Shut up shop- Chorale Preludes for Lent from the Little Organ Book (BWV 618-623)

Tempus Clausum. Closed season. For a few weeks each year, Bach's manic work-schedule stepped down a gear; no new cantatas were required for Sundays in Lent. So there's a strange gap for us here. Admittedly, it's allowed me to catch up with things; last week we looked at the cantata for the Sunday before Ash Wednesday more than a week late after the mountainous sublimity of Ich Habe Genug pushed my schedule out of kilter. But now we're in a strange wilderness- only a few scraps of specifically Lenten music until we crawl out of the desert into the astounding riches of Bach's Holy Week.

Because it's Bach, the scraps are actually pretty tasty. Although he wrote (almost) no specifically Lenten cantatas, we do have the specifically Lenten chorale preludes from the Orgelbuechlein or Little Organ Book, written in his time at Coethen around 1713. They're little only in the sense that a diamond is little- tiny, perfectly formed and self-sufficient. They range in length from about a minute to a mighty five minutes .

First, O Lamm Gottes unschuldig- O guiltless Lamb of God. It's based around a tune which sends shivers down the spine of anyone who knows the St Matthew Passion. There, it's given to the soprano in ripieno in the mighty first chorus, soaring above the two double choirs as the final touch to the great dance of grief. But the harmonic ambiguity of the melody allows it to work equally well in a major-key context as a a minor one; and here, the quality is completely different- pastoral, gentle, reassuring from the outset. Yet a bittersweet quality has come in by the end; inherent in the paradoxical image of the Lamb: sweet, gentle and innocent, but undoubtedly destined to be separated from its mother and at best sheared, at worst slaughtered.

The next, Christe du Lamm Gottes- that familiar “Du”, addressing Christ as a family member or friend!- is an even more intimate. Played lightly (with a barely perceptible pedal part in Alessio Corti's recording, for example) it's innocent and simple; an effective little coda to its predecessor, focussing in again on the Lamb itself, pure and simple at the eye of a hurricane of struggle. The struggle comes in the next piece- Christus der uns selig macht – Christ, who makes us holy. It only arrives at triumphant resolution after titanic struggles up and down chromatic scales. And what is the means of that making holy? The Cross, the theme of the next chorale, Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund- “When Jesus hung upon the Cross”- not a raging, tortured lament as one might expect, but a still meditation.

It should be obvious by now that these pieces are far more than just a collection of helpful exercises for beginner organists, or even practical filler material for a gap in the service. There's a genuine theological progression, starting from the chorale texts Bach chose, but made explicit by his own musical treatment. Like the cantatas, they're another sort of sermon in music. And this is made perfectly clear by the next piece, the greatest of this set, O Mensch, bewein dein Suende gross- O man, bewail your grievous sin. The unheard words of the chorale call on us to look on the whole course of Jesus' life, from birth to death and resurrection. Bach responds to this by slowing down and decorating the melody to an almost obsessive extent. Time seems to stop, as a familiar tune stretches out into eternity. Five hundred years earlier, the early polyphonic masters of Notre Dame, Leonin and Perotin did it with their great organa built over well-known melodies slowed down into infinity. (If you haven't heard Perotin's Viderunt Omnes, stop what you're doing, type it into Google and listen to it now. Your life will be better). Even earlier, the great anonymous plainchant graduals from the ninth and tenth centuries played the same trick. By eroding metre into a continuous ever-changing flow, it takes you to a place where the simple passage of time, sixty seconds a minute, starts to lose its meaning; you become conscious of a new sort of time that is both now and eternal.

But the purpose of this is not just to achieve a gorgeous interior mental state. Having touched eternity, we must return to everyday life. The last piece of the sequence, Wir danken dir, Herr Jesu Christ (We thank you, Lord Jesus Christ), returns to the world of clear metrical rhythm, foursquare construction. For a minute, we are jubilant and thankful; our contemplation is over, and we have entered into the spirit of Lent- penitence and contemplation, yes, but preparation for a glorious Easter too. I'm slightly ashamed that I described these little pieces as “tasty scraps” earlier; the Lenten scraps that fall from Bach's table have proved to be a wholly unexpected feast.

