BWV 3
Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid
Well, I’m back in Madison and that means I’m back in the saddle with no recourse to excuses about why I haven’t listened to my weekly dose of Bach. It’s even more imperative that I write this week as Andy is out with a case of “having a good relationship with his mom who is visiting.” Hopefully I can fill this space until he’s free again.
When we first started listening to these cantatas I was primarily blown away by Bach’s writing for larger forces. As we move forward, however, my appreciation of his arias and duets is starting to grow. BWV makes it easy of course with a bass aria that absolutely shreds (he must have got hold of a great bass for this one) and a soprano/alto duet that is, as a listener as much as a composer, to die for.
I’ll start with the duet. As just a listener it’s pure pop for me: great lines for both voices, steady accompaniment that keeps moving thanks to the syncopation, and a harmonic world that stays unresolved while still feeling somewhat “homey.” After listening with a score at my side I found myself learning a good lesson, as a composer, about stretching one’s materials. Rather than write new material for each sung phrase, Bach becomes a master recycler. He relies on the timbral and registral differences between alto and soprano to cloud the fact they basically just swap two melodies back and forth. They sing each phrase of the poem twice and trade off the second time through each phrase. In the theory nerd world, this is called invertible counterpoint, and it’s very clever, economical, and tricky to pull of right. Not only that, but the melody for the second phrase of the poem is largely just a transposition of the first phrase’s melody into a minor key! This is saving Bach a lot of work and having the two voices work in this way is sort of an abstract illustration of the text he’s setting (I only noticed the inversion at the line about crosses), which I point out just to make Andy a little peeved at my fixation on text painting:
He also does this in his bass aria, most strikingly to the melisma that is sung on the word “fruedenhimmel,” which Google tells me means Joy Sky (translations say Heaven of Joy). I can’t help but hear the transposition of this solo from major to minor as a sort of commentary on the melody and text. Even though modulation from major to minor is arguably part of the bedrock of tonal music, the fact that his chosen text is so concerned with the constancy of Jesus carrying one through tough times does lend a poetic quality to Bach’s choice to transpose his melodies more or less wholesale. The saving force for the author is as constant as the basic melodic shape, despite the tonal context.
The last thing I want to mention doesn’t have to do with Bach himself. I purchased a recording, by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, of BWV 1-14. When you get to BWV 3 it actually replaces the first movement with a recording of BWV 58, which shares the same text, but has very different music. I don’t know why Harnoncourt would have done this, but maybe Andy take a shot.
