BWV 194, Reformation Sunday

It seems that of all the days on the liturgical calendar when a perverse Lutheran blogger should post, Reformation Sunday would be at the top of the list. 

Or perversely, perhaps not, but here I am, laptop on my knees, blog open in the browser, blank space on the screen.

I sat outside to eat my lunch in the warm and colorful October sun this afternoon, and then stayed in my chair, at the patio table littered with golden maples leaves, to finish the novel I've been reading "Leaving the Atocha Station," by Ben Lerner. My red wool sweater was just warm enough on this bright afternoon, and the number of pages left in the book just enough to fill up the minutes until it was time to return to church for a pre-service rehearsal for Bach Cantata Vespers. Now, in the evening, in the living room, my bare feet are craving the afternoon sunshine and warmth. Next Sunday, on All Saints, it will be dark already at 5 o'clock in the afternoon

This afternoon's cantata, at Grace Lutheran in River Forest, was not "Ein Feste Burg" or "Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schield," cantatas composed for Reformation Day. Instead we sang the festive "Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest," first performed for the dedication of a church renovation and a new organ in a small town near Leipzig in early November of 1723. If you'd like to know more about the cantata, you're welcome to read the bulletin notes (written by me last weekend).

It's quite the cantata -- lots of inventive dance-like music for happy people celebrating something. It was an eye-popping afternoon in the soprano section. The organ in this small town was tuned quite low, and the soprano part in the chorus, already pretty high no matter how you tune the organ, had some high C's, which did not have to be quite so high back in 1723.

When I was studying the cantata last week, I imagined a little domestic drama around it. The music comes from a secular work performed at the Court of Köthen, where Bach was music director before taking up the church musician job in Leipzig. Someone (couldn't track down who) has suggested that Anna Magdalena sang the solos in the 1723 church performance outside Leipzig, just as she may have sung the soprano solos in a performance of the early work in Köthen. This makes sense -- maybe Bach wrote this music with her voice in mind. It's not easy, and there's a lot of it. The duet with the bass goes on and on. Give the woman a chance to sing it again!

Anna Magdalena was a salaried court singer when she married JSB in 1721 at the age of 20. He was a widower, 16 years older than she was. Her first child, a daughter, Christiana, had been born in the spring of 1723 (and died in 1726). Women were not allowed to sing publicly in churches in Leipzig, so the move to Leipzig put an end to Anna Magdalena's singing outside her home, though perhaps that was inevitable after marriage and children; she became the household manager and a mother to stepchildren as well as 13 babies of her own. Only six of them survived to adulthood.

Here, on this day, in this place, in this music, in between pregnancies, she had a chance to shine. She sang an aria and a duet with the bass. Before the duet there's a dialogue recitative, in which the bass asks lots of questions about faith and the soprano has all the reassuring theological answers. If you were making a movie about the first performance of BWV 194 (a prequel to my romcom about BWV 197) this duet could be a way to show the relationship between the Great Composer and his young wife -- he setting her up to look good, she inspiring the music. He wanting to please the young wife, she with the capacity to please and cheer. In other scenes perhaps we'd see her chafing under the demands of running a household full of children and students, or working through the minefield of establishing her authority as mistress, while having to lean on the domestic experience of the sister of Bach's first wife, who remained part of the household. Does the movie end happily, with her far away from the kitchen, working as a copyist and singing to herself alongside Bach and his students in his workroom? And what about that famous Notebook?

Who knows? But I would insist that the scene where she sings the music of Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest be lit with golden filters and shot in the fall, with church windows open to an autumn forest, deep, brilliant and elegiac.