Situation vacant- genius need not apply. Jesus nahm sich die Zwölfe- Cantata for the Sunday before Lent

It's Sunday, February 7, 1723 in Leipzig, and Bach has written a new cantata for the choir of St Thomas' Church. Just like hundreds of other Sundays, you might say. But this Sunday is like no other. Today, Bach is on trial. He's come to Leipzig hoping to get the job of Cantor; and he's been instructed to write and direct a new piece to show off his musical abilities to the town council. This isn't Bach the confident Kantor of Leipzig. Today, we hear from Bach the third choice interviewee, as he struggled to change the minds of his reluctant possible employers.

Because it's certain that the Leipzig town council didn't really want Bach. The first man they offered the job to was Telemann, renowned for his work at Hamburg. Even when the council agreed to let him carry on composing operas and let him off the work of teaching the choir school boys Latin, he still turned them down, tempted by a pay rise from the Hamburg council. Choice number two was Christoph Graupner, an old boy from St Thomas's choir. He must have wowed the judges a few weeks earlier on 17 January with his Magnificat: they offered him the job outright without hearing Bach at all. But Graupner was contractually tied to his own post as court chapel music director at Hesse-Darmstadt and had to reluctantly turn them down too. Possibly he wasn't as reluctant as all that; the offer from Leipzig enabled Graupner to claim a pay rise from his courtly employer too. Finally the Leipzigers looked to Bach.

So what did he give them? The first movement plunges into a dark, harmonically unstable world. But it's far more than just a polished bit of abstract music; this is liturgical drama, with all the richness of opera. It's could almost a deleted scene from an unwritten Passion. Jesus and the disciples are preparing to go to Jerusalem- for the very last time before the Crucifixion. Naturally, the wonderfully slow-on-the-uptake disciples don't realise this. The tenor tells the story, and then the bass takes up the role of Christ himself, telling the disciples “Behold! We go up to Jerusalem”. Where a lesser composer might have set these quotations from the Gospel in strict dry-recitative form, with just chords played on a keyboard to underpin it, Bach makes the lower strings of the orchestra into a dark, foreboding halo around Jesus's words. And the response from the disciples is equally vivid. Bach bends the meaning of the Gospel text slightly. Strictly speaking, the text is third person narration: “They understood nothing and did not know what had been said.”. But Bach turns it into a turba (crowd) chorus, making “Was? Was?” (“What? What?”) stand out in the choral texture by repeatedly giving it to the three lower parts simultaneously. It's as if the disciples were a load of elderly relatives with dodgy hearing aids.

And to follow, we have the faithful soul's emotional response to the events distilled into an aria- again, just as in the Passion. The soul wants to be drawn to Jesus, just like the disciples were drawn in the first line of the whole cantata. But in the easy-listening serenity, there's some trade-mark word-painting; a harmonic twinge on the word “Leid” pain. The meditation is followed by the bass's recitative. The libretto at this point is dense and full of allusions, to the point of being indigestible at first hearing. There's a reference to “Tabors Berge”- Mount Tabor: that was another example of the disciples getting the wrong end of the stick, where St Peter's response to a heavenly vision of Moses and Elijah was to ask if they'd like some tents. Yes, it's didactic; but to me it seems that Bach is making a theological point- that serene emotional contemplation and more learned teaching go hand in hand. And at the end of the brief sermon from the bass, we end with a flourish- time to dance!

And the dance continues all the way through the tenor aria; a swinging triple-time courtly dance, with flourishes from the upper strings. All that's left is for Bach to reiterate his connection to the two hundred years of Lutheran music again, with the final chorale setting of words by Elizabeth Kreuziger. She was one of Luther's own associates in the 1520s and helped to forge the Lutheran chorale as a literary genre. Here, it's strangely bittersweet; the lively eighteenth-century orchestral accompaniment contrasts with the downbeat sixteenth-century melody. But this just gets the point of the paradoxical words of the hymn: “Ertöt uns durch dein Güte, Erweck uns durch dein Gnad; Den alten Menschen kränke, Daß der neu' leben mag” : “Slay us in your goodness, wake us with your grace; sicken the old man, that the new may live”.

