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  42:3 (01-02 /2019)
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This is the 10th and final volume in Masaaki Suzuki’s survey of Bach’s secular cantatas. If you’ve collected one or more of the previous releases, you’ll know what to expect. I’ve reviewed a number of those earlier volumes and have expressed my likes and dislikes about them. Mostly, I think, the latter has outweighed the former.
 

My main dislike is largely personal and subjective, and may therefore be ignored if you’re not of similar mind. The substitution of a countertenor (in this case, Robin Blaze) for a female alto is not to my taste. There may be a place for the countertenor in music history, but it’s assuredly not in Bach. Moreover, if the rationalization for using a countertenor in Bach’s 18th-century German choral tradition is that female vocalists were verboten, and that only men and boys were allowed, then what is the rationalization for using a female soprano soloist (in this case, Carolyn Sampson) and female sopranos and altos in the choir? One final point on this matter: These are Bach’s secular cantatas. Even if the case can be made that only men and boys sang in the composer’s church cantatas, it’s hard to imagine that Bach wouldn’t have employed female singers for these non-church works, some of which, like the “Coffee” Cantata, were written purely for entertainment purposes. Can you visualize the part of the rebellious, coffee-guzzling daughter being sung by a 10-year-old boy?
 

A second dislike I’ve mentioned in reviewing prior albums in this series has been the stray out of tune and sour note emanating from the period instrument orchestra. But these are few and far between. On the whole, Suzuki’s Bach’s Collegium Japan instrumentalists are well-tempered.

According to the album note for the present volume, Bach’s cantata, Angenehmes Wiederau, freue dich in deinen Auen, BWV 30a, may have been intended as a bromide for “the contented man,” but it gave Bach very little contentment. For starters, the libretto he had to deal with was a patchwork cobbled together from the verses of more than one hand, and the text could serve as the brochure for a retirement home in which the ever-smiling residents are kept in a permanent state of serenity by regular doses of happy pills. The cantata was composed in 1737 for the wealthy landowner Johann Christian von Hennicke, who had recently purchased an estate at Wiederau, not far from Leipzig. The Wiederau manor, became the “happy house” to which Hennicke repaired and spent his days, as the cantata’s verses suggest, extolling the virtues of being content just to be content. I suddenly felt an urge to dig out my DVD of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

As Klaus Hofmann’s liner note observes, “Bach cannot have been especially happy with this text as a whole. It is not just that the theme of ‘contentment’ is worn thin by the length of the text; in addition, the strophic poetry that dominates the additions to Hunold’s original libretto proved hard to combine with the modern recitative and aria forms.” Long story short, Bach’s musical response did not make for one of his more winning cantatas. But never one to waste music he’d already composed, Bach adapted practically the entirety of the score to his later sacred cantata Freue dich, erlöste Schar, BWV 30.2, formerly cataloged as BWV 30.

Ich bin in mir vergnügt, BWV 204, composed to a text by Christian Friedrich Hunold, dates from 1726–27. The occasion for which it was written is unknown, but its verses, like those of BWV 30a, deal with the feelings of well-being and contentment one experiences in just letting the world go by. Here are some of the more choice verses:
 

“I am content in myself,

May someone else indulge in fancies,

But thereby he will not

Fill his bag, nor his stomach.”

“I’m not boasting about myself,

A fool shakes his bells;

I just remain still,

Timid dogs bark.”

“My passion is

To control my passion;

I fear no distress,

Do not ask after pointless things.”

 

You get the picture—just biding one’s time in God’s waiting room. Were it not for the fact that Bach chose to exercise his own passion and provide this Weltschmerz-like text with music that is very much alive to the promise of industry and achievement, this cantata could have ended up on suicide watch. But in an aria like “Die Schätzbarkeit der weiten Erden,” so beautifully sung by soprano Carolyn Sampson, Bach manages to endow the words of the living dead with music of life-giving force. As was his custom, Bach once again made good, and in this case, better, use of the music he’d composed for BWV 204, when only a year later he recycled some of it for Vergnügte PleißenStadt, BWV 216.1 (formerly BWV 216), a cantata for the wedding of Johann Heinrich Wolff and Susanna Regina Hempel.
 

Done with Bach’s sacred and secular cantatas, and having recorded the composer’s Mass in B Minor and Magnificat, the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, the Missae breves, the motets, the Christmas and Easter Oratorios, and a dozen other smaller stand-alone sacred choral works, Suzuki would seem to have exhausted Bach’s contributions to that body of work. But as a keyboard artist and orchestral conductor, Suzuki has also given us Bach’s harpsichord concertos and practically the entirety of the composer’s solo keyboard output (suites, partitas, Goldberg Variations, WTC I and II, etc.); and as conductor, he has led his Bach Collegium Japan in the orchestral overtures (aka, suites).

I think it’s fair to say that Suzuki’s Bach will be an enduring legacy for the ages. As I’ve made clear, I don’t necessarily agree with every one of Suzuki’s artistic/interpretive decisions, and there are other performances of these secular cantatas I prefer, namely those by Helmuth Rilling and the Stuttgart Bach Collegium, but Suzuki’s conclusion of this secular cantata survey is to be applauded and appreciated. If you collected the previous nine volumes, you obviously cannot be without this one to complete the set.

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