BWV 1 — Danny
Wie Schoen leuche der Morgenstern
I’ll be honest, Andy: I had to listen to this three times before I began to hear anything more than warm waves of aural gold; to tease apart the sinuous streams of melody and the subtle treatment of the text. That’s the effect of a lot of Baroque music on my ears and I suppose that’s the point. Once unraveled, however (and once the lyrics were in English!), I could finally start to appreciate the craft lying beneath this first cantata.
What struck me most about this cantata, and I imagine this will be common to a lot of the works in this series, is the way Bach uses instruments and the voice, separately and in unison. This is partly due to the remarkable blending effects achieved in the recording I listened to (the brass and sopranos seriously blow me away every time I hear them), and partly due to something I remember Steve Reich saying about Bach’s instrumentation in an interview I once read. In the interview, Reich pointed out that when writing for voice with instruments, Bach tends to double the voice, which has to effects: it helps the singer to be more confident, but it also produces a wholly unique timbre. In this cantata it’s most pronounced in the first movement, a chorale, with the following lyrics:
Now, in these lyrics we’re dealing with imagery that’s not particularly easy to tie to sound: and rays of light and genealogy, but there is a thread of abundance running through all of it and Bach captures it using this doubling technique. Each line of the text is sung in long tones, two or six beats (depending on your ears) per syllable, and the voice is doubled by the brass. Underneath this soaring line the other voices in the choir generate lush textures by singing imitative lines. The effect is an illustration, in sound, not only of the radiance of a “morning star,” but also of the sublimity of loving and being loved by a god…or at least the sublimity that one’s church hopes you might feel.
So, if you were to ask me whether I considered this doubling choice a technical crutch for the performers, or if I take as a clever text-paint-y orchestrational technique, I would have to go with the latter. The next four movements reveal the considerable skill that Bach’s singers had. They’re all, literally, operatic and reveal that there was no technical need to double any of the singers. In fact, the next longest movement of the entire cantata is an aria for solo tenor (I do find it funny that a text about praising god without end is also given the second longest movement of the entire work). The fact of the matter is that Bach apparently had quite a bit of lattitude in regards to his orchestration and could afford to be choosy in his writing. At least for me, this contrasts with a perception that he wrote more at the whim of his circumstances and, perhaps, had to dumb down his writing for larger forces. Now I realize that’s just been immense ignorance on my part.
Next week I’ll try to pull something from a later movement in the cantata I cover, but that first movement was truly eye opening for me.
