Sunday, Oct 11, 2020 • 21min
Bach BWV 174: Ich Liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte 'Sinfonia'
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This week, to start off his podcast, Carl chooses a lesser known work by the baroque composer J. S. Bach.
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Carl Roewer
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Carl Roewer
00:16
Welcome to "Classical music: The Stories".
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00:21
Oh, I love that piece so much! I love it! I mean yeah, it's only 30 seconds, but don't worry, I'll play the whole thing at the end for you after I've debriefed the whole thing; analysed the whole thing.
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00:31
Welcome everybody to the first official episode of my podcast, "Classical music: The stories".
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00:38
Each episode I, as you know, choose one piece that I love and I analyse it; I break it down, I look at it, and then I play the whole thing at the end for you. So, I suppose just a quick introduction.
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00:51
My name is Carl, I play classical piano and Bassoon. I got inspiration for this after our English teacher showed us the software for which we could use to make podcasts.
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01:09
I don't know if you've noticed, but the first episode that you probably saw was, well, my Desert Island discs, that wasn't necessary to listened to. I got rid of it now, it was just for an English assignment, but because of that I now have, I love making podcasts, I love it.
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01:25
It's really good fun. I love recording myself talk, I love talking to people about things that I love. So, here's the podcast now that will be hopefully continuing for quite a long time and I hope you can all stay with me for it and I think it would be a lot of good fun. So yeah, I hope you enjoy this.
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01:46
So, to properly get us going to get us moving on this journey, I've chosen a piece by
Johann Sebastian Bach
and I think Bach
is a great place to start. He's a great composer to begin with. I see him as the father of music. I think he's the one who discovered anything, everything you can do with the notes that he's given.Share
02:10
So, I've chosen a not very well-known piece of as well, in a sense, it is well-known in a sense it is and I'll explain. This piece that you heard 30 seconds of a second ago, that is his "
BWV 174
". His cantata No. 174
, "Ich Liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte
", translated from the German, "I love the highest with my entire being".Share
02:33
So, that was the Sinfonia. The Sinfonia, the overture, the kind of the small orchestral piece that kicks the whole thing off. For those of you who do know a lot of Bach and know a lot of music, they will have realized that it is basically the same as his "
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 In G Major
", the first movement — and well, yeah, it is. It's exactly the same.Share
02:58
But, what Bach did, he took that piece and he added instruments; he added more. He added the winds basically, there were no winds up to then. It was only three violins, three violas, three cellos and the double bass and harpsichord.
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03:13
And then, for this
cantata,
Bach
decided to add two horns, two oboes, taille — which would be the modern day English horn or cor anglais — and under the continual line, the Basso Continuo
, continuous baseline, he added the bassoon.Share
03:32
Basso continuo
, just for those of you who don't know, that's very simple. It's in the name Basso continuo
, it's a continuous baseline. It doesn't stop, it keeps the whole thing going.Share
03:42
So yes, this is a remake of his "
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
", which he composed as a set of six Brandenburg Concertos
. And, of all the Brandenburg Concertos
, the "No. 3
" is both the shortest but it's also the most well-known.Share
04:04
The piece that you can hear now here playing is the "
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
". The original that became the Sinfonia for "BWV 174
".Share
04:14
You can hear that there was no horns, there was no oboes. It was all strings, three violins, three violas, three cellos and the bass.
Brandenburg Concerto
— now, concerto means a piece of music composed for a certain number of solo instruments, usually one but you know, baroque composers like Bach
, they didn't really mind about that.Share
04:34
In this case he ordered for nine solo instruments. Nine as in the three violins, three violas and three cellos. The double bass and harpsichord are just the accompaniment; they just keep it going.
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04:45
So, this was composed around 1721 as a set of six
Brandenburg Concertos,
and each of the six have their own specific instrument combinations, so to speak, their own solo instruments. Like, for example, the "Brandenburg Concerto No. 2"
has solo trumpet and recorder, and "Brandenburg No. 6" has two solo violas.Share
05:08
They're all very, very different and actually, honestly, I would recommend that everyone here and gives them all a listen, because they're all definitely worth it. But out of all, the
Brandenburg Concertos
, No. 3 In G Major
is the shortest and it's also the most well known.Share
05:28
But anyway, now back to the piece that is the subject of this podcast episode. I'm going to get historical for a second. It was composed during the year of 1729 in Leipzig. Leipzig being box home and workplace for over 25 years of his life. 27, to be exact.
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05:46
He was choirmaster in the Thomas Kirche, the Thomas' Church,
St. Thomas' Church,
and during his time here in Leipzig, he wrote many hundreds of these cantatas as in very short little masses for Sunday services, along with bigger full-scale masses, organ works, chamber music and, of course, his orchestral music. So, he composed this cantata
, should I say BWV 174,
"Ich Liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte", "I loved the highest with my entire being."Share
06:22
It was composed for the second day of Pentecost and was then performed for the first time on June 6th, 1729. Now, as I said, a
cantata
is a small work for a Sunday service, which means that obviously once the Sinfonia finishes, it doesn't stop there, it keeps going for another 15 minutes. It has a solo bassoon, solo alto, moments of, of course, choral section.Share
06:49
The whole thing is about 20–25 minutes approximately. It's not very long, but for most people, the highlight is the Sinfonia, because of the incredible musicality that Bach brought to it having taken it from his
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
.Share
07:06
John Eliot Gardiner
, he's a very famous conductor, who has also conducted and recorded this piece. He says that he hears a new minted sheen and force to the original concerto movement; its colours, even sharper than before, and I have to say I agree with him, completely. When I listen to this Brandenburg Concerto
, I now almost begin to miss the horns, oboes, bassoons.Share
07:31
It feels almost dull, dare I say, and I know it's Bach, Bach is not dull, but without the winds, it just-
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07:39
Bach
was clever. Bach didn't add them and then add them to the lines he had already written, he created new lines, he made new parts, new voices for them and, if anything, they make it incredibly a lot more fun.Share
07:56
It's very difficult to describe if you haven't heard the whole thing before, which is why I'll at the end of the podcast. I find that when I listen to this piece now, I don't want it to stop, and it has to stop, it's only five minutes long.
