This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Angela Watters.
Durchlauchtster Leopold BWV 173.1 / BC G 9
Members of Princely Houses, Anhalt-Köthen, December 10, 1722
The cantata Durchlauchtster Leopold BWV 173.1 (Most serene Leopold) is one of only two cantatas preserved in their entirety from Bach’s time at Köthen. As such, it is nearly the only example of Johann Sebastian Bach’s vocal and instrumental compositional style during those years when he, content with himself and the world, believed that he would be able to live out his life in the service of the prince of Anhalt-Köthen, a consummate connoisseur of music. The work is titled Serenada auff Hochfürstliches GeburthsFest des Durchlauchtigsten Fürsten und Herrn Leopolds Fürsten zu Anhalt-Cöthen (Serenade for the high princely birthday celebration of the most serene prince and lord Leopold, prince of Anhalt-Köthen). With that, the work’s date and occasion are identified: December 10, the prince’s birthday. Admittedly, the year remains in question; moreover, the designation “serenade” is of little use in this regard. According to the Leipzig poet and literary theorist Johann Christoph Gottsched, a serenade was an extended cantata that could “be used for princely table and evening music, as well as for large musical concerts.”1 On the other hand, in 1739 the Hamburg music theorist Johann Mattheson argued for “the tenderness, the sensitivity” as the serenade’s most important quality.2 Admittedly, this qualification conflicted with his earlier assertion that the serenade was among those secular vocal genres that should not be performed onstage because of the particular effects of their performance: “Nowhere can such a serenade sound better than on the water in quiet weather, for one can use all sorts of instruments at their full strength that would sound too loud and overpowering in a room, such as trumpets, timpani, French horns, and so on.”3 Here, Mattheson may have had in mind relevant compositions by his peer Telemann and perhaps Handel's famous Water Music. Even so, in the very next breath Mattheson theorizes in just the opposite direction:The serenades . . . want primarily to know of nothing else than tender and strong love, without dissimulation, to which the composer as well as the poet must direct themselves if they wish to strike the proper essence. . . . It thus runs against the true nature of the serenade if one wishes to, so to speak, put it to uses that are foreign to its element—by which I mean affect—in congratulatory celebrations, public award ceremonies, university promotions. The affairs of state and regiment are alien to it, for the night is devoted to no other thing with such intimate friendship as to love and sleep. Those purposes are best served by oratorios and morning pieces or aubades of all sorts. . . . For that reason oratorios have need of more voices; by contrast, for serenades one needs only a solo or pair of singers, which is once again a very good sign.4
Bach’s Köthen serenade can be reconciled with this view only in part. “Tender love” is not necessarily its theme; instead, it is much more the congratulatory celebration rejected by Mattheson.
We do not know who might have provided the libretto to the court Kapellmeister. For many years, Christian Friedrich Hunold provided the court of Köthen with needed libretti. Hunold, born in Thuringia, spent much of his career in Hamburg before returning to Halle. But Hunold died in August 1721 at the age of only forty, and it was probably not possible to find a replacement quickly. For this and other reasons it seems likely that the cantata was composed in December 1722; this would explain why the text composed by Bach is not exactly a prime example of poetic inspiration and linguistic expertise and why instead the poet’s horizons remain limited, and often enough he comes in second in his struggle with meter and rhyme.
The first recitative offers a series of clumsy formulations that do not contain a single rhyme on the name of the prince:
Durchlauchtster Leopold,
Es singet Anhalts Welt
Von neuem mit Vergnügen,
Dein Köthen sich dir stellt,
Um sich vor dir zu biegen,
Durchlauchtster Leopold.
Most serene Leopold,
Anhalt’s world sings.
Renewed with pleasure,
Your Köthen appears before you
To bow before you,
Most serene Leopold.
The handling of grammar in the first aria seems rather questionable:
Güldner Sonnen frohe Stunden,
Die der Himmel selbst gebunden
Sich von neuem eingefunden,
Rühmet, singet, stimmt die Saiten,
Seinen Nachruhm auszubreiten.
Happy hours of golden suns
That are bound by heaven itself
Have appeared anew.
Praise, sing, sound the strings
To spread his renown.
The text of the second aria is a bit more comprehensible grammatically, but in terms of content it hovers around zero:
Here again, the poet labors in vain. For “Leopolds Vortrefflichkeiten” an appropriate rhyme does not occur to him, nor can he find anything meaningful to say about it. Even so, he ventures forth, undaunted, to his masterpiece: an aria with tricky verse structure in three strophes. The middle strophe serves as an example of this artistry:Leopolds Vortrefflichkeiten
Machen uns itzt viel zu tun.
Mund und Herze, Ohr und Blicke
Können nicht bei seinem Glücke,
Das ihm billig folget, ruhn.
Leopold’s splendors
Give us now much to do.
Mouth and heart, ear and sight
Cannot rest at his fortune,
Which properly follows him.
Nach landesväterischer Art
