During his long career as a church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a handful of motets for elaborate funerals. These beloved yet challenging works, set primarily to scriptural texts rather than new poetry, tend to drive home singular messages with incessant text repetition: “Sing to the Lord,” “Come, Jesus, come,” or in the case of the work that opens this program: “Fear not, I am with you.” With that reassuring phrase firmly in mind, we embark on a new season devoted to various Twists of Fate that are by turns heartwarming and harrowing.  

Though Bach created Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir for a memorial service, we know neither for whom nor when it was first performed. The work is cast in two sections, both of which feature the opening Biblical imperative (from Isaiah 41:10 and 43:1); the second adds a complementary chorale text from Paul Gerhardt, a 17th-century theologian and hymn writer. Bach delivers his scripture with characteristic flair, alternating between two choirs of four very active voices each. An ambitious fugue follows, now in four instead of eight independent parts. Its twistingly chromatic ideas provide urgent background for the chorale tune and text, which rings out at the top of an unusually busy texture, even for Bach. Tonight’s performance adds instruments to the vocal lines, following common practice for such pieces in the 18th century.  

Concerts in coffee houses and other non-liturgical spaces in Bach’s day often featured an overture-suite, a composite genre near and dear to the Germans especially. This kind of work, commonly scored for strings plus winds, begins with a French-style overture in two sections (the first majestic, the second scampering) and then proceeds to a series of short dance movements and character pieces. Telemann wrote over a hundred such works, though with Bach we have but four. Were there once more? That’s likely, though Bach never took the trouble to collect his ensemble suites into a single source, as he did with instrumental compositions in other genres. 

Today the most familiar movement from these suites is a tuneful Air heard regularly at weddings, in elevators, and on classical radio. Its limpid melody and artful accompaniment are worth savoring live as well, along with the other items in the suite. As preserved in a manuscript from around 1730, Bach’s “Orchestral” Suite No. 3 comprises an overture and five additional movements, including two gavottes meant to be played alternatively, in the French manner (I–II–I). Although the winds are silent in the famous Air, the rest of the work uses a full Baroque orchestra of oboes, trumpets, timpani, strings, and continuo.  

For public concerts in Leipzig, Bach also composed a handful of secular cantatas. Phoebus and Pan, one of the grandest of these, may have been written for his début in 1729 as Director of the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, a group of mostly university students who performed in Zimmerman’s Coffee House and summer garden. Its subject matter is the nature of art itself, a topic of great interest to the composer, his critics, and (one supposes) Herr Zimmerman’s heavily caffeinated patrons.  

The story had been circulating for centuries in various guises: Pan has challenged Phoebus to a musical contest, claiming that his rustic song is preferable to his opponent’s more ornate music-making. With the help of a few friends (including Bach and his librettist Picander, who are hardly unbiased in this matter) Phoebus shows Pan the error of his ways, and high art triumphs over low. The libretto also specifies various supporting characters, including two tenor “seconds” to our dueling baritones (Tmolus for Phoebus, and Midas for Pan), plus Momus (the god of satire) and Mercury, who serves here a kind of master of ceremonies.   

Though entertaining and even comic on its surface, Phoebus and Pan is a substantive contribution to a serious debate. Bach’s music was not universally popular during his day; indeed, he was criticized more than once for the “excess of art” in his compositions and their “bombastic and confused” textures. Here, by contrast, Bach takes up features of the popular galant style only to subject them to extended critique, often undercutting his characters’ words with contrary musical information.  

Embracing the high style, Phoebus sings flowery verses about the handsome youth Hyacinth; Pan, in contrast, embodies the low style with lyrics redolent of a court buffoon. The former, who sings first, is surrounded by a lush ensemble of strings and winds whose multiple embellished obligatos add layers of fancy window dressing to his suggestive text, with its intimation of forbidden love. But his aria’s predictable phrase structure and underlying rhythm are that of a simple minuet: it’s a galanterie in full drag! Out of Pan’s mouth, in the rejoinder aria, comes a hilarious stutter on “wack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ackelt das Herz” (“my heart sha-a-a-a-a-a-akes”). And yet, those alert to Pan’s musical surroundings, which comprise a buoyant melody for unison violins plus an equally perky continuo line, will notice that his aria’s leading idea is artfully imitative, unlike the swoony arabesques of Phoebus’s ostensibly more elevated song. 

Arias for Tmolus and Midas are distinguished by an equally witty kind of stylistic opposition, including the requisite donkey’s ears that Bach duly awards to the latter (with a rude violin figure) for his appalling lack of taste. Momus’ and Mercurius’ arias frame the debate politely at either end. Two jolly ensembles bookend the work as well, inviting the audience to listen carefully and judge the merits of each singer’s song. 

© Matthew Dirst