Bach’s Sleepers Awake!

Bach’s Wachet Auf has long been one of the most beloved pieces of music ever written – a favourite of choirs, orchestras, music lovers, and jazz musicians alike, the work features melodies that have become iconic.  This performance marks the very first orchestral performance of the work in our region, and we couldn’t be more excited to feature the SSO Chorus with conductor Duff Warkentin and our soloists Chelsea Mahan, Spencer McKnight, and Joel Allison. 

Bach’s iconic themes have been the basis for great organ and piano transcriptions (Jan Lisiecki performance above), and even great jazz takes on the melody.

Some of the most joyful music is created in the midst of difficult circumstances. Displaced while his home underwent reconstruction, Bach wrote this most famous of his cantatas, BWV 140; Philipp Nicolai, composer of the chorale tune, found comfort in the midst of the death of a pupil by contemplating eternal life.

In the historic town of Tubingen, the pupil, a fifteen-year-old nobleman, succumbed to the scourge of the bubonic plague. His teacher and pastor, Nicolai, who had watched upwards of thirty burials a day, penned the chorale “Wachet auf” in memory of his young student. The chorale text, based on the parable of the wise virgins in Matthew 25, is a sacred recrafting of the old Minnesinger tradition. Instead of the watchman on the tower who warns the lovers to part as dawn approaches, this watchman’s midnight cry announces the heavenly Bridegroom’s arrival.

During Bach’s time, “Wachet” was the principal hymn for the twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity, a rare occurrence in the church calendar. This service, for which Bach wrote cantata 140, fell on November 25, 1731. The gospel reading for this last Sunday before Advent is Matthew 25. In shaping the overall form of the cantata, Bach used each verse of Nicolai’s hymn as a structural pillar in the work: verse 1 in movement 1, verse 2 in movement 4, and verse 3 in the closing chorale. The structure of the entire cantata is chiastic , with movement 4 as the centerpiece.

In movement 1, festive royal processional music imitates the midnight tolling as the wise virgins heed the watchman’s call to action: “awake!, prepare!, arise!, go forth!” Bach sets the chorale tune in the sopranos, doubled by the watchman’s instrument, the horn. The three lower voices represent the scurrying to action, literally falling upon each other in joyful tumult, with ascending melodic leaps and brilliant voicing of rising chords on texts depicting “high up.” All the time, the orchestral wedding procession continues relentlessly on its course to meet the Bride-Church-Sion.

The third and sixth movements, duets for soprano and bass, are dialogues between the Soul and Jesu. Each duet is prefaced by a recitative. The first duet, in question-answer format, is orchestrated as a quartet: the two solo voices, an obbligato violino piccolo, and the continuo.

Movement 4, one of Bach’s more beloved choruses, depicts Sion’s joy in greeting the descending Groom. The musical construction is stunning in its simplicity: the continuo supports a unison string melody of three basic motives over which the tenors, also in unison, float the second verse of Nicolai’s chorale. This wedding song of the Bride Zion (church) and the Returning Bridegroom (Christ) leads all to the feast, the Lamb’s eternal Supper.

The second duet, movement 6, musically exemplifies the union of the soul and Christ: the oboe presents material that is then shared by the voices. The textual references from Song of Solomon in the previous recitative are fulfilled with joyous ebullience in the duet. The phrase “love never separated” literally takes musical life in the melding of a four part texture (two voices, oboe, continuo) into a trio (a united voice, oboe, continuo).

And so, in the final chorale, the host of heaven—humans and angels—gather in the Eternal City at the twelve gates of pearl, raising voices, harps, and cymbals to proclaim the great “gloria” (Revelation 21). All of the instruments join with the choir, but this “joy no ear has heard” takes on an added brightness by Bach’s use of the violino piccolo playing the melody an octave above everyone. Surprising harmonic colorations on the final phrase’s quotation of the ancient “in dulci jubilo” melody depicts the brilliant and eternal rejoicing in the heavenly Jerusalem.

Copyright © 1998, Marian Dolan

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