Sunday Bach - Pentecost

In Bach's time, and indeed through much of the history of the Church, Pentecost was the major festival of the church year, even more so than Christmas and Easter. Why? Because Pentecost marks the birthday of the Church itself, when the disciples, energized and emboldened by the descent of the Holy Spirit, emerged from hiding in the upper room and went out into the world to spread the Good News. These days, and especially here in the United States, it's less so, mostly due to the influence of evangelicalism, which has that uniquely American distrust of any and all institutions and sees Christianity not as the Church Universal but more as a way to advance the "salvation" of the individual; for them Pentecost is a nod to the emergence of the Holy Spirit as another of those personal benefits of being a Christian.

But in Bach's time Pentecost was a three-day celebration of the birth of the Church, and some of Bach's best writing was done for this celebration. For this year's offering, I give you BWV 172, Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten! (Resound, you songs, resound, you strings! Weimar 1714). This is one of Bach's earlier cantatas, composed soon after his election to the position of concertmaster in Weimar; he seems to have liked it very much, and revisited it five times in his later career. As befits music for the celebration of the principal festival of the Church, it's magnificently triumphant, with lots of fanfare and trumpets. Here's the late Craig Smith of Emmanuel Music on this wonderful cantata:

When Bach was Kapellmeister in Weimar, he was responsible for the composition of one cantata per month. In his time there he also wrote large-scale works for some of the major holidays, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The librettist for most of Bach’s Weimar works was Salomo Franck, who doubled as the court poet and head of the mint. Franck was the finest poet that Bach ever collaborated with, and all of the Weimar works are notable for their passionate music and high literary quality.

The work begins with a joyful chorus with orchestra of trumpet and strings. As is typical of Bach’s early works the trumpet parts are mostly fanfares, the chorus reacts with suitably homophonic music. A simple fugue comprises the middle section of the work. The only recitative in the piece is an arioso setting of the passage from John for the bass. This leads into more fanfares from the trumpets accompanying the pomposo writing of the solo bass. The idea of the heavenly wind permeates the tenor aria, with its smoothly running violin part and gently expressive vocal line. Without a doubt, the high point of the cantata is the intricate, heavenly duet for soprano and alto with oboe obbligato. The complex metaphors and high literary quality of this marvelous text are paralleled by the detailed and elaborate voice parts. Woven into this texture is a highly ornamented version of the great Luther chorale, Komm Heiliger Geist. A beautiful setting of Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, with a high, descant first violin part ends the cantata.

 © Craig Smith

Today's performance is from a recording by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner. Enjoy!

Photo © 2020 by A. Roy Hilbinger