So this morning Bach has given the Leipzigers a mini-Passion; then meditation; then a quick sermon; a courtly ball; and finally tied it back to the roots of Lutheranism. He's shown them that he can write opera as well as their first choice, Telemann; and that as a writer of courtly dances, he can match choice number two, Graupner. And it's all steeped in a learned theology that is uniquely his own. Surely the Leipzig councillors will welcome him with open arms? We must leave the last words with one Councillor Abraham Plaz. His comment of April 9, 1723 at a Council meeting to confirm Bach's appointment is recorded and has become immortal:

“Da man nun die Besten nicht bekommen könne, so müße man mittlere nehmen”

“Since the best man could not be obtained, we'll have to take mediocre ones.”

Sadly, this sums up the attitude of the Council to Bach- one that would last another twenty-seven years.

Demon Chickens from Hell- Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister- Cantata for the Second Sunday before Lent

Firstly, there's the polysyllabic obscurity of the title, wonderfully translated as “Frivolous Flibbertigibbets” or more soberly as “frivolous fluttering souls”. Then there's the disjointed clucking of the first movement; and a courtly, brassy finale that seems to come from an entirely different world. What's going on here? Is it just twelve minutes of oddness? 

The key is the reading that Bach's congregation would have heard on this Sunday in 1724, the parable of the Sower. More specifically, Bach is taking his inspiration from the section where the seeds sown have a range of different fates. Firstly, some seeds fall on the path and get snapped up the birds; this symbolises those people who are weak in faith (the leichgesinnte flattergeister, no less) getting snapped up by the biggest sharp beak of all- the Devil. It's a strange analogy- but the Man who originally came up with it had a tendency to come up with rather strikingly odd metaphors- planks in eyes, camels squeezing through eyes of needles and the like.

So Bach brings it to us in musical form. The first movement clucks away happily, with a motif that John Eliot Gardiner brings out in all its chicken-ness. But suddenly the tonality shifts and the text moves from the flighty souls to "Belial und seiner Kinder"- Belial and his children, who seek to obstruct the divine word.

Who is Belial? Literally in Hebrew, it means something like “worthlessness”, and by Bach's time, he was one of a vast panoply of demons with juicy names and attributes. Milton talks about him in Paradise Lost: “BELIAL came last, than whom a Spirit more lewd Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love Vice for it self”. As ever with the devils in Paradise Lost, he sounds more interesting than the rather dull angels on the side of good. And here, he's the dark side of those faintly ridiculous chickens, seeking to snap up the seeds of the word of God before they grow.

The alto recitative that follows has some wonderful moments of tenderness. The theme is stone- some of the seed in the parable falls on stony ground. The music turns from dry declamation into rich aria-style singing when lamenting the sad fate of the “Felsenherzen”- the people with hearts of stone who “scoff at their own salvation and are brought down”.

But the message quickly hardens. The tenor's aria that follows depicts another part of the original parable, the seeds that fall among thorns. The score for this is unusually bare, with only a bass line and vocal part. Various conductors to try to reconstruct a middle part for another solo instrument. However, I think it works equally well with a virtuoso improvised keyboard part, as per Helmuth Rilling's recording. It's full of spikiness, appropriate for those schädlichen Dornen – tearing, choking thorns . Possibly it would have been Bach himself at the keyboard, and hence he felt no need to write his own part out.

And the soprano gives us the final choice- either we allow our good seed to be smothered by earthly cares and allow it to lie useless: or we send it onto the guten Lande, the good earth. The glorious final chorus is the depiction of the heavenly joy, where the seed has come to full growth. It's full of trilling fanfares and feels like music the entrance of a great prince at Court. The orchestra is significantly expanded from the previous austerity. Some people have suggested that this last movement must be a re-used part of a lost work and that that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the cantata. But I think the contrast works perfectly; at last, we hear the seed that bears fruit a hundredfold in musical form. Bach paints us four perfect little pictures in the cantata: the devilish birds snapping up the seeds, the tragically rocky hearts, the choking thorns- and ultimately the joy of a flourishing princely kingdom.

