Music & the Arts - Trinity Church

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M a T T h ä u s - P a s s i o N The Choir of Trinity Wall Street Soprano Sarah Brailey Martha Cluver Mellissa Hughes Linda Jones Molly Quinn Melanie Russell Alto Ryland Angel Melissa Attebury Luthien Brackett Eric Brenner Matthew Hensrud Marguerite Krull Tenor Eric Dudley Timothy Hodges James Kennerley Stephen Sands Geoffrey Silver Bass Adam Alexander Kelvin Chan Steven Hrycelak Tim Krol Richard Lippold Thomas McCargar* Jonathan Woody * Choral Contractor 32 Trinity Baroque Orchestra Orchestra 1 Violin 1 Robert Mealy, concertmaster Owen Dalby Abigail Karr Violin 2 Marika Holmqvist, pr Jessica Park Viola Jessica Troy, pr Alissa Smith Violoncello Katie Rietman, pr Jacques Wood Viola da gamba Beiliang Zhu Bass Douglas Balliett Organ Avi Stein Flute Sandra Miller, pr Emi Ferguson Oboe, Oboe d’amore, Oboe da caccia Geoffrey Burgess, pr Sarah Davol Bassoon Andrew Schwartz Orchestra 2 Violin 1 Cynthia Roberts, concertmaster Beth Wenstrom Theresa Salomon Violin 2 Daniel Lee, pr Dongmyung Ahn Viola Daniel Elyar, pr Adriane Post Violoncello Ezra Seltzer, pr Paul Dwyer Bass Motomi Igarashi Organ Renée Anne Louprette Flute Anne Briggs, pr Christopher Matthews Oboe, Oboe d’amore Julie Brye, pr Kristin Olson Orchestral Contractor John Thiessen
M a T T h ä u s - P a s s i o N Program Notes The city, Leipzig in 1727: site of a fine university, a secondary commercial center, a satellite of Dresden. We are interested in two inhabitants of the city, the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantor of the Thomas School and Church, and the writer Christian Friedrich Henrici (pen name: Picander), Post Office Commissioner. We are interested in the phenomenon of collaboration in the making of works of art. First, the composer. He is in the fourth year of strenuous service to his church, school and city – more than a hundred cantatas and occasional pieces, the St. John Passion, endless lessons, coachings, church services, and concerts. Each year his production has slackened slightly. Perhaps fatigue and a discouragement with the performance level have played some role. But we notice especially, in the third and fourth Leipzig cantata cycles, a dwindling availability of good texts. The more we study Bach, the more we understand him to be outstandingly text-sensitive. Some composers – Schönberg and Brahms come to mind – are vocal music machines, willing to handle and effectively shape almost any verbal material. Others – like Wolf and Schumann – write best with the best words, and seek out the best words. Always alert for local collaborators, Bach was fortunate during his employment in Weimar (1708–1718) to find Salomo Franck, the head of the Weimar Mint, the finest poet he would ever set. The Weimar Bach-Franck cantatas are a precious sheaf of some of the most sublime, mystical, colorful music ever composed. During his desperate Leipzig libretto search Bach returned, when possible, to Franck’s poetry, as well as to the work of other poets from his early years. He also tries a Leipzig poet, Marianne Von Ziegler: some of the results are weighed down by the greyness of the words. The major large work of Bach’s first Leipzig years is the St. John Passion (1724). The non-Biblical texts for that piece were a rough assemblage from existing older sources, poetically uneven and heterogeneous. The proportions – the first part half the length of the second, aria texts of widely varying length – contribute to the piece’s bracing journalistic nervousness. Bach, through four very significant revisions, works effectively to make virtues of the work’s difficulties. He must have been interested when Picander published (a year later) a libretto for a Good Friday oratorio. By 1727 Bach and Picander had worked on two cantatas, apparently enough for the composer to believe that the poet was the right man to help him achieve his largest vision. As with Salomo Franck, we can assume that Picander was more than a professional acquaintance. Christoph Wolff, who has shown us the crucial importance of the roster of godparents in discovering Bach’s intellectual environment, notes that Elizabeth Henrici, Picander’s wife, served as godparent to Bach’s nineteenth (!) child, ten years after the St. Matthew premiere. Two months before