it's a direct criticism of the first movement's confidence. We start with the repeated word “Ach!” from the alto. “Ach” is a remarkable word. It's not just a cry of pain, despite the resemblance to “ouch” in English; it literally means pain. The only words that the singer can express are “pain, pain, pain”. Bach's vision is terrifying. This is the cry we make to the Father through Jesus: not confident Lutheran foursquare chorale singing, but weeping with pain. When we finally get to some more actual words in the rest of the line, ironically they can only emphasise the inarticulacy of the tormented soul: “Unaussprechlich ist die Not”: the agony is indescribable, and all that can be expressed is agony itself.

Here is the alto's “Ach!”. Instead of a solid, falling resolution like at the end of the first movement, it rises up, un-grounded and uncertain:

Du Friedefürst, second movement, bars 11-15

And if we look more closely, we see it's sung to two jagged fragments of the movement's opening melody. It's almost as if the singer is too overwhelmed with the pain to complete the lyrical line- a musical depiction of angst that is unaussprechlich, fear of sin combining with fear of God to break the song into pieces.

Du Friedefürst, second movement, bars 1-4 (keyboard reduction)

With the third movement's brief recitative link for the tenor, we begin the fourth movement with an unsettling thought: we can scarcely cry to the Father through Christ if he turns away from us. But here we are taken from uncertainty into a new sublime sound-world, one very rare even for Bach: a terzett or trio of voices, the soprano, tenor and basses weaving round each other hypnotically. Only the yearning of the cello underneath reminds us of the pain of the previous movement, as the three voices repeat the phrase “wir bekennen unsre Schuld, wir bekennen” again and again- “we confess our guilt, we confess”; and there's a lovely thinning of the textures as the voices sing “wir... bitten nichts als um Geduld”- we ask for nothing but patience.

Yet the outside world crashes back in. The next alto ario takes us from E major to F sharp minor, and then on the words “die scharfen Ruthen”- the harsh rod- we have a chord of the dreaded G sharp minor (with an added F sharp for extra spice):

It's the very edge of usability in the tuning system that Bach would have used. And although we return to a more tuneful A major by the end of the recitative to lead into a muted chorale, the cantata as a whole still seems a strange and unsettled.

What is going on? Well, one suggestion is that Bach isn't only on the edge of tuneful harmony in the music. In the words, he and his librettist are flirting with a controversial theological doctrine that some people think is on the edge of heresy. The key words are in the wonderful serene trio: “Es brach ja dein erbarmend Herz, Als der Gefallnen Schmerz Dich zu uns in die Welt getrieben”. “Your merciful heart yielded, for the pain of the fallen drove you to us in the world.”. This is actually dangerous stuff; it suggests that within the eternal and unsuffering Trinity, the pain of a fallen world reached all the way up to the Godhead. It may be heretical, but it explains why at the heart of this cantata there is a moment of stillness- a trinity of voices, dancing round each other- which is suddenly interrupted when we are thrown back to a world of pain. Bach's music follows the journey of God's Son to a world of anguish. And it's appropriate that in journeying from heavenly harmony to the moment of the deepest earthly discord, we reach a key with four sharps and a double-sharp. For the German word for a sharp is kreuz- a cross. Only there do we see the Friedefürst, the prince of peace.

Ach, wie Fluechtig, ach wie Nichtig- Cantata for the 24th Sunday after Trinity

Bach goes all urban on Baroque good manners

The year accelerates toward its end. The few mocking green leaves tease us: it can't really be December in less than two weeks' time! Our human instinct to delineate time just serves to increase our anxieties. Now it's November, what has happened to all the plans we made in May? How transitory and meaningless it all is- or “Wie fluechtig! Wie nichtig!” as Bach set it for this week in 1724.

And how he set it. Just like last week, the first movement is a fantasia on the basic chorale tune. But this is miles away from the pleasant swinging hummability of last week's meditation on child-like friendship. Instead, we have two musical worlds violently colliding. The treble voices sing the chorale melody, and the orchestra supports them with exciting rising and falling scales, giving an impression of instability and tension. That, on its own, would make it beautiful and exciting, and all within the bounds of good taste and civilisation. But the lower voices of the choir break free at the end of the line. Altos, tenors and basses sing in blatant unison: “Ach, wie fluechtig! Ach, wie nichtig!”- and continue to offer their blaring commentary throughout the chorus.

Having almost the whole choir singing in unison octaves is rare in this sort of music- it overbalances the structure and makes the line stick out, rather like an graffiti in day-glo colours on a beautiful Baroque facade. To me, it feels like a commentary on the piece itself- a piece of self-criticism that strains at the edge of the music. How transitory and vain even this sort of human skill is in the face of eternity, it says. In a neat palindromic pun, what we think of as life (Leben) is declared to be nothing more than mist (Nebel). Like mist, human endeavour suddenly appears and just as suddenly it goes again:- “Wie ein Nebel bald entstehet / Und auch wieder bald vergehet”.

