1 of 4

Johann Sebastian Bach served as Cantor of the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, for the major part of his life. His last resting place is in the chancel of the church, marked by a bronze plaque that simply bears his name.

But when you visit the church today, local guides will usually point out two other things. One is the pillar against which the pulpit used to stand, the place where in 1539 Martin Luther preached to introduce the Reformation into the city and the surrounding area. The other is the gallery in the west end of the church, the site of the earlier gallery from which, two centuries after Luther, Bach directed the music of worship.

Earlier in this issue, Mark Noll has recounted how Luther, an extraordinary preacher, was also an accomplished musician. Now, this essay tells how Bach, the superlative musician, was also an effective preacher. But Bach did not preach from a pulpit as Luther did; his musical "sermons" came from the gallery at the back of the church. There stood the principal organ, and there the instrumentalists and singers played and sang what Bach created and directed.

Bach never called these pieces "sermons in sound," though that is what they are. He did not often call them "cantatas," the term modern musicians most commonly use to refer to them. He labeled them instead as church "motets" or "concertos," or more simply as "pieces"—Stücken, the term commonly heard today in connection with pieces of cake!

Most people today misunderstand these pieces. Because they are usually presented in concerts, the common view is that they are small-scale oratorios, independent works like Handel's Messiah or Mendelssohn's Elijah. And they are usually presented three or four at a time.

But Bach did not see them as independent musical works. Instead, Bach composed his cantatas for the two principal Leipzig churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicolaus. On alternate Sundays, these two churches heard Bach's cantatas as a significant part of the service of worship (usually the Eucharist). These services were long—lasting up to four hours—with a complex liturgical order based on Luther's evangelical reinterpretation of the traditional Mass.

In that service, the cantata was closely connected with both the reading of the Gospel and the sermon. The simple sequence was this:

Gospel, Nicene Creed, Cantata, Hymn, Sermon.

The portion from one of the Gospels appointed for that day was read. The choir responded to the Gospel, affirming the faith by singing the Nicene Creed in Latin. Then the choir and instrumentalists performed the cantata. The whole congregation responded by singing in German the hymn Wir glauben all' an einen Gott ("We all believe in one true God"), Luther's rhyming, metrical version of the Creed. After this second affirmation of faith came the sermon, a detailed exposition and application of the day's Gospel reading. The cantata therefore stood in the middle of a sequence that began with the Gospel reading and ended with the sermon. Like the sermon, the cantata was also an exposition and application of the Gospel of the day.

Like other composers, Bach needed someone to script the text he would use from the Bible, familiar hymns, and original material. The writers would structure the cantatas' libretti (as such texts were called) in much the same way as the sermons of the time. Indeed, some of the authors, such as Erdmann Neumeister of Hamburg, were pastors, and their poetic cantata texts grew out of their preaching.

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help