that premiere, their cantata “Ich bin vergnügt” appears, a compact preview of a fertile partnership in which this versatile writer will provide scripts for comedy (the Coffee Cantata), mythological masque (Phoebus and Pan), “official” encomia (Long Live the King), and the greatest cantata-length Good Friday meditation (BWV 159: Sehet wir gehn hinauf, 1729). With a real literary talent aboard, Bach can plan his big piece from the ground up. Early Passion settings, like the Schütz St. Matthew Passion, were essentially Bible texts. By Bach’s time interpolations were customary. Our collaborators first decide where they might interrupt the Biblical story with traditional chorales. These chorales are chosen for their ability to summarize some concept or action we have witnessed in the story. They are also present for their appeal to the listener, who knows them as familiar hymns. The melodies and words, often hundreds of years old, are the given element; the harmonizations are geared to their moment in this piece, the composer’s own commentary and punctuation. Next comes the placement – also interrupting and embroidering the Biblical narration – of “Madrigal” texts, arias and duets for solo singers, as well as monumental outer-pillar choruses, all to be poems by Picander. These too refer to the story, but not with “traditional” material. The approach Bach and Picander take is very personal. Many of the interpolated texts in the St. Matthew can be heard as surrogate arias, soloists in empathy with characters in the story. For the big choruses which frame the Two Parts of the piece (and maybe this caesura for the sermon was their first decision), the listeners are recruited as mourners and witnesses to mourn together, to take responsibility, to ask forgiveness. These interventions produce a supple, varied libretto, with an operatic abundance of musical types (opera in Leipzig had closed down in 1720). The Bible narrative, full of moving and dramatic detail and incident, is not geared to expanded, lyric emphasis. Bach and Picander, in making this text (the composer the guiding hand) seek a generous, expansive, public diction – seek a combination of impact and inwardness. In Volume II of his collected works, Serious, Jocular, and Satirical Verses (1729), Picander published his text for the St. Matthew Passion, divided into fifteen scenes. This seems a more likely way for the writer to conceive the text than the composer, especially a composer making the largest and most comprehensive musical design ever attempted. In restudying the piece, I perceive a musical structure in fewer divisions. It begins, after a significant prelude, by concentrating on brief, intimate establishment scenes, then gradually widens its focus and expands the length of its inner segments, arriving at certain points of stress or climax where the librettist (as well as the composer) must produce something exceptional. Part One Scene Central Image Conclusion 1. The woman of Bethany Buß und Reu Blute nur (the house of Simon the Leper) (community) (prophecy) 2. The Last Supper Nehmet, esset Ich will dir (a room in Jerusalem) (communion) (commitment) 3. The Watch (the Mount of Olives) Ich will bei meinem So ist mein Jesus Jesu wachen nun gefangen (pledge) (arrest) 33
Page 1 and 2: Trinity Wall Street February 6 -May
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Page 5 and 6: Welcome to Trinity Wall Street! The
Page 7 and 8: TENEbrae a Lenten earLy music serie
Page 9 and 10: Dietrich Buxtehude: Membra Jesu nos
Page 11 and 12: Texts & Translations Membra Jesu no
Page 13 and 14: VII. Ad faciem Concerto Illustra fa
Page 15 and 16: Program Notes “La Musique d’un
Page 17 and 18: Troisième Leçon Lamentations 1:10
Page 19 and 20: Program Notes Forced into great eco
Page 21 and 22: Lamentations II Lamentations 1:3-5
Page 23 and 24: Program Notes “The melancholy tem
Page 25 and 26: Texts & Translations Tenebrae Respo
Page 27 and 28: T E N E b r a E Marc-Antoine Charpe
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Page 33: PART TWO 30. Aria (alto, flute) & C
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Page 41 and 42: BWV 129 Gelobet sei der Herr, mein
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Page 45 and 46: Anne Trout, baroque bass, violone T
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