Luogo e data di registrazione		Bennebroek (Holland) - Gennaio 1966
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9513-B | 1 LP - durata 38' 32" | (p) 1966 | ANA
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics | LC 6019 | 3984-21711-2 | 1 CD - durata 68' 48" | (c) 1998 | ADD
	Cover		"Die Anbetung der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit". Deckengemälde in der Klosterkirche Veresheim von Martin Knoller.
	Note		-

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. ···················· Among the two hundred church cantatas by Bach that have been preserved, there is a small group of works not written for the normal large “concerto” forces (soli, chorus and orchestra), but for a solo voice and a small instrumental ensemble, often enriched by a solo instrument. These are the alto cantatas “Geist und Seele sind verwirret” (with concertante organ), “Widerstehe doch der Sünde”, “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” (with concertante organ) and the aria “Bekennen will ich seinen Namen”, the soprano cantatas “Jauchzet Gott” (with concertante trumpet) and “Mein Herze schwimmt in Blut” (with concertante oboe) and the bass cantata “Ich habe genug” (with concertante oboe) (BWV 53, 160 and 189, also solo cantatas, are probably or certainly not by Bach). Nearly all these strikingly chamber-musical, intimate works were probably written around 1730-32, and in nearly all of them the writer of the text could not be determined to date. In view of their marked chronological proximity to one another, it would seem to suggest itself most strongly that none other than Bach himself was their author. Around and just after 1730 he evidently had some particularly able soloists among his pupils at St. Thomas’ School, his Leipzig students or other helpers, and these special circumstances - and probably other reasons deriving from practical considerations of cantata performance - stimulated him to experiment for a few years with the solo cantata, which his Leipzig congregation had not been accustomed to hear from him up till then. That there was no need for him to spare the members of his ensemble, here as in the big cantatas, is particularly clearly shown by what is probably the earliest, the most famous and the most virtuoso of all these works: “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen”. The cantata “Jauchzet Gott” (BWV 51) was probably composed in 1730, being intended for the 15th Sunday after Trinity (17. 9. 1730) “et in ogni tempo”. It has no apparent connection with the Gospel for this Sunday (Matth. 6, the unjust Mammon), either textually or musically, but its pious jubilation truly does let it appear liturgically suitable “in ogni tempo”. What was perhaps also a makeshift allocation to the 15th Sunday after Trinity thus at least becomes understandable, all the more so in that the simple and concise form of the work does not allow of the interpolation of a sermon (as is the case with the big cantatas in two sections); its performance will thus only have been possible at the beginning or at the end of the service. But here, too, it will have seemed questionable to the orthodox Leipzig church people. The extraordinary virtuosity of the solo vocal part and of the trumpet combined with it in concerto style in the first aria and the closing “Alleluja” give it much of the character of a concert piece, of a resplendent (and remarkably “fashionable-Italian”) exhibition of virtuoso soloists in the style of the great trumpet arias of Alessandro Scarlatti and his school. Of course, the composer could not have been Bach if he did not sound a gentler and more intimate note between these two resplendent and extrovert movements in C major. This appears in the solemn, striding quaver motion and the touching gesture of prayer in the A minor recitative “Wir beten zu dem Tempel an” (We worship at the temple), in the A minor aria, whose gently rocking melody and rhythm are sure to have been inspired by a central idea in the aria’s text: the faithful as God’s children (“dass wir Deine Kinder heissen”), and in the skilllful chorale fantasia that leads into the radiant final “Alleluja”. BWV 202, “Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten ”(Depart, gloomy shadows), is a soprano cantata of an entirely different kind. It was possibly composed while Bach was still conductor at Köthen (1712-23), certainly at a relatively early date, and is a “secular” wedding cantata, not intended for the church ceremony but for the domestic celebrations. This explains both the work’s camber music instrumentation and its text, which describes and unites mythological celebration of spring and the spring of the marriage couple’s love with a charmingly naive erudition. The happy basic mood of these verses is matched by the composition, which is entirely attuned to bright colours, gay tone-painting and song and dance elements. Thus the introductory G major aria paints the “betrübte Schatten” (gloomy shadows) of winter only in gentle pastel shades, “Florens Lust” (Flora’s pleasure), on the other hand, in elegantly dotted rhythms and song-like sequences of motifs. The C major aria “Phöbus eilt mit schnellen Pferden” (Phoebus hastens with fast horses), accompanied only by the continuo, depicts the stamping of the horses’ hooves and the “hastening” in leaping quavers and rolling semiquaver runs. Bach used this bass theme again later in the final movement of the G major Violin Sonata with obligato harpsichord.) The two following arias let one solo instrument each - violin and oboe - play in combination with the vocal part. “Wenn die Frühlingslüfte streichen” (When the spring breezes blow), in E minor, describes the gentle breezes and Cupid “stalking” through the fields in concise ritornello form with gentle dynamic gradings and a witty play of motifs which, after broadly conceived melodic beginnings, repeatedly changes into the warbling motif repetitions of a little ‘galant’ song. The oboe aria (D major) “Sich üben im Lieben” (To practice loving) is a rhythmically spicy, elegant dance song though in a large-scale ‘da capo’ form; the little final song, a gay gavotte, is a no less elegant piece of social dance music that assembles the entire ensemble once again, thus concluding Bach’s good wishes for the young couple with a polite compliment in the best social taste. Ludwig Finscher