United Reformed Church, Fareham, Saturday 22 March
Portsmouth Baroque Choir will once again be shining a performative light on niche Baroque repertoire at its concert in Fareham on March 22nd, performing cantatas by Buxtehude and Kuhnau and an arrangement of Kuhnau by Bach.
For this concert of choral rarities Portsmouth Baroque Choir is delighted to be joined by members of the Consort of Twelve. Additional instrumental colour and all vocal solos will be drawn from the Choir.
Performances of works by these composers side by side are infrequent. In fact the chances of any of their music surviving down to our age were slim. With little or no thought among Baroque composers for a lasting musical legacy – for most of their time spent composing they were simply doing a job – almost all of it could have disappeared were it not for the initial efforts of discerning manuscript collectors and subsequent initiatives to perform and record every component of the available repertoire.
Nowadays, everything that has survived of Bach’s music is available in multiple recordings on numerous streaming platforms or in boxed sets of CDs; his music is performed hourly in some location around the world; Bach is a household name, revered as one of the greatest musicians and composers of all time. For many people, playing or listening to Bach can change the way they see the world helping to retain a hopeful perspective in fractured times. So it is difficult for us to comprehend how, in the winter of 1723, Bach was only the third choice after Telemann and Christoph Graupner to succeed Johann Kuhnau, who had died the previous summer, as cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Luckily for Bach, and for us, first choice Telemann had received a better offer from Hamburg and Graupner’s current employer refused to release him. Bach performed two cantatas, BWV 22 and 23 for his “audition”, at a service on 7 February that year, a tough listen for the examiners. While 22 is full of dance rhythms and pays stylistic homage to his predecessor, Kuhnau, 23 is ornate and dense, anticipating the music of the Passions.
Assuming Bach was also asked about his CV, the names Kuhnau and Buxtehude would have figured prominently. Kuhnau is better-known as a composer of pictorial pieces for keyboard. He was the first to write a keyboard sonata and his Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) influenced Bach. Less well-known are his sacred cantatas, written as annual cycles, again as Bach was required to provide. Few have survived, mostly thanks to Bach making a collection of them. We will be performing three: his masterpiece Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern for Epiphany 5, Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden (I desire to die in peace’, based on the Song of Simeon) and Gott, sei mir gnädig (Psalm 51, for Ash Wednesday). All three display a mixture of pietist moderation and operatic flare that would be adopted by Handel as well as Bach. Kuhnau also practised as a lawyer, he was a prolific theorist, a talented linguist, and even wrote a satirical novel, Der musicalische Quacksalber (1700) on what he considered to be superficial trends in contemporary music, the operas of Telemann presumably a target. You could say that Kuhnau was the last ‘Renaissance man’. More important for Bach is that for decades Kuhnau had directed the St Thomas choir, the Thomanerchor founded in 1212, although it was not in particularly good shape when Bach took over. But that is another story.
Going back a little further, there was Bach’s famous 260-mile walk from Arnstadt to Lübeck ostensibly to hear the greatest musician of the day, Dietrich Buxtehude, then aged seventy. Bach was given leave to stay one month but he stayed for four, soaking up not only Buxtehude’s organ playing at the Marienkirche (the magnificent roofscape of which dominates our concert poster) but also the weekly concerts (Abendmusik) organised by Buxtehude that included chamber music and dazzling concerted music on a monumental scale involving musicians from several different countries6. Abendmusik was a central cultural event in Lūbeck and was mentioned in travel guides of the time.
Buxtehude’s own music might have disappeared but for the compilation of manuscripts made by Swedish organist Gustaf Düben, including over 100 by Buxtehude. While the memory of Buxtehude lived on as a skilled organist and composer of organ music, mostly written in the first half of his life, his sacred vocal music, from the second half, was utterly forgotten until the early twentieth century when scholars began rediscovering it. Buxtehude composed his vocal works not to order but entirely on his own initiative, which meant that he was able to achieve a higher standard of quality for that time. The possibility of achieving such a level of professional freedom while carrying out the duties of a church musician established the model for the likes of Handel, Telemann and Bach.
Our concert begins with Buxtehude’s Advent cantata Ihr lieben Christen, freut euch nun and the second half includes Jesu, meine Freude that Bach must surely have heard while in Lūbeck as his later, well-known setting shares striking similarities including key and palindromic form. The concert ends joyfully with a Magnificat setting attributed to Buxtehude. While some scholars believe the score bears all the marks of Buxtehude’s style, others point out that it bears no resemblance to any of his known works and that it looks and sounds more like Lully or Carissimi. But then Buxtehude, like Bach, was a master at imitation.
To reinforce the Bach connection we’ll be singing the funeral motet Der Gerechte kömmt um, attributed to Bach. It is a vernacular re-working (contrafactum) of a Latin motet Tristis est anima mea by Kuhnau. Believed to have been written 1730-5, it bears several hallmarks of Bach’s style: paired wind instruments in the accompaniment, subtle harmonic recolouring and heightened expression. The instrumental introduction foreshadows Mozart and just before the end there is an astonishing moment, very rare for those times, of measured silence.
Chris Clark
Read footnotes and additional info.