So the cantata is paradoxically denying the value of human skill- while using that skill to create a masterpiece. It's a fascinating tension. As human beings, can we acknowledge that we are always falling away from perfection physically and mentally?And at the same time use our imperfect powers confidently to strive for something better?

The second movement is all about- well, movement. The flow of semiquavers is almost ceaseless, passing from the lovely flutes to the tenor soloist, who sings that “as quickly as rushing water flies, so the days of our life hasten”. All the while, repeated notes in the bass serve to build up the tension. It doesn't start off despondent; but the darkness grows in the middle section of the aria, and we hear a wonderful depiction of the hours falling away like individual water-drops separating (“Wie sich die Tropfen ploetzlich teilen”). Are they raindrops, or tear-drops? It hardly seems to matter:“Alles in Abgrund schießt”- it all falls into the abyss. And when we return to the initial theme at the beginning, that unstoppable flow of time that we found beautiful before seems more ominous...

The flow of notes continues into the third movement, a little recitative for the alto, who starts singing about Freude- joy- but it is suddenly stopped by the word “Traurigkeit”- happiness turns into sadness. All the virtuosic exuberance is turned into a bare and stark sentence- knowledge, all human writings, everything ends up in the grave. The majority of Bach's cantatas are now dust- never to be heard again.

And the picture gets darker. The bass aria returns to the virtuosic flow when describing “irdische Schaetze”- earthly treasures. But instead of the carefree song we heard from the tenor, here the process of collapse seems to be a dark mocking inevitability, accompanied by sardonic oboes. There's even a moment where the melody seems to get completely harmonically lost. The bass soloist searches for the key-note amidst a slithering chromatic scale – appropriately enough, on the words “eine Verführung der törichten Welt”- “a deception of the foolish world”. And there's no comfort from the soprano recitative that follows sombrely accompanied on the lower strings to give a strange hollow emptiness.

The verdict comes in the austere and archaic-sounding final chorale. Only at the very last moment does Bach allow the harmony to slip into the major. The sun finally comes out on the last word of “Wer Gott fürcht', bleibt ewig stehen.”- he who fears God, will forever stand. And no doubt some in the congregation shivered slightly (although not as much as the Quivering Brethren at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5evsxRdkJw).

So what are we to make of this beautiful and skilful denial of the lasting value of skill and beauty? It's a troubling theme, but one the Church tends to play with as it leads up to Advent, both in Bach's time and now. You see it in the reading now set for this very week in the Church of England's lectionary (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+13%3A1-8&version=KJV). Jesus slaps down a disciple for some innocent tourist-gawping at the Temple in Jerusalem, saying it'll all be knocked down in a few years time. Well, it was. And now tourists go and gawp at the one wall that survived the Roman onslaught in 70 AD. Plenty of scholars have pointed out that this suspiciously accurate bit of prophecy might actually have been inserted after the fact. But the point remains. No matter how much we love impressive architecture, or beautiful sculptures, or even Bach cantatas, it's all ultimately handfuls of dust- the epitome of fluechtig and nichtig.

Yet on the other hand, fluechtig doesn't just signify transitory dissolution into nothingness. It also means flowing, re-circulating, combining. And every piece of organic matter on Earth was originally dust too: star-dust, forged in the heart of a dying star and destined to circulate and re-combine across aeons of time. And if that image isn't enough to lighten the mood, one particular very noticeable star might point a way out of that cycle of death. But we have to wait a month for that, as we travel from the grey nothingness of November to the darkest heart of Winter.

Wohl dem der sich auf seinen Gott- 23rd Sunday after Trinity

When a friend of mine was about ten years old, she went to a new school. Rather nervously, she went up to some other girls and asked if they could play together. “Oh no,” they replied. “We don't play. We socialise”. It sometimes seems a bit childish to have friends. You can have partners, work colleagues, drinking mates, people who you make a cursory nod to in the bus queue. But saying “you're my best friend” to someone seems a bit playground-like. But as the brilliant xkcd.com cartoon at http://xkcd.com/150/ says, being grown-up means getting to decide what being grown-up actually means. And here we have Bach fighting for our right as adults to put aside so-called grown-up things- and just to say “God is my friend”.

The first movement of the cantata is another one of those flowing pastoral accompanied chorales. Everyone loves them- and that's why Jesu bleibet meine Freude (or Jesu, joy of man's desiring, if we're being English) from Cantata 147 regularly turns up on Soooooothing Classics compilations. But there's a difference here; the melody is strongly led by the treble line, as sung by the youngest boys in Bach's ensemble. The lower parts sing a more complicated harmony, following a beat or two later; but it's the children that lead the way, musically speaking. And this is perfectly in line with what the cantata actually says in the first sentence “Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott recht kindlich kann verlassen!”; good for him, who can rely on God truly like a child. (And good for him too, who can write less rubbish translations than I do...)

