CantataFest: Celebrating the church gig that J.S. Bach spun into gold

Johann Sebastian Bach might be best-known for big works like his epic Mass in B minor, his oratorios about the last days of Jesus Christ’s life, the Brandenburg Concertos, the orchestral suites, the Well-tempered Clavier, and of course the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But if you want to understand what Bach’s life was like as a working musician, and the religious faith that motivated him, his 200-plus surviving cantatas are the place to start. And WETA VivaLaVoce is playing all of them during March, to celebrate the month of his birth.

Our CantataFest web page will list featured cantatas every weekday. You’ll hear one every other hour from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. The only exception is March 21, Bach’s birthday, when we’ll play his larger choral works instead. If you want to follow along—and we recommend that you do—there’s a wonderful Bach Cantatas Website with texts and translations.

Bach was the church music director in Leipzig, Germany, from 1723 until his death in 1750. That meant he had to compose, rehearse and perform new music every week for Lutheran services at the St. Thomas and St. Nicholas churches. His music also made it to two other smaller churches in the city. 

Imagine writing 20-30 minutes of choral or solo vocal music, with orchestra, in time for each Sunday service—plus special compositions for major holidays like Christmas and Easter, and other church feast days. He rehearsed them with a boys’ choir and some professional instrumentalists, performed them on Sundays with the addition of adult tenors and basses, and then started a new piece each Monday. The choir at St. Thomas was typically about 50 men and boys in all. (Women were not allowed to perform in Leipzig’s churches at the time. Mercifully, that time has passed.)

“Five full annual cycles of church pieces”

Bach was devoutly religious, so it was a labor of love, but it must also have been a series of crazy, exhausting fire drills. He wrote more than 300 cantatas, most of them in the space of three or four years; one-third are lost to history. His obituary, written by one of his students and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, mentioned “five full annual cycles of church pieces, for all the Sundays and holidays.” Only three of those cycles survived intact. Each one consists of about 60 cantatas.

The cycles matched the Lutheran Church’s annual rotation of scriptures and lessons. Each year focused on lessons from a different Gospel. Eventually the whole cycle would restart in Advent, about a month before Christmas. And as with the Rhine River in Wagner’s Ring cycle, the action brings you right back where you started. That means Bach composed vocal music in Leipzig for every service in the church’s near and long-term futures. He wrote a small number of cantatas in cities where he worked earlier in life, and he spent six years in the service of the 25-year-old prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, a Calvinist whose court had a need for exactly zero sacred vocal music—just instrumental pieces.

So the big church gig in Leipzig was the break Bach had been waiting for. He wanted to write functional music that could muscle its way into Lutheran services and alter the relationship between liturgy and music. Each sacred cantata was written for a specific date in a specific church to deliver a specific message. It was performed, put away for a few years, and then brought back when the church cycle demanded it again. Music for holidays like Easter Sunday never gets old, after all, like this well-known cantata called Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4 (“Christ lay in death’s bonds”).

Bach Cantatas 101

Let’s back up a bit: What exactly is a cantata? I’m glad you asked. The word comes from the Italian “cantare,” which means “to sing.” Cantata means sung, just like sonata means “sounded” or “played” (instruments only, please) and toccata means “touched”: Lightning-fast organ music means you have enough time to just barely touch each key. 

The cantata emerged in the 17th century as a musical form that blended scripture or poetry, or both with instrumental music. But it’s not an oratorio. (Those are much longer, like Handel’s Messiah or Mendelssohn’s Elijah.) And it’s not an opera: There are no costumes, sets, staging, characters or drama. Think of it as a medium-length, multiple-movement narrative piece of church music for voices and instruments. Some of these movements have become concert pieces on their own. The beloved “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is a wedding ceremony staple rivaled only by Johann Pachelbel’s infernal Canon in D. The wedding guests would never know the lilting melody and the walking bass line come from a cantata called Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147 (“Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life”).

