TELEFUNKEN
1 LP - SAWT 9425-B - (p) 1963
1 LP - SAWT 9425-B - (p) 1963
1 CD - 2564-69646-9 - (c) 2008

KANTATE






Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750) Kantate "Schleicht, spielende Wellen", BWV 206

42' 16"

Drama auf das Geburstfest August III., Königs von polen, Kurfürsten von Sachsen... am 7. Oktober (1733)




- Chor: "Schleicht, spielende Wellen"
6' 33"
A1

- Rezitativ (Baß): "O glücjliche Veränderung"
1' 20"
A2

- Arie (Baß): "Schleuß des Janustempels Türen"
5' 11"
A3

- Rezitativ (Tenor): "So recht! Beglückter Weichselstrom!" 1' 42"
A4

- Arie (Tenor): "Jede Woge meiner Wellen" 7' 52"
A5

- Rezitativ (Alt): "Ich nehm' zugleich" 1' 04"
B1

- Arie (Alt): "Reis von Habsburgs hohem Stamme" 6' 59"
B2

- Rezitativ (Sopran): "Verzeiht, bemooste Häupter" 1' 59"
B3

- Arie (Sopran): "Hört doch! der sanften Flöten Chor" 3' 57"
B4

- Rezitativ (Baß, Tenor, Alt, Sopran): "Ich muß, ich will gehorsam sein" 1' 41"
B5

- Chor: "Die himmlische Vorsicht der ewigen Güte" 3' 58"
B6





 
Irmgard Jacobeit, Sopran
Wilhelmine Mattès, Alt
Tom Brand, Tenor
Jacques Villisech, Baß
MONTEVERDI-CHOR HAMBURG / Jürgen Jürgens, Einstudierung

DAS AMSTERDAMER KAMMEROCRCHESTER
- Hermann Krebbers, Violine
- L. v. d. Lek, Oboe d'amore II
- L. Oostdam, Flöte II
- L. Smeehuyzen, Violoncello continuo
- W. Groot, Trompet
- H. Stotijn, Oboe d'amore I
- H. Bahrwasher, Flöte I
- J. Visser, Flöte III
- B. Spieler, Contarbaß continuo

Gustav LEONHARDT, Cembalo

André RIEU, Dirigent

 






Luogo e data di registrazione
Amsterdam (Holland) - 20/27 Ottobre 1962


Registrazione: live / studio
studio

Producer
Wolf Erichson


Prima Edizione LP
Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9425-B (Stereo) - AWT 9425-C (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 42' 16" | (p) 1963 | ANA
Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9425-B | 1 LP - durata 42' 16" | (p) 1963 | ANA | Riedizione


Edizione CD
Warner Classics | LC 04281 | 2564-69646-9 | 1 CD - durata 77' 06" | (c) 2008 | ADD

Cover

August III. (1696-1763), König von Polen, Kurfürst von Sachsen.


Note
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The cantata in the broadest sense of the word - whether as the church cantata or the patrician, academic or courtly work of musical homage and festivity - accompanied the Arnstadt and Mühlhausen organist, the Weimar chamber musician and court organist, the Köthen conductor and finally the Leipzig cantor of St. Thomas'-Bach-all through his creative life, although with fluctuating intensity, with interruptions and vacillations that still are problems to musicological research down to this very day. The earliest preserved cantata (“Denn du wirst meine Seele nicht in der Hölle lassen“) probably dates, if it really is by Bach, from the Arnstadt period (1704) and is still completely under the spell of North and Central German traditions. In the works of his Mühlhausen years (1707-08) - psalm cantatas, festive music for the changing of the council and a funeral work (the “Actus tragicus”) - we sense for the first time something of what raises Bach as a cantata composer so much higher than all his contemporaries: the ability to analyse even the most feeble text with regard to its form and content, to grasp its theological significance and to interpret it out of its very spiritual centre in musical “speech” that is infinitely subtle and infinitely powerful in effect. In Weimar (1708-17) new duties pushed the cantata right into the background to begin with. It was not until the Duke commissioned him to write “new pieces monthly” for the court services that Bach once more turned to the cantata during the years 1714-16, on texts written by Erdmann Neumeister and Salomo Franck. Barely thirty cantatas can be ascribed to these two years with a reasonable degree of certainty. It is most remarkable that, on the other and, no courtly funeral music has been preserved from the entire Weimar period, although there must have been a considerable demand for such works. It is conceivable that many a lost work, supplied with a new text by Bach himself, lives on among the Weimar church cantatas.
In the years Bach spent at Köthen (1717-23), on the other hand, it is the composition of works for courtly occasions of homage and festivity that come to the fore, entirely in keeping with Bach's duties as Court Conductor. It is only during the last few months he spent at Köthen that we find him composing a series of church cantatas once again, and these were already intended for Leipzig. It was in Leipzig that the majority of the great church cantatas came into being, all of them - according to the most recent research - during his first few years of office at Leipzig and comprising between three and a maximum of five complete series for all the Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year. But just as suddenly as it began, this amazing creative flow, in which this magnificent series of cantatas arose, appears to have ended again. It is possible that Bach's regular composition of cantatas stopped as early as 1726; from 1729 at the latest it is evident that other tasks largely absorbed his creative energy, particularly the direction of the students’ Collegium Musicum with its perpetual demand for fashionable instrumental music. More
than 50 cantatas for courtly and civic occasions have indeed been recorded from later years, but considered over a period of 24 years and compared with the productivity of his first years in Leipzig they do not amount to very much. We are left with the picture of an enigmatic silence in a sphere which has ever counted as the central category in Bach's creative output.
But we only need cast a superficial glance at the more than 200 of the master’s cantatas that have come down to us in order to see that this conception of their position in Bach's total output is fully justified. Bach has investigated their texts with regard to both their meaning and their wording with incomparable penetration, piercing intellect and unshakeable faith, whether they are passages from the Bible, hymns, sacred poems by his contemporaries or sacredly trimmed poetry for courtly occasions. He has transformed and interpreted these texts through his music with incomparable powers of invention and formation, he has revealed their essence and, at the same time, translated the imagery and emotional content of each of their ideas into musical images and emotions. The perfect blending of word and note, the combination of idea synthesis and depiction of each detail of the text, the joint effect of the baroque magnificence of the musical forms and the highly differentiated attention to detail, the skillful balance between contrapuntal, melodic and harmonic means in the service of the word and, not least, the inexhaustible fertility and greatness of a musical imagination that is able to create from the most feeble ‘occasional’ text a world of musical characters - all this is what raises the cantata composer Bach so much higher than his own and every other age and their historically determined character, and imparts a lasting quality to his works. It is not their texts alone and not their music alone that makes them immortal - it is the combination of word and note into a higher unit, into a new significance that first imparts to them the power of survival and makes them what they are above all else: perfect works of art.

