Luogo e data di registrazione		Kobe Shoin Women's University Chapel (Japan) - September 2016
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer | Engineer		Thore Brinkmann (Take5 Music Production) | Matthias Spitzbarth | Akimi Hayashi
	Edizione CD		BIS - BIS-2311 SACD - (1 CD) - durata 80' 53" - (p) & (c) 2017 - DDD
	Note		-

COMMENTARY

Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde, BWV 201 (Hurry, Ye Whirling Winds) The Contest between Phoebus and Pan Whereas the majority of Bach’s secular cantatas were written for specific political, academic or private festive occasions, which are emphasized by their texts, in the case of the ‘dramma per musica’ Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde no particular cata lyst is discernible. It may well be that Bach composed the piece on his own initiative, without an external incentive, especially because the message he conveys in the work can be understood as championing his own cause – a defence of his artistry and his musical attitudes against the trends of the time, against philistinism, superficiality of artistic judgement and an unquestioning preference for easy fare. The score and parts date from 1729. The introductory chorus urges the ‘whirling winds’ to withdraw to the ‘cave’ so that the music may remain undisturbed, suggesting that the music was performed in late summer or early autumn. According to the Aeneid by Virgil (70–19 BC) Aeolus, god of the winds, kept the powerful autumn storms captive in a cave, releasing them only when the time was right. Evidently the people of Leipzig were hoping for good weather for an outdoor performance. The work is remarkable for its opulent scoring, with no fewer than six vocal soloists, plus trumpets and timpani, flutes, oboes, strings and continuo. Bach had recently taken over leadership of the Leipzig Collegium musicum, founded by Telemann, and could evidently indulge himself. The libretto was by Bach’s regular and skilful collaborator, Picander (i.e. Christian Friedrich Henrici [1700–64)]. It alludes loosely to a famous episode from the Metamorphoses by Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD), describing a musical competition between two Greek gods. Pan, the god of shepherds and flocks and companion of the nymphs, with his own invention, the panpipes, challenges Phoebus (Apollo), the cithara-playing god of the arts, to a contest. They are accompanied by their seconds, the Lydian mountain god Tmolus and the Phrygian king Midas. Phoebus and Pan compete and, as might have been expected, Phoebus emerges victorious. Midas, however, had voted for Pan; and he is now punished by Phoebus, who gives him donkey ears. Picander’s libretto turns the instrumental competition into a singing contest. Two additional characters join in as well: Momus, the god of mockery, and Mercury, the versatile messenger of the gods, who as the patron of merchants was a familiar mythological figure in the trade fair city of Leipzig. To some extent it is these two characters who drive the action forwards. Bach divided up the vocal pitches into pairs. Momus and Mercury are allocated to the upper voices, soprano and alto; the ‘seconds’ Tmolus and Midas sing first and second tenor, and the protagonists Phoebus and Pan sing first and second bass. In the outer movements all six singers join in unison with the choir. In between there is a regular sequence of recitatives and arias, with one aria for each of the characters. In the magnificent opening chorus, Bach lets the winds ‘whirl’ in rapid triplet figures. The middle section of this da capo movement, however, is full of charming echo effects between the choir and the instruments. The plot per se begins in the first recitative with an argument between Phoebus and Pan, in which the latter boasts about his artistry. By doing so, however, he earns the scorn of Momus, both here and in the following aria (third movement), who calls out to the show-off: ‘Patron, das macht der Wind’ (‘My friend, this is just hot air’). In the following recitative (fourth movement) Mercury suggests a contest and asks the protagonists to choose their seconds. Phoebus begins the competition with a beautiful aria (fifth movement). The text is full of the tender longing with which Phoebus mourns for his friend Hyacinth, killed by Zephyrus out of jealousy. Bach put all of his artistry into this movement. The exquisite sonority of flute, oboe d’amore and muted strings is combined with an expression of wistful longing. It ticks all the boxes: expressive leaps of a sixth and seventh in the opening theme, sighing grace notes, caressing triplet and trill figures. This movement is a display of artistic emotion par excellence. Now Pan makes his appearance. His aria ‘Zu Tanze, zu Sprunge, so wackelt das Herz’ (‘Dancing and leaping sets the heart in motion’; seventh movement) is a rustic passepied, and forms a striking contrast to Phoebus’s aria: it is earthy and powerful. Bach makes the most of the ‘motion’ in musical terms, making it thoroughly comical. In the middle section of the aria, where – with a sidelong glance at Phoebus – the text mentions ‘laboured’ music, Bach introduces ‘laboured’ chromatic writing. Bach maybe somewhat biased, but he is not un fair: this movement is by no means lacking in artistry, and it comes as no surprise that Bach reused it some years later, with a new text (‘Dein Wachstum sei feste’/‘May your growth be strong’), in his Peasant Cantata, BWV 212. Mercury and Tmolus are in agreement (eighth movement): Phoebus has won, Pan has lost. Tmolus strikes up a song of praise (ninth movement) for Phoebus and the charm of his music. Bach set this movement most charmingly as a trio with obbligato oboe d’amore. In the middle section, to the words ‘aber wer die Kunst versteht’ (‘but whosoever understands the art’), he pointedly writes a canon between the voice and wind instrument. Now it is Midas’s turn to speak (tenth movement). He praises Pan, and the melodiousness and memorability of his song – with, unlike that of Phoebus, was not ‘gar zu bunt’ (‘all too colourful’) but rather ‘leicht und ungezwungen’ (‘approachable and unforced’). Midas, too, strikes up a song of praise (eleventh movement). This time, however, Bach has tinged the song with irony: when Midas refers to the evidence of his ‘beiden Ohren’ (‘two ears’ – with a long note on the syllable ‘oh’), Bach has the strings bray quietly like a donkey. In the following recitative (twelfth movement) Midas receives the punishment he deserves: donkey ears. And there is more mockery to follow: in Mercury’s aria (thirteenth movement) there is a mention of a ‘Schellenmütze’ (‘dunce’s cap’) that the Philistine Midas has earned. The final chorus praises the ‘Kunst und Anmut’ (‘art and charm’) of true music, and defends it against pedantry and derision. This is all part of the message Bach intended to convey. This is even clearer in the preceding recitative (fourteenth movement), when Momus tells Midas: ‘Du hast noch mehr dergleichen Brüder…’ (‘You have brothers of the same ilk. Ignorance and stupidity now wish to be wisdom’s neighbours, judgements are passed on the spur of the moment, and those who so do all belong in your society.’) This does not apply only to Midas, but also to critics of Bach and of his art. And the ending sounds as if Bach were trying to encourage himself: ‘Ergreife, Phoebus, deine Leier wieder…’ (‘Phoebus, now take up once more your lyre, nothing is more pleasurable than your songs.’) We do not know who or what prompted Bach in 1729 to wish to convey such a message. Later, though, he had ample cause to do so – in 1749 for example, when Johann Gottlieb Biedermann, headmaster of the grammar school in Freiberg, asserted that music was the ruin of youth. This caused outrage among musicians and strong invective, and Bach could not let it pass. For a revival of the cantata that year he smuggled the headmaster’s nickname, Birolius, and that of one of his supporters, into the final lines, which were changed to ‘Verdopple, Phoebus, nun Musik und Lieder, tobt gleich Birolius und ein Hortens darwider!’ (‘Redouble now, Phoebus, your music and songs, though Birolius and Hortensius rage against them!’) Auf, schmetternde Töne der muntern Trompeten, BWV 207a (Up, Strident Sounds of Cheerful Trumpets) Bach’s parody technique has various facets. The use of existing material offered him an opportunity for a renewed involvement with the work, and the chance to improve and refine it. A further strong incentive for Bach was the possibility of salvaging for posterity the artistic substance of secular occasional pieces, written for a single performance, by providing them with a new religious text and transforming them into religious compositions that could be reused every year in the context of church services. For Bach it was very appealing to take a work designed for a single use and bring it back to life in this way. And, not least, the parody technique offered practical advantages: the composer’s task could to some extent be confined to a few procedures such as substituting a new text, plus of course slight compositional changes and additions; and often the parts for the original version could be used again without extensive alterations. The cantata Auf, schmetternde Töne der muntern Trompeten is an example of the kind of parody in which Bach was clearly primarily concerned with practical considerations. In this form the cantata was prepared for the name day of the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland Augus tus III on 3rd August 1735. Bach based it on a cantata from 1726, Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten (United Division of Changing Strings), BWV207 [BIS-2001], written to congratulate the Leipzig academic Dr Gottlieb Kortte on taking up his law professorship. Most of the work in converting it into its new version for the royal name day fell to the – unknown – librettist. It was his task to imitate the metre and rhyme structure of the 1726 cantata text in a replacement, parallel text about the sovereign. Only in the wording of the three secco recitatives (second, fourth and sixth movements) did Bach allow the poet free rein to write something independent of the earlier version; movements of this kind are hard to parody effectively, and could in any case quickly be composed anew. The rest of the cantata – the opening and closing choruses, the arias and the single recitative with orchestral accompaniment (eighth movement) – received a new text. At times Bach’s librettist remained close to the original not just formally but also in terms of content, as is shown by a comparison of the opening lines. In both cases the cantata begins by calling upon the participating instruments to delight the listener with their music. The final chorus of the 1726 version started with ‘Kortte lebe, Kortte blühe!’ (‘Long live Kortte, may Kortte flourish!’); in the new version the wording is rather similar: ‘August lebe, lebe, König!’ (‘Long live Augustus, may the King live!). In the inner movements the poet has gone to a lot of trouble to capture in verse the virtues and achievements of the sovereign and the alleged enthusiasm of his subjects – with the exaggeration that was typical of the period. Although the reference to the instruments at the beginning of the cantata takes the existing music into account, there are otherwise – as one might expect – hardly any illustrative allusions. An exception to this is the newly composed tenor recitative ‘Die stille Pleiße spielt mit ihren kleinen Wellen’ (‘The calm river Pleiße plays with its little waves’; second movement), in which Bach imitates the wave motion of the river in the continuo. On the other hand, some musical images in the original piece have lost their textural context, but this seems not to have bothered Bach very much. This applies for example to the energetic dotted motif, repeating a single note, that the strings interject in the otherwise charming alto aria with flute ‘Preiset, späte Folgezeiten’ (‘Praise, later generations’; seventh movement). It has nothing to do with the new text, but plenty to do with the original one: ‘Ätzet dieses Angedenken in den härtsten Marmor ein!’ (‘Etch this remembrance into the hardest marble!’) – and the string motif depicts how the stonemason is already working on the marble with his hammer and chisel. Clearly Bach just trusted in the power of his music. We should not neglect to mention that Bach had already had recourse to existing and established music in the congratulatory score of 1726, which thus returns for a second time in the name day cantata. The opening chorus is a free arrangement of the third movement from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, BWV 1046, with the addition of the choir and with trumpets and timpani instead of horns. The ritornello that appears after the fifth movement also originates in the same concerto, where it was the third trio of the concluding minuet. Bach later added one more instrumental piece to the score – a march that does not appear in the original performance parts. Even if it is not part of the cantata, this march was probably performed in the context of the festivities surrounding the sovereign’s name day. © Klaus Hofmann 2016