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08:13
But, when it does stop, then I feel that I've always missed something, and usually that is the case, because there is so much going on. The musical colours, the musical emotion, the incredible lines, textures et cetera. It's a lot to take in. So, when I do listen to it, I listen to it more than once, just so I can get the full feeling, the full flow of this fantastic piece of music.
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08:39
Now, I am aware that I say there's just a couple of people listening to this episode who don't know very, very much about
Bach,
and that's absolutely fine because, honestly, well let's be real, unfortunately, classical music doesn't get as much publicity as it deserves. So these people, my heroes, are relatively unknown.Share
09:01
So, anyway,
Johann Sebastian Bach
born in 1685. He was a genius, but he had a tough childhood. He was orphaned at the age of 10 and had to move in with his older brother, Johann Christoph Bach
, can you imagine that? Imagine your parents passed away and you have to live with your older sibling. I'd say that was probably not very nice.Share
09:24
Although there are quite a lot of stories from this time, especially when
Bach
got up in the middle of the night and copied down his brother's orchestral scores that were apparently so sacred and so important to his brother that he wouldn't let Bach anywhere near them. So, Bach
did that himself. He woke up in the middle of the night and he copied them down with, I'd say not very much light, not in those days anyway. And so, he was a musician from the beginning.Share
09:58
In 1705, he walked 400 km. I'm gonna say that again, Bach walked 400 km to hear baroque composer and organist,
Dieterich Buxtehude,
give a performance on the organ. 400 km, that is going from Limerick to Dublin and back again, on foot. Exactly, did that twice. As in he walked from Limerick to Dublin and back twice.Share
10:29
Bach, he clearly liked music. If he was gonna he was gonna walk 400 km to Lubeck to listen to a man give a performance, he clearly was set in his career and his future.
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10:45
In 1723, he went to Leipzig where he was appointed the counter at St. Thomas's church and that's where he spent the remainder of his life. That's where he composed most of his music. The exact number of compositions that he wrote, that is still unknown. There are more pieces being discovered all the time, but the number that most musicologists have and historians have come up with is around... it'll be over 1,100 pieces.
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11:15
1,100 pieces of music that he wrote. And they are all, they're all genius. They're all amazing. Every single one of them, he took such care and he knew what he wanted to write. Bach is one of the few composers that was very mathematical. As in all these pieces have a very clear and defined structure, and a lot of people are put off by that.
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11:39
A lot of people are put off by the fact that all these notes are generally the same length and they all come in one after the other in the same way as the one before.
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11:50
But in fact the notes that he chose, those beats, those rhythms to be, are so perfect. So incredibly well picked. Which is why I'd say Bach would be my favourite baroque composer, because he did do a lot as a family man. He was, I think he was pretty mental.
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12:12
He was married twice and one of those times was to his cousin, and had 20 children between those two marriages, out of whom 13 died young. And there's another story that for his second wedding and he paid five years worth of his salary on the wine for the festival. I think we can safely say that he did like his second wife a bit more than his first.
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12:45
Bach
died at the grand old age of 65, in the year of 1750. To get anywhere beyond the age of 50 was big; it was huge. I'm not saying that Bach was in any way healthy at all. He loved parties. He threw many parties in his own home. He also was quite large. He was big.Share
13:12
He was big. He was fat man. He also loved the drink. He really, really loved alcohol. I mean, there were times where like he was paid in alcohol and then there were times when he paid his publishers in alcohol, because he thought that it was a fitting salary.
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13:30
He eventually died, not of anything natural. He died of complications after eye surgery. So, he had surgery on his eye in the year of 1750 and afterwards it didn't go as planned. But then again, it was 1750. The doctors of 1750 wouldn't have been as advanced as the doctors of 2020.
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13:52
Johann Sebastian Bach
was a musician, that much is very clear. I'm stating the obvious, I'm sorry about that. I say that because I want to draw your attention to the fact that his father was a musician, and his father's father was a musician. All his children became musicians on his extended family, his cousins, his uncles, they were all musicians, all of them.Share
14:15
And event there's eventually a catalogue of about fifty "Bachs" that became musicians, because of this in those days, in Germany, the word Bach, or the name Bach, just generally meant musician. If you were a Bach you were a musician, and that was very, very simple. I'm gonna wrap this up now with... I'll play through the entire piece that I've been looking at. The Sinfonia, of
Cantata BWV 174
.Share
14:47
Before I do that, I just want to say a big thank you to all of you for taking the time to listen. Like, honestly, it means quite a lot to me the fact that I already have quite a large listening base and the fact that my topic is classical music, it's it's really amazing.
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15:07
So, thank you guys. Truly, it really makes a difference to me sitting here and talking about my favourite pieces, and I love it. I do, I really enjoy this. But it wouldn't be the same without people listening to it. So, I'm going to turn into a radio presenter, playing
Bach
BWV 174
Sinfonia. It's Akademie Für Alte Musik Berlin
. I hope you enjoy and thank you very much for listening.Share
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