And so the second movement gives us a wonderfully naif illustration of this. Last week's cantata had a tenor's anguished lament of self-doubt. This week, Bach gives us an almost laughably simple repetition: “Gott ist mein Freund”, again and again, declaimed with the clarity and directness of a road sign. God. Is. My Friend. Underneath the soloist, there is a simple chugging bass line, of the sort that Bach wrote for his amateur viola da gamba playing boss in the sixth Brandenburg concerto, a sort of eighteenth-century equivalent of letting the manager win at golf. Everything about the music implies simplicity until Bach sets the tenor free to indulge in a little vocal gymnastics on the words “Was hilft das Toben?”. Toben is a wonderful word, meaning bluster, raging, clamour. What good is all this musical showing-off, in the face of a child-like faith? And so we return to that mantra: God is my Friend, repeated enough to embarrass a twenty-first century audience.

But being recht kindlich- truly child-like- doesn't just mean being simple and unaffected. It also means being able to grow into true maturity and complexity. After a brief alto recitative with bare harpsichord accompaniment, it's the bass soloist's turn to show the contrast between the simple and the complex. But here, it's the opposite of the tenor aria.. The tenor contrasted a simple faith statement with a melismatic depiction of the bluster of the adult world. Now, Bach uses a stentorian, almost clumping setting for the words “Das Unglück schlägt auf allen Seiten um mich ein zentnerschweres Band”- “Misfortune, on all sides, winds me up in a hundredweight of chains”. Yet suddenly the music breaks free on the words erscheinet die helfender Hand- “the helping hand appears”. The brakes come off, and the music has the freedom to run virtuosically! All the vigour of a child prodigy is combined with the poise and beauty of an adult craftsman. And the conclusion of this quick flourishing? It's our old theme- daß Gott allein der Menschen bester Freund muß sein, that God alone must be the best friend of Man.

From here, it's a quick run to the end of the cantata. There's another quick interjection of recitative, but not accompanied austerely on the harpsichord alone any more; this time it's given a halo of strings around it. It's the same trick that Bach uses for the words of Jesus in the St Matthew Passion. The higher-pitched accompaniment gives it a more exalted feeling; but there's also more emotional intensity as, unlike the harpsichord, the strings can sustain and even increase their volume after the notes are initially played.

Finally, the chorale brings us to a close. The word Trotz- usually translated “defiance” appears three times in successive lines:

“Trotz der Höllen Heer!
Trotz auch des Todes Rachen!
Trotz aller Welt!”

“Defiance to the army of Hell! And defiance to the sting of Death! Defiance to all the world!” would be a perfectly good translation. But Trotz can also have a connotation of sulkiness, rudeness, naughtiness. In the context of the child-like values of the rest of the cantata, I like to think of it as sticking one's tongue out at the Devil. So ner-ner-na-ner-ner to the hosts of hell, 'cos my best Friend's bigger than you.

Ich Armer Mensch (cantata for the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity)- Passion in the workshop

First thoughts aren't always best, in music or in life. Lawn tennis was originally called Sphairistike by its inventor, an Englishman with more eye to the Classics than marketing. Christopher Wren's original design for the dome of St Paul's Cathedral had an enormous golden pineapple on top. But Bach is different. His first thoughts are good enough to cherish. Cantata No.55, Ich Armer Mensch is a masterpiece in its own right. But it also shows how Bach's thoughts were working towards what is arguably the greatest piece of music ever written- the St Matthew Passion.

The cantata isn't easy to listen to- but great music usually isn't (be quiet, Mozart). We start off with self-condemnation. A single tenor voice at the extremes of his range confesses that he is an armer Mensch- a wretched, worthless man. Indeed, he is a Suenden-knecht. Worse than simply being sin's slave, the world knecht implies that he is sin's henchman, willing and helpful.

After a brief recitative, we're at the emotional heart of the cantata- a near desolate call on God. Erbarme dich, have mercy, heed our tears, soften your heart, only have mercy on us! The picture is only softened slightly in the last recitative, where the singer states that he will not be judged, but only by holding up the image of Jesus' own suffering will he be able to return to God's grace. And the closing chorale gives a communal counterpoint to the individual's anguish. But it's not a joyful expression of certain redemption; instead, we are all on the first step of a long journey of repentance:

I do not deny my guilt,
but Your grace and mercy
is much greater than the sin
that I constantly discover in me.

