BWV 1 — Andy

Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern

Danny stole my thunder by tackling the first—hrm, is movement really what we want to call the sections of a cantata? I guess that will work for now. I’m mostly going to talk about the aria and let’s be honest, about the oboe da caccia part.

First though I wanted to share something I noticed about the opening chorus, which is how Italianate it is. Here you can really hear the influence of Vivaldi on Bach (Bach’s knowledge of Vivaldi is unquestioned—he transcribed several Vivaldi concerti for various keyboard instruments). Listen to the sixteenth-note string passages throughout the movement—for the most part they consist of a single central pitch decorated by neighbor tones and stretches by third or fourth to the other chord tones for the prevailing harmony. Compare this with a typical Vivaldi ritornello:

Certainly I don’t claim that Vivaldi or even the Italians had a lease on this style (it’s quite familiar to me from many classical oboe concertos), al though there is something especially Italian about it. It’s a sort of faux-complexity — lots of notes to make forward motion, but those notes are pretty much just riffs on a single pitch.

Bach is a big deal in the oboe world — in our standard set of excerpt books, we have four volumes: classical lit, romantic, modern, and Bach. In general there isn’t much chamber or solo music for oboe from the romantic period, although there’s many juicy orchestral parts. There is however, Bach. Reams of it. Most of the cantatas include at least one oboe part, as well the masses, passions, and other vocal works. There are also several concerti and sonati. For me personally, I’d rather have the Bach than the romantics. No hating on Romantics here — I like both — but as you can see from the Aria in this cantata, the parts are usually very expressive, exposed, and rather florid and therefore wonderful to play. When I think of the poor clarinet (sorry Danny!) and the complete absence of baroque literature for them to play—well, I almost pity them. Almost.

This oboe part is pretty typical and actually I realized listening to this that I had played it before. But what is, you might ask, an oboe da caccia? Literally it means oboe of the hunt and indeed these instruments resemble the horns used in hunts and played on horseback. It has, as you can hear if you’re listening to a period performance, a more brassy and perhaps aggressive sound than the modern oboe and since it was pitched in F, it’s usually replaced by the English horn (also in F) in modern performances. You can listen to Sand Dalton, probably the finest American maker of baroque oboes and such, play one here. If anyone out there is feeling particularly generous, I’d love to own one.

The floridity of the line in this cantata could be intended to depict the “divine flames of heaven” from the text, but general I think there is little evidence of such a crude literalism. I can say from experience that if you make that generalization about this particular cantata and this particular oboe da caccia part, you’ll have to make a similar claim for pretty much all the cantatas that have oboe. In general, I think Bach’s motives were probably more solely musical—here as in most of the Bach arias with obbligati, the solo instrumental line provides the contrapuntal contrast to the solo vocal line. If you compare the two lines, you will likely notice that one tends to be more active when the other is static.

As Danny and I work through all 209 or so (!) cantatas in Bach’s ouevre I suspect you will hear much more about my opposition to “symbolistic” interpretation of musical lines in general (see “crude literalism” above). For now, I leave you with a sense of gratitude—how fantastically lucky are we to even have 209 such pieces to explore!