As part of his new job, the 22-year-old Bach had to provide music for Mülhausen’s city council elections. For the first time, he officially had an occasion to write for a large orchestra: brass, timpani, woodwinds, flutes, strings, two choirs— this is BWV 71, Gott ist mein König. Scoring so largely on the page must have been exciting for the young Bach:

That’s a lot of parts! The first time Bach writes for brass and drums! Notice the ‘J.J.’ in the upper left corner, Jesu Juva, ‘Jesus help me.’ We see it spelled out on the title page and get to see Bach’s fancy handwriting:

I didn’t go into this in the episode, but is there an S.D.G. inside the big G on the title?

Write That Fugue!

One of the most striking features of this cantata are the multiple instrumental ‘choirs,’ the groups of instruments which Bach placed in separate areas of St. Mary’s church to achieve stereophonic effects. Bach, the organist, expands his knowledge of registration onto a full orchestra that required two conductors! To hear this music in quick succession from separate areas must have been thrilling:

Three trumpets and drums! Then immediately:

Woodwinds somewhere else! And then two choirs together, singing from opposite lofts:

Still more groups of instruments follow, now the flutes:

And finally the strings:

What a bold and exciting way for Bach to begin his orchestral career.

Links to the performances: Suzuki and Koopman

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Transcript:

We’ve been tracing the young Bach’s development, writing his very first cantatas. We looked at what may have been his first two, and we heard on quite a few of these recordings that they had only one voice per part. The orchestrations were very small, maybe an oboe, maybe a pair of violins, but things are very neat, very compact. You could put one of these bands in a van, and you should. He’s 22, he’s moving from one — that’s how it begins. A bit different to the last two cantatas, right? Remember the previous two cantatas? They started with these lovely orchestral introductions. The Actus Tragicus, also an early cantata, started with the most wonderful, most inviting introduction. “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” which we will soon cover, also begins with a nice introduction by the orchestra — Bach saying, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind if I write a cantata.” But this one is different: Bach is not asking for permission. He’s been asked to write this piece. This is now part of his job to do this. He will not fail the entire city. Everybody at once, go — big chord, big orchestra, no intro, massive sound.

Bach is our new organist. And unlike many cantatas, we have an exact date when this music was first heard: February 4th, 1708. Bach has been the new organist in Mühlhausen for about six months, and there was a recent inauguration of the city council, where the new burgomasters — sort of like the mayors — and the city members are honored. They’re probably given some very official looking clothing, maybe a nice new wig, and there’s a concert in a big church, St. Mary’s, with some required town council music. So all the new city council members, every politician, all the notable persons come to St. Mary’s and hear the world premiere of Bach’s cantata “Gott ist mein König” — God is my king. If today, after elections anywhere in the world, everyone piled into the same room to hear a Bach cantata, why, I dare say the world would be a better place.

Now, St. Mary’s in Mühlhausen has several galleries and lofts in the church, and Bach took advantage of this. I love this image of the 22-year-old getting the commission, knowing that this is part of his job now for the town council music, knowing that it’s going to take place at St. Mary’s. He walks into the church, he sees all the lofts, and he thinks: I can put trumpets up there and drums up there, and I could put the strings over there. I can have the oboes and bassoons over there. Now I’ve got the money to have the instruments I want. I can put recorders over there. I can have two choirs — one over there, the other over there. The organ, in a different place, can have some solos. This is how Bach makes this piece — a 1708 sound bath, if you will. The different movements feature the various choirs, and here I refer to the choirs of instruments as well as the choirs of singers. It has different choirs in different places in the church, so the listener would have just been delighted — Bach was delighted to hear music first coming from the left and then from the right, and then different sounds coming from the back and from the front.

You might ask, but how could Bach conduct two choirs in two different spaces of the church? Well, there were actually two conductors for this cantata — in the original set of parts, there were two conducting scores. I love this idea. You’d think music moves in the direction of small to big — Mozart’s concerti, small ensembles; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a bigger orchestra now with a choir; Mahler even bigger. But Bach had two conductors. To quote friend of the show Christoph Wolff, Bach had composed a work of unusual proportions and complexity that make the performances of earlier council pieces pale by comparison, as most everyone would have immediately noticed.

So I like imagining that I’m a parishioner in Mühlhausen at the beginning of the 18th century, and, you know, the last few town inauguration concerts have been a bit dull, but now we’ve got this young whippersnapper, Johann, and boom — “Gott ist mein König,” this chord, this amazing opening. Let me read you from the top to the bottom of the score all the instruments that play. Tromba one, two, three — three trumpets and a timpani as well. That’s the first choir altogether, somewhere separated from the rest of the musicians: three trumpet players and a drummer. Flauto dolce one and two — what is the flauto dolce? It’s the recorder. So two recorders as well as a cellist, in a different area. And yet in a third choir, two oboes and a bassoon. The strings in yet a different choir: violin one, violin two, viola, and violone. Violone is like a fretted bass instrument, like a cello or a bass, but with frets. And then we’ve got the two choirs of singers — soprano, alto, tenor, bass, ripieno, as they say, maybe two voices per part, and then soloists, one voice per part. And on top of all that, the basso continuo, probably more than one player.

So now we’re almost ready to explore the music. We’ve answered one of the two important questions you ask whenever looking at a cantata: when and why was this piece written? 1708, new town council. Now the other important question is, what is the text — what are they singing about? Like the other early cantatas we recently covered, this cantata is mostly a psalm — Psalm 74. If you’re a psalm savant, you might think it begins, “O God, why hast thou cast us off forever? Why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?” Indeed, this is how Psalm 74 begins, but Bach does not begin this cantata there. He begins at line 12 of the psalm: “God is my king.” The King James Version has it as “God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.” The German is more like “God is my king of old that gives help for all that happens on the earth” — hilfe is more like “help” than the word Bach sometimes uses for salvation, which is Erlösung.

So off we go, and I want you constantly to imagine — though it’s sadly not possible to hear even on the most magnificent recording — all these different groups of instruments coming at you from different areas in this space. I will try to guide your ears left and right as best I can, but nothing can possibly beat the experience of hearing two groups of singers above you in different areas singing at each other, brass at the back, oboes somewhere else — just a lovely idea. Off we go: “God is my king.” Then, “my king from olden days,” “my king from long ago” — quite different music from “God is my king.”

What an opening. The first thing to notice is that Bach shows you where the different choirs of instruments are: first brass, then woodwinds, then recorders, then strings, then he moves into the solos, and you heard the soloist singing “from olden days” — they sing in an older style, a more antiquated style, where one part has the cantus firmus, like a Gregorian chant, holding long notes while the other parts move around it. From olden times, Bach goes back, quite literally, to the old musical times.

Bach has shown us the forces at work. He’s pulled out all the stops. In fact, it’s very much like Bach’s organ concertos, which begin with him pulling out every stop on the organ to show the lungs of the instrument. And many of the ideas in the way that Bach orchestrates this cantata come directly from his being an organist — his ability to deal with differentiated patterns of sound, that’s something an organist knows, and he shows it here in his orchestra. So he’s hit us with the full organ, all the stops out. And now, as we well know on this show, Bach will cha...