BWV 2
Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein
As Andy’s already mentioned, I’m currently of traipsing across the country from Madison to Boston. While it’s been a lot of fun so far, I’ve had spotty access to the internet and to time to write and listen (a car travelling on the highway is far less conducive to Baroque music than I thought!). However, I’ve had a bit of a break today and hopefully I can cover the bits of this cantata that stuck out to me.
Now, I’m listening to these cantatas without much knowledge of the genre. Each one reveals a bit more about how cantatas, in general, work. Rather than making me think about Bach or cantatas specifically, however, BWV 2 has caused me to reflect on how pieces of music can be a way for composers and listeners to interact with history. This cantata is based on an older Lutheran hymn from which this cantata takes its name. As Andy has already done a good job of pointing out, the degree to which this cantata draws from the source material would make modern copyright lawyers tear out their hair. But Bach doesn’t just use this melody as a source of smaller-scale motives, in the first and last movements he uses the melody as a the backbone of entire movements.
In the first movement, underneath a wash of imitation, the core melody can be heard snaking its way through the altos in long tones. On the one hand, the long tones mean that the melody and text can be heard clearly, but on the other hand, the alto voice is hardly the most prominent in a choir. This technique of building a larger scale structure out of a slightly modified, preexisting melody that sits in an inner voice seems, to me at least, to be a reference to the much older technique of cantus firmus writing. Bach is here taking part in a centuries-old tradition of simultaneously expanding and, in a way, commenting on pre-existing musical materials; a tradition that stretches forward into our own time, most directly, in the forms of the contrafact, remix, and mash-up.
In the final movement, Bach recycles the Lutheran hymn in a different way, but one that’s more familiar: re-harmonization. Leaving the core melody basically untouched, but putting it in the high voices, Bach provides a novel bass line and harmonic progression. It doesn’t seem like anything too remarkable. To my ears, though, it reveals how different the harmonic sensibilities can be across the composer of the original tune, Bach, and the listener. The key signature claims the piece is in D minor and the final couple of bars show Bach trying very hard to make it so, but I can’t hear this chorale as anything other than a tune in G minor that ends with a half cadence (which would be truly striking). The “problem” probably arises because the original tune is in a phrygian mode based on A. Because of the way this mode is constructed, with a flat second scale degree and flat leading tone, it doesn’t naturally play nicely with Bach’s model of tonality. To get around this, Bach changes the key from A phrygian to D minor, which should work because both scales have the same notes. It doesn’t come off perfectly, however, because melodies in a phrygian mode tend to spend a lot of time moving around the flattened leading tone (in this case G) and so Bach’s harmonization emphasizes G minor more strongly than D. To his contemporaries this might have sounded perfectly D minor-y, but to someone with two hundred more years of tonal music floating around, it sounds unresolved. Just as the phrygian mode would’ve sounded rough to Bach’s audiences, this harmonization now sounds incomplete.
Maybe all that sounds like I’m saying Bach didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t want to give that impression; I rather like the way this cantata ends. Instead, I want to try to point out how his re-harmonization of the Lutheran hymn reveals how Bach and his contemporaries heard harmony and melody, and that how we hear those things can be very different even though Bach was instrumental in constructing our current understanding of harmony. Engaging with this music doesn’t involve simply dealing with the piece itself, but also the music that preceded it and the music that came after. That’s the real pleasure of hearing and learning musics that have robust traditions.