A typical sacred Bach cantata is 6-8 movements long and starts with a grand choral movement introducing a theme from the week’s scripture reading, always with orchestra. There are some fugues in these openers, like the one that begins, with no fanfare, the cantata Es ist ein trotzig und verzagt Ding, BWV 176 (“There is something defiant and despairing”). I don’t know of many church choirs that could learn this music from scratch in the space of a few days and then crush it on Sunday. It’s Bach at his most inventive, especially with laser-detailed counterpoint—multiple musical lines dancing around each other like threads in a tapestry. Each line has its own identity, but the conversation going on is complex and produces all sorts of musical colors as the weave gets tighter and tighter.

After the first chorus, the structure of a Bach cantata unfolds a lot like a mini-opera. We hear “recitative” singing that moves the story forward and outlines the theological lesson. It’s usually bare-bones: often just a solo singer, a cello, and an organ. Arias and duets come along to capture emotional moments in time, with music that’s meant to be reflective, not big and preachy. And yes, this is baroque music, so there’s no shortage of expressive ornaments and intricate parts for a solo instrument like a violin or oboe, and for solo singers, too. The instrument usually intertwines with the voice. It’s cooperative, like chamber music. When it works, the result can read like minor-key anguish, or like tenderness, serenity or joy. It’s Bach painting with every color, in three-dimensional auditory space.

The final movement of a Bach sacred cantata, called a chorale, is an exclamation point in four-part harmony with a melody that the worshipers would often know. (Bach based many of them on common hymns.) This often turned into a church singalong.

Sleepers Awake!

Let’s take a moment and see how this model worked in one of Bach’s best-known cantatas, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140 (“Wake up, the voice calls to us”). It’s based on a three–verse hymn of the same name that drew its lyrics from a parable in the Gospel of Matthew. The parable is about 10 virgins, five wise and five foolish, waiting for a bridegroom who symbolizes Christ.

The opening chorus is an electrifying wake-up call for the five wise virgins who packed enough oil for their lamps: He’s here! (The five who didn’t plan ahead are out shopping for oil when the bridegroom arrives.) Bach based the chorus on the first verse of the hymn, but we get rhythmic urgency from French-sounding double-dotted notes and a melody that climbs and alarms like a rising siren. There’s also a funky, almost jazzy Alleluia. 

Then Bach writes a tender duet between soprano and bass soloists, representing the human soul in a conversation with Jesus. A solo violin plays right along with them in a wandering melody that’s a picture of the soul’s inherent grace, floating over a steady bass line. The conductor John Eliot Gardiner has said he hears the arabesques as an illustration of flickering oil lamps. Bach wrote the solo part for a violino piccolo—a tiny violin meant to make high notes easier to play. They’re exceedingly rare today, but modern violinists have no problem sliding up the fingerboard stratosto pheric registers. 

There’s a bonus choral movement based on the hymn’s second verse, but it’s the melody Bach writes for the strings that steals all the thunder. You’ll recognize it when you hear it. 

Now Christ and the soul come back for what would fairly be described as a love duet from a Baroque opera. The bridegroom is a stand-in for Jesus, after all, and the soprano is the bride. Bach even used some harmonic shifts associated with real love duets, dropping in unexpected musical “suspensions” to heighten the tension. The final chorale is based on the hymn’s third verse.

That’s just one cantata. Bach probably spent no more than four days writing it. 

Simeon’s Solo Cantata

On the other end of the spectrum from the giant choral works are solo cantatas. No choir. Just one singer and a small orchestra. A great example is the cantata Ich habe genug, BWV 82 (“I have enough”). It’s sung from the perspective of Simeon, a character in the Gospel of Luke. 

Bach wrote this piece for Candlemas, a Christian feast day that comes 40 days after Christmas. Candlemas commemorates Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the temple to be circumcised. Simeon, a devout old man, is there. He has received a message from the Holy Spirit saying that he would see the Savior with his own eyes before he died. He holds up the Christ child and tells God: 

You may now dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations. A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel.

The cantata wraps it up in three short words that don’t appear in the scripture but capture what must have been in Simeon’s deep breath: “I have enough.” The candles lit during a Candlemas service are an illustration of the “light” in his prayer. 

Bach writes three arias and two recitatives (those half-speaking, half-singing portions), all in Simeon’s voice. And each of the arias includes Simeon saying he’s ready to die a happy man. 