Ich habe genug- Cantata for the Feast of the Purification (February 2)

Like Everest, some masterpieces are just there. You can't meaningfully analyse them without slipping into poetic adoration or stunned silence. Anything I write this week has even less chance than usual of being helpful or coherent. Trawling through Ich habe genug, with all its dark perfection, would be like trying to delineate the night sky on the back of a cornflake packet with a broken pencil . So I'll cheat a little bit. Instead of blathering about what Bach (and his unknown librettist) has done, I'll go through how other performers have made Bach live. Working out what paths mere human beings have taken to reach the summit of the mountain seems less sacrilegious and pointless than wrestling with the mountain itself.

I'm told that this cantata has more recordings than any other. Part of it is the fact that Bach himself made versions for bass, alto and soprano; and it seems somewhat churlish not to allow the tenors to have a go too. Another factor in the equation is the bottom line. A solo cantata is cheaper and quicker to record than one that needs a whole gaggle of singers, who generally are as easily herded as cats on the wrong side of a door. So of the five intrepid soloists I've listened to, one is a baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (I say a baritone- it would be more appropriate to say the baritone of the twentieth century); one a countertenor, Andreas Scholl; one bass-baritone, Thomas Quasthoff;; one mezzo-soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; and one soprano, Emma Kirkby. (Apologies to tenor-lovers.)

The first path I heard was overwhelmingly that of weariness and struggle. I listened to Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau's 1983 recording with Helmut Rilling. The recorded sound is ever-so-slightly too bright, typical of the early digital era. But as an instrument, Fischer-Dieskau's voice is as rich as it ever was in his 1950s and 60s recordings, although here there's a slightly brighter resonance at the top giving an edge to the sound. And to me the overall emotional message feels almost distraught, the song of a believer who has come the end of a weary life with little left except his faith. The repetitive turns on “den Heiland” - the Saviour - are heavy, determined, almost wrenched out. On “Ich hab' ihn erblickt”, “I have glimpsed him” we hear rock-hard certainty, and a tiny core of joy in the pain. This is what this soul has left at the end of his life; a single, transformative moment of touching the divine that has driven him on, almost onto to his deathbed. This Ich habe genug means “I have had enough experience of this life, no more, let me go!”

Rilling maintains this weight in the string accompaniment; the recitative that follows the first aria has a rising scale that here sounds like an exhausted stump up a flight of stairs to a longed-for bed. And even the sleep that follows in the aria Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen- “Sleep now, you tired eyes”- is troubled. Yes, Fischer-Dieskau's voice is still radiant- how could it now be in this music? But there's a bitter note of anger when he sings “Welt, ich bleibe nicht mehr hier, hab' ich doch kein Teil an dir”- “I'll stay no more with you, World, you have no share in me”. And in this performance, as in life, the magical moment of longed-for rest never lasts for more than a moment. The crucial thought is “hier muss ich das Elend bauen”- “Here must I build up my pain”- the mortal's pain is all the worse for it being self-created, self-trapped in our own web of desires. The only solution to escape from the pain that paradoxically binds the soul to the world is to rejoice in approaching death. Is it fanciful to say that Bach's Lutheranism seems to run close to a Buddhist theology of Nirvana? The dancing aria that concludes the cantata is chilling in its joyful embrace of annihilation, sung with gritted teeth by Fischer-Dieskau. That is the joy that is offered to the lifelong suffering soul; that our little life is rounded with a sleep.

The next way up the mountain was one of Enlightenment elegance. Andreas Scholl's most recent 2010 recording of Ich habe genug with the Kammerorchester Basel comes from a totally different soundworld. The string melodies are delicately phrased, in contrast to Rilling's heavy repetitions. The plucked string accompaniment to the continuo lends a more intimate touch too. As a whole, the orchestra seems far more flexible; the resolution of the chord at the end of the first aria is delayed, to emphasise the gorgeous bareness of the open fifth. Scholl's very first entry has a subtly altered rhythm from that sung by Fischer-Dieskau, shortening and lightening the last note of the upward melody and avoiding the over-emphatic. Countertenors have a shorter shelf life than many other singers, and Scholl's voice is not as uniformly butter-rich as it used to be. Certainly his earlier recording of this piece with Philippe Herreweghe was more luscious in places. But a slight touch of autumnal thinness and the option of a leaner vocal colour is completely appropriate to this piece.