Not exactly cheery. So is this cantata hamstrung by an excess of gloom and an emphasis on God's wrath over God's love? It's impossible to deny there's an overall atmosphere of anguish. But this makes perfect sense if we look at the deep resonances with the St Matthew Passion. Bach wrote this cantata to be performed in St Thomas's, Leipzig on 17 November 1726. The Passion was first performed less than five months later in the same church. By comparing the cantata to the Passion, we can see Bach's thought processes as he honed and polished his material. And by looking at the cantata in the light of the Passion, we can understand that strange gloomy Lutheran theology.

At the very beginning of the cantata, we hear a repeated crotchet-quaver heartbeat pattern in the bass. (Ignore the slurring- Bach didn't write it, only a 19^th century editor).

(Bass part of Ich Armer Mensch, First movement, bars 4-6)

This is rhythmically identical to the bass line of the Passion's opening chorus:

(Bass part of the St Matthew Passion, bars 1-3)

So from the very opening, Bach is creating a similar musical effect- a pulsating, nervous beat. Not all the recordings bring this out: it's very obvious in Fabio Biondi's impassioned reading with Ian Bostridge as the singer, but it's pretty much lost in Gustav Leonhardt's stern scholarly version. Either way, it's definitely there in the score. There's an even more obvious correspondence between the cantata and the Passion. We saw that the heart of the cantata was a desperate call to God: Erbarme dich, have mercy. A solo instrument weeps with the singer in music of unutterably sad beauty;

(Ich Armer Mensch, 3^rd movement, solo tenor line, bars 6-7)

And, at the centre of the Passion is a desperate call to God, Erbarme dich, etc. etc., unutterably sad... I'm sure you get the picture, but there's no better evidence of the close correspondence between the pieces than the first vocal entries. (Apologies for the awkward break between "Er-" and "barme"- the page turn in the score flummoxed my rudimentary HTML skills!):

(St Matthew Passion, No. 47, solo alto bars 8-10)

It's not just that they have the same opening text and penitential tone. The melodies are almost identical! Both the cantata version and the Passion version start with that yearning leap from “er” to “bar” of a minor sixth. Then there's a downward movement on “bar” and a little turn of a semitone on “me” to “dich”- identical in both pieces.

Of course, Bach is too good to just copy things out completely. There are a few magical differences. Most obviously, the tune is given to an alto in the Passion rather than a tenor in the cantata. But this difference isn't as significant as it might seem. Bach used young men for both voice parts, although his alto's voice might not have broken yet. (Back in those good old days of malnutrition, it wasn't uncommon for 17 and 18 year old men to be singing high treble parts still. Now we feed choirboys up and cathedral choir directors suddenly find that they have a load of 12-year old baritones.)

Bach did put an extra flat on the second note of “bar” in the cantata version; that gives it a little more dissonant pain compared to the serenity of the Passion version. That Passion version also has some more passing notes and swings along in a lilting triple time. By contrast, the cantata melody is much starker in four-square metre. But the two melodies are sisters, even though the cantata version has an intriguing beauty spot and the Passion version has more sensual curves.

But there's yet another link between the cantata and the Passion. After the Erbarme Dich aria and a short recitative, the cantata closes with the chorale, Bin ich gleich von dir gewichen. And the same sequence occurs in the Passion: its own Erbarme Dich aria is followed immediately by exactly the same chorale as in the cantata. The chorale harmony is slightly different, admittedly- but the words, melody and theological message are carried straight over.

And from this we can read back the context that gives some explanation to the seemingly harsh words of the cantata. In the Passion, Peter sings Erbarme Dich- have mercy- and the chorus sings that chorale from the cantata at the very blackest depths of his desolation, when he has not only failed to protect Jesus from arrest but denied him three times. Peter realises that he is indeed the armer Mensch, the henchman of sin; he goes and and weeps bitterly. But it's actually a moment of hope. At this point, the trajectory of descent into self-hatred is arrested; Peter accepts his guilt, and his sin is accepted for what it is.

And so in the light of the Passion, we can see why the opening of the cantata is so terrified, so ludicrously self-abnegating to our twenty-first century ears. In the scene of Peter's denial and subsequent grief, Bach would delineate the darkest part of human conversion; the recognition that God loves sinners as they are and as a whole, with all the shame and baggage that we would like to lock away. So in late 1726, Bach is using the cantata as a sort of workshop to intimately explore a central theme he would bring out just a few months later when writing the St Matthew Passion in early 1727. The cantata clearly allowed Bach to turn his musical genius to that theme earlier.

But in the end, it would be a mistake to look at the cantata as an “out-take” or a dry run for the greater piece of music It has its own life and spiritual profundity. The fact that the cantata is sung by only one soloist allows us to identify with him as Everyman, speaking for a whole community. And the links to the Passion give every man and woman in Bach's congregation the opportunity to identify with Peter. Frightened by their own great unrighteousness, yes; but ultimately loved and saved through a greater grace.