Sunday Bach - Trinity 24

Laurel Lake, Pine Grove Furnace State Park. Gardners, PA

This is the last Sunday in Ordinary Time in the Lutheran liturgical calendar, and Bach composed two equally magnificent cantatas for this Sunday. I've had to make the difficult choice of choosing one to post, but I also urge you to go visit the other on YouTube - BWV 26, Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig (Oh how fleeting, oh how fading, Leipzig 1724).

The cantata I've chosen to post today is both magnificent and unique in Bach's work - BWV 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort [Dialogus] II (O Eternity, thou word of thunder, Leipzig 1723). The cantata is a dialogue between Fear (alto) and Hope (tenor), in the end resolved by the Holy Spirit (bass). And the closing chorale, with it's chromatic harmonic structure, is 200 years ahead of its time! Here's what the late Craig Smith of Emmanuel Music had to say about this cantata:

Composed in November of 1723, Bach O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort, BWV 60 became an enormous favorite among the fin de siècle intelligentsia in Vienna. The final chorale, perhaps the most extreme of any chorale setting, was the backbone of the Berg Violin Concerto. The Austrian expressionistic poet, painter and playwright Oskar Kokoshka, sketched an astonishing series of drawings based upon the cantata and its dialogue between Fear and Hope. The content of this dialogue is one of the most intense, neurotic and immeshed thirteen minutes of music ever written. This exploration into the human psyche seemed to fascinate Bach as is evident in a few other cantatas (BWV26, 70, 90) that precede Advent.

In the first movement the icy-cold chorale "O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort" appears in the alto voice (fear), doubled by a horn, above trembling strings and a hysterical tenor. An even more unstable recitative follows in which Fear sings a tragic, agonizing and forever searching melisma on the word “torture”.  This leads directly to the bony and unpleasant duet with violin and oboe d'amore. Jagged dotted rhythms and slippery scale passages live together in an uneasy truce. Hope, significantly, has the final word; his melodic line continuing after Fear has spoken. In the recitative/arioso that follows, the voice of the Holy Ghost appears more as an arbiter than a comforter. The opening whole tone scale and disjunct phrase lengths of the final chorale are hair-raising in their instability. The text, however, does offer some kind of comfort in its acceptance of death.

The performance I've chosen for today is a 1998 recording by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir under the direction of Ton Koopman. Enjoy!

Photo © 2015 by A. Roy Hilbinger