Artistic Director Ryan James Brandau’s notes on Amor Artis’s October 30 program, Back to Bach

For decades, Amor Artis has welcomed the new calendar year with a New Year’s Eve Bach concert. Alas, the pandemic’s peaking at that very time, two years in a row, has silenced what had always been a high point in the season. Thus we’re more eager than ever to go back to Bach and share some of our favorite pieces to open our the 2022–2023 season.

We felt acutely the absence of Bach’s music in our lives because it represents the best our art has to offer. The surface of Bach’s music, whether a beautifully balanced solo melody or an intricate web of interlocking contrapuntal lines embroidered with elaborate detail, guides and delights the ear. And yet it’s the way that surface adorns a superbly fashioned harmonic architecture that makes Bach’s music strike us as so logical, inevitable, and ultimately satisfying. The sheer craft of it ranks among the world’s greatest artistic treasures. But we don’t just appreciate it on paper. Bach’s music demands the utmost from those who attempt to play and interpret it: We naturally revel in the heightened sense of execution the music demands, whether we’re performing it or listening to it; the challenge and complexity enrich the aesthetic experience. To see a Bach score on paper is to be dizzied by black ink; to hear a Bach score in the hands of experts is to be dazzled by the capabilities of the human mind and body. Two hundred and seventy years’ worth of musical and technological invention haven’t rendered the splendor of Bach’s creations any less brilliant.    

Part of the durability of Bach’s musical treasures, I think, is the way they transcend technique and engage us in multiple layers of meaning. Even in his purely instrumental music, Bach’s natural feel for musical rhetoric begets clear, incisive musical sentences and paragraphs worthy of the greatest orators. It sounds as if he’s trying to work through something with us, in conversation. The instrumental works reconcile staggering complexity with powerful simplicity, meticulous contrapuntal constructions with ornate melodies that nonetheless sound improvised. In his church music, where words provided the starting point, Bach often complemented the required biblical texts with additional poetic texts and aimed to illuminate and amplify their themes with his music. He was routinely drawn to theological concepts that reconcile seemingly opposite qualities in paradoxical oneness: infant and king, abasement and glory, exultation and humility. Those with spiritual compasses trained on Bach’s particular Lutheran theology will find deep resonance in his texted sacred music. Perhaps because his initial intent was to connect directly to his congregation (many of Bach’s sacred compositions were written, purposefully, in the vernacular, using hymn tunes well known by his congregation), they still manage to broadcast on universally recognizable frequencies. For listeners of all stripes, Bach’s compositions have the potential to conjure worlds beyond and entrance us into aesthetic reverie. Yet they never leave behind entirely their earthly humanness.

Whereas most of Bach’s cantatas were written for specific use in church services, the three on this afternoon’s program were potentially conceived for other occasions. The two choral cantatas come from the final years of Bach’s career. All three show the composer at the height of his technical and expressive power, contrasting astoundingly virtuosic brilliance and bravado with moments of exquisite tenderness, expertly exploring a panoply of instrumentations and textures. Gloria in Excelsis was created for Christmas celebrations at the University of Leipzig. The three movements comprising the cantata can all trace their roots (indeed, they’re nearly identical) to the analogous passages in Bach’s Missae of 1733. That source work, written in an attempt to secure a plum position at the Dresden court, aims to impress with opulence. Bach dispatches the trumpet and drum corps (usually reserved for special civic occasions) and a choral texture enriched by a fifth voice (here a fiendishly challenging second soprano part) in jumpy fanfares and acrobatic fugues, balanced in the middle movement by the more translucent color evoked by muted violins, flutes, and pizzicato cellos and basses accompanying an elegant duet for soprano and tenor.

O Ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe (Oh Eternal Fire, Oh Source of Love) repurposes a cantata written for a wedding into one for Pentecost. The burning love expressed in the text (“Oh eternal fire, oh source of love, ignite our hearts and consecrate them. Let heavenly flames penetrate and surge over us”) applies equally well to blissful newlyweds or zealous apostles, tongues aflame. Either way, Bach summons some of his most shapely music, at once vigorous and refined, reflecting fire and love with equal intensity. Here, too, flutes and muted strings, with alto solo, create an otherworldly moment of repose in the heart of the work.

The provenance of Jauchzet Gott in allen Länden is less clear. The soprano part was presumably too difficult for a boy soprano in the church to manage, so it’s possible that it was written as a showpiece for a female soprano (perhaps Anna Magdalena Bach, a professional singer and Bach’s second wife) to sing elsewhere. Few cantatas offer such a comprehensive compendium of Bach’s various compositional modes: a fireworks show for soprano and trumpet, a beautifully humble and tender accompanied recitative, an aria affording the soprano and cello a spotlight duet dance, a chorale fantasia, and more. 

As our all-Bach programs have in the past, today’s concert also features Bach’s magnificent instrumental music. Before securing a major appointment in the court at Weimar (1708 –1717), Bach had been something of a maverick, holding several positions for short periods while gaining notice as an organ virtuoso. He had lost both parents by age ten, and his provincial education did not include worldly travels. Fortunately, Bach’s brother Johann Christoph exposed him to the music of French masters. In addition, Bach doggedly copied out the works of Italian masters like Corelli, Torelli, and Vivaldi. Bach would soon put this new knowledge to good use after landing an appointment in the court of Prince Leopold at Cöthen (1717 –1723), who loved music and supported a skilled group of instrumentalists for whom Bach would write a large number of secular works, including the Concerto for Two Violins. This composition makes clear that Bach not only assimilated the Italian concerto style but put his own mark on it. While his Brandenburg Concertos colorfully pit different kinds of instruments against each other, here he works only with strings. The essence of the concerto style is the interplay between the soloist (or in this case, soloists) and the group (the ripieni). Bach’s inventive combinations and laser-cut counterpoint, three hundred years old, are as captivating now as they surely were then. The interdependence of the individual lines is, to me, the most beautiful part: They wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying without rubbing up against and crossing over the others. Though elsewhere Bach would write beautifully for solo violin without accompaniment elsewhere, here he embarks on a different project, fashioning a bustling, cooperative community in music.

Having faced difficult decisions from unforeseen challenges in the last few years, I’ve been reminded that, though he sought fervently to compose music worthy of the glory of God, Bach was, of course, just a human being who, despite his otherworldly gifts, had to deal with the ups and downs of work, children, finances, and illness (Bach lost his first wife, and only ten of his twenty children survived to adulthood). How fortunate we are that that differential seemed to light the “eternal fire” ever-burning within him and replenish his “source of love.” And how fortunate for Amor Artis that you have chosen to be a part of this community. Music is everywhere in our lives these days (for better or worse!), literally at our fingertips. We can cue up just about anything in an instant, but it seems harder and harder to do so without distraction and noise, aural, visual, or mental. The decision to attend a live concert signals a willingness to engage with more complex musical ideas and to become a participant in a longer, more nuanced exchange. Pausing together, to seek the best our art has to offer—by collaborating as players, singers, and listeners—is a precious, important act, and we’re grateful you’ve helped make it possible.