1. “I have enough! I have taken the savior, the hope of the righteous, into my eager arms. I have enough! I have seen him. My faith has pressed Jesus to my heart. Now I want, this very day, to depart from here joyfully. I have enough!”
2. “Fall asleep, you weary eyes, close softly and pleasantly! World, I will not stay here any longer; I own no part of you that could matter to my soul. Here, I must build up misery. But there, there I will see sweet peace, quiet rest.”
3. “I delight in my death. Ah, if only it were here already! Then I will emerge from all the suffering that still binds me to the world.”

The second aria, Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen (”Fall asleep, you weary eyes”), is particularly famous because Bach stops and starts the music more than listeners expect. The point of the aria is to appreciate the moments in life, even near death, when forward motion stops and silence clears the mind. It’s the last thing you expect to hear at a concert. But don’t think of the pauses and delays as an unsteady old man at the end of his life. It’s a beautiful cleansing of chaos.

The Sacred and the Secular

It’s important to notice that Bach tells the Simeon story without quoting the Gospel of Luke at all. Most of the “libretti,” the German texts, came from poets and other creative writers who didn’t waste words repeating what anyone else said—not even the son of God. Bach wrote the texts for about 30 of his cantatas, but even he didn’t add layers of scripture.

These cantatas aren’t the Bible. They’re musical sermons that the congregation could absorb easily and meditate on. And this music wasn’t an intermission from sermons and sacraments: It was an integral part of Sunday services. The range of human emotions runs from bottomless sorrow like in Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12 (“Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing”) to transcendent joy in Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, BWV 51 (“Rejoice with God in every land”), depending on the lesson from the pulpit.

Most of Bach’s cantatas are religious, but he wrote about 20 secular cantatas for weddings, birthdays, and big events attended by the nobility. There’s even a “Coffee Cantata” written for performance at the Café Zimmermann in Leipzig. Bach saw the cafe as a live-music venue, hosting or performing in more than 600 public concerts there with the Collegium Musicum, an organization that Georg Philipp Telemann founded while he was in law school. Tickets to the weekly Friday night events were always free. The cafe’s owner, Gottfried Zimmermann, saw it as a way to sell more coffee—which was an expensive delicacy in the 1730s. Today there’s a hotel where Café Zimmermann once stood on Katharinenstraße. Allied bombers destroyed the storied building during World War II.

No church. Just a coffeehouse. This was Bach—yes, Bach!—presenting art as entertainment, and some of his secular cantatas are lovely and hilarious. The Coffee Cantata, Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211 (“Keep silent, don't chatter”) is about a man who tries to cure his daughter’s coffee addiction. I’m not making that up. There’s dialogue and catchy tunes. It’s almost like a scene from a comic opera. Bach led performances of his A Minor violin concerto, BWV 141, at Café Zimmermann, and it’s likely his orchestral suite #2 was written for a concert there. It’s the lightest and most festive of the four suites, and probably sounded like “popular” music at the time.

But what does it mean? 

We hope you enjoy the month-long CantataFest. Whether or not you share Johann Sebastian Bach’s deep faith, there’s a lot to love about these pieces. Most of them provide mashups of the precise and the uncontrolled. The architecture of Bach’s cantatas is full of intricate patterns and rock-steady hymn tunes. But the human experience he captured more than 300 times—in suffering and doubt, joy and hope, is intense and sincere. 

The cantatas are the main road into the life of Bach’s intellectual and religious mind. His super powers were harmony and invention. German chorales, Italian opera structures and French dances combine in more or less equal parts, and the combination is unmistakably Bach. The emotions swing from exuberance to melancholy and back again, described in musical language that needs no words at all. 

He writes about hope and the trumpets lift listeners to the heavens. He writes about fear and the strings tremble. Suffering brings dissonant notes seemingly out of nowhere. Bach faced enormous personal tragedy in his life. His first wife died suddenly, and he buried many of his 20 children. The angst lodged in much of his music, but nowhere as firmly as in his cantatas. 

Bach turned his church gig into something timeless three centuries ago. It doesn’t take any specialized musical knowledge to appreciate these masterworks. Just sit back, lower the lights, and let the music wash over you.