Kantate, BWV 206 "Schleicht, spielende Wellen"
The “Dramma per musica” “Schleicht, spielende Wellen” is one of a series of cantatas of festivity and homage for the Saxon-Polish royal family, which Bach composed in the years 1733-35 and presumably performed with the members of his students’ Collegium Musicum. The public concerts of this Collegium were one of the best attended and most richly traditioned features of Leipzig’s musical life outside the churches. They were held nearly every week, in summer in Zimmermann’s coffee garden before the gates of the town, in winter in the same proprietor’s coffee house. On special occasions, most of all of course on festive days connected with the royal family, largescale festive cantatas composed ‘ad hoc’ occupied the central place in the programmes. The ruling couple, if in residence at Leipzig, came to receive this homage in person, or the Town Council gave the events an official colouring by their presence. Such festive concerts were advertised in detail in the Leipzig newspapers as, for instance, “a solemn music with illuminations in Zimmermann’s Garden”. There is sure to have been no lack of audiences on these occasions.
“Schleicht, spielende Wellen” was composed for the birthday of the Elector Friedrich August II. (as King of Poland August III.) on the 7th October 1733. Two days previously the anniversary of the Prince’s election as King of Poland had been celebrated in great splendour, likewise with a festiv: cantata (BWV 215) composed by Bach. The Elector was in residence at Leipzig at the time, together with his wife and the entire court, and thus it can be assumed that he attended both performances. Perhaps he was particularly pleased with the birthday cantata, for the composer performed it again three years later for the Elector’s birthday or name day without any important changes and evidently did not incorporate any music from it into other vocal works - two facts are most unusual for Bach’s mode of working in this field.
A special preference on the part of the Elector for this work would be quite understandable, for it is one of the finest of Bach’s festive cantatas, although its text (perhaps by the Leipzig cantata writer Henrici-Picander) is no better than most of the devout rhymings of this genre. In accordance with the traditional formal scheme of such a “Dramma per musica” (which was, of course, a drama only in the sense of imaginary action and not performed on the stage), four allegorical characters investigate in a dispute which of them has the greatest claim to the ruler, the Polish Vistula, the Saxon Elbe, the Austrian Danube (the Electress was a daughter of the Emperor Joseph I.) or the Leipzig Pleisse, who finally mediates in the noble dispute and exhorts her sisters to join with one another to glorify the House of Princes.
Bach has endowed this undistinguished text with an overwhelming abundance of musical ideas that raise the work far above the occasion for which it was written, and even subsequently impart considerable dignity to the text. The conventional word imagery seems to be ennobled by the graphic power of Bach’s musical language when the latter is set in action by the former, while the courtly occasion and dainty compliments of the less pic
torial sections of the text have inspired the composer to an extraordinary unfolding of splendour and an elegance of thematic invention that reveal almost unaccustomed aspects of Bach’s genius.
The opening chorus, thematically inspired by the play of the “creeping” (“schleichende”) waves, presents the full festive orchestra of the baroque age with trumpets and timpani; it is followed, with intermittent recitative discussions, by the elegant, light, polonaise-like bass aria of the Vistula, the tenor aria of the Elbe in swaying 6/8 time with amazingly “Schubertian” melodic wave figures and the alto aria of the Danube accompanied by two oboes d’amore in strict canon (instruments and part-writing naturally symbolizing the marital love of the Princess from the Danube for her Saxon husband). Finally the Pleisse (soprano) speaks up, whose charm can be resisted just as little by the “mossy heads of mighty streams” as by the modern listener; in its instrumentation (3 flutes and continuo) and melodic character this aria forms the enchanting climax of the entire score. In the jubilant 12/8 dance of the final chorus the dispute is closed in perfect harmony and with a respectful bow to “His Serene Highness August”; as firmly as the fame of the ruler stands the radiant tonic key of D major, from which the arias had departed in a carefully planned sequence of keys - A major, B minor, F sharp minor and G major - and to which the final chorus now returns with resplendent emphasis.