There's always a sense of elegance at the heart of Scholl's and the Basel players' performance. The rising accompaniment in the second movement, which seemed rather like a pensioner's stumble up a loosely carpeted stairway in the Rilling recording, is a smooth effortless ascension here. And Schlummert ein is sung straightforwardly and elegantly, with a sense of a rueful smile in the voice at hab' ich doch kein Teil an dir, followed by a geniune pianissimo lullaby-feel for the last repetition of that gorgeous melody. But I'm going to be churlish in the face of such beauty. In the elegance of the phrasing, this performance almost feels like a Baroque “Allegory of Sleep” without ever getting to the heart of the genuine sense of rest. And there's a surprising gear-change into Scholl's baritone voice in the last movement when he has to sing “Tod” on a bottom G. It all serves to reinforce the sense of slightly unreal but beautiful eighteenth century artifice.

Our third path is sparkling human joy, refreshed with genuine calm rest. Thomas Quasthoff has the darkest, richest voice of any of our guides, accompanied stylishly but unshowily by the Berliner Barock Solisten. Here we see a different emotional register; more joyful than Fischer-Dieskau's downtrodden fist-shaker, more human than Scholl's serene Baroque rhetorician. A real sense of joy infuses the singing after “Ich hab' ihn erblickt” in the first movement. But the real highight is Schlummert ein, where Quasthoff's low pianissimo notes sound like the apotheosis of a snore. You can hear him relaxing into them and just having a good time. His voice just fades into the melody and...Mmmmm... Zzzzzz. No-one sings more quietly or more richly here- the real bass-baritone deep resonances win out, and create a heart-stopping ppp. And immediately afterwards on the words Welt, ich bleibe nicht mehr hier, where Fischer-Dieskau is raging and Scholl detached and transcendent, Quasthoff is triumphant and radiant.

The final movement, with its vigorous dance rhythms, seems to have been revitalised by the previous hypnotic aria and recitative. It's as if the search for the end of life's pain isn't enervating at all; rather, knowing that nothing can ultimately harm us enables the seeker to take part in life more fully. All our worries about risks are nothing when we contemplate the security of salvation after death. In this interpretation, Ich freue mich auf meinem Tod means less “I rejoice in (the prospect of) my death”, but “Confident that my death is nothing to fear, I now rejoice”.

So far, we've only looked at men leading us up the precipice. And yes, it was rare (although not unheard of) for women to sing Bach's liturgical music in services. But we know that Bach's wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, was an accomplished singer and had part of this particular cantata copied into her own notebook. But even if we didn't have any evidence that Bach sanctioned performances by women, that would be no reason for us to spurn performances like our next one.

The fourth path: vibrant intensity and a heroic struggle, centre-stage. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson gives us a diva's performance in the best sense of the word. From the very outset, she seems separate from the orchestral texture. Compared to the eighteenth-century chamber music sound of Scholl and the Basel Kammerorchester, she could be alone on a stage, illuminated a single spotlight. It's ironic, as Hunt Lieberson was once a viola player in the middle of very band that accompanies her on this recording- the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music from Boston, Massachusetts. The slightly more recessed, almost hesitant sound of the orchestra, with tear-drop diminuendi from the bass line, allows the soloist to grab our attention. Yes, her vibrato might be a surprise to those of us used to the austerity of so-called Early Music. But the vibrato is always there for a reason; a spicy condiment, generously but thoughtfully added, rather than an incessant marinade.

Again, Schlummert ein is the most precious jewel. The passion of the earlier movements is still there- it's a wakeful lullaby, unlike Quasthoff's reverie. And the thrillingly intense quiet of Hunt Lieberson's voice tides us over the huge gaps made by the conductor at Bach's pause-points. These are magical pools of absolute silence- deeper in intensity than any simple absence of noise. But this stillness is by no means the end of the story. The last movement has some of the pugnacious quality of Fischer-Dieskau; the soul here will fight on. When the soloist sings “Freue” -joy- you can feel it's a hard-won joy after a struggle equivalent to that of any romantic heroine.

And lastly, pure church simplicity, with Emma Kirkby and the always-wonderful Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Gottfried von der Goltz. It's ridiculous to suggest that Emma Kirkby sings with a “boyish” tone, as if it was somehow un-female to sing lightly, unaffectedly and without vibrato. In fact, plenty of boys have used vibrato as an expressive device in the past- and they still do sometimes. But what Emma Kirkby brings in her recording is a quality of directness and transparency. This recording isn't about her as a performer- this is about the music.

There's an almost instrumental quality to her singing; the words are there, but not hammered out or milked for their emotional heart. They're just there, and to me this feels like the most liturgical of all the performances. That's not to say that it's cold. The “Ach!” in the second movement really stabs through you, and the strings have some exciting echo-effects in the last movement. But I could imagine Kirkby's Schlummert ein being sung as a solo at Evensong in an Oxford college chapel, with the last light of a winter's afternoon filtering through the gothic tracery and a sublime quiet contentment spreading through the congregation.

Of course, one needs to be a supreme performer to achieve this level of self-effacement. And this has to be the heart of the paradoxical message of the piece: that the journey to utter self-less-ness fulfils all your desires and needs; that death is the fulfilment of life, not its extinction; and that when you declare “Ich habe genug” - I have enough, I need no more from life - you are given more sublime gifts that anyone could possibly imagine. Struggle, elegance, joy, passion, simplicity: five paths up the mountain. One inexpressible masterpiece for all time.

Nimm was dein ist und gehe hin!- Septuagesima

“Take what's yours and get out! Get out, get out!” Without any introduction, the congregation's ears are assaulted with a solid block of choral polyphony. It's dense, complex and chromatic; the clearest thing about it is the repetition of “gehe hin! Gehe hin!”, running incessantly through all the vocal parts. And suddenly it finishes as abruptly as it began; the door slams shut.

It's yet another moment of psychological genius. The tense, dark instrumental interlude that follows, with its repeated bass notes has the feeling of being left outside, stammering- we expected more than this! Give us what's fair! Yet the whole point of the cantata is that human ideas of what's fair are just that- human.

On this particular Sunday in February 1724, Bach's congregation would have just heard the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. It's a wonderfully perverse story where an landlord insists on paying all his contractors exactly the same full daily wage, even though some have worked all day and others have only turned up an hour before home-time. Surely the people who were in work at nine o'clock in the morning deserve more than the people who were only hired at five in the afternoon? That would be fair, reasonable and completely in line with the fallen world of invoices, timesheets and payslips . Those who work harder and longer get more; the lazy ones who roll in late get their pay docked. Not in this vineyard, though. You've got your pay; now get out and don't grumble!

And the second movement is all about coming to terms with this odd, inhuman, unfair divine notion of reward that isn't deserved. Over a bass line that's still pulsating (frustrated rage?), the alto tells us “Murre nicht”- don't grumble. But it's not an insensitive fobbing-off; the text addresses us as “lieber Christ”, “dear Christian”, and the vocal line is tender, reassuring. Even so, it's a difficult message for modern ears; Er weiß, was dir nützlich ist- God knows what is good for you. And the chorale that follows just repeats the assertion: Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, Es bleibt gerecht sein Wille- What God does is well done, his will remains just. Without any complex accompaniment and foursquare in its harmonies, it feels like the sort of chorale that usually concluded a cantata. It may not be the end of the cantata- but it's certainly the end of the argument. Far better, says the tenor in the brief recitative that follows, to let contentment reign. And we see the flowering of that contentment next: the the soprano aria, lovely and serene again and again repeating the word genugsamkeit- “contentment, the treasure of life”.

And we end with another old familiar chorale for Bach's congregation. This one dates back to the sixteenth century, both in words and music; it's as if Bach is pointing out that fact that he's dealing in old wisdom, not anything new: “Was mein Gott will, das g'scheh allzeit, Sein Will, der ist der beste”; “What my God wills, that always comes to pass; his will is the best”. And the unexpected twisting harmonies on the very last line leave us hanging. We expected more than this!

So, an unexpected ending to a cantata that is literally unsatisfactory- it leaves us wanting more! So either Bach was having a rushed week- or he is playing a very clever theological-musical game. How can we say as listeners we expected more when we were given the glories of the Genugsamkeit aria, as beautiful as anything Bach wrote? How could the labourers expect more when they were paid a full daily rate? And how can the congregation shake their fist at God and say “we wanted more than this!” when he died for them? Take what has been given you and go and do something with it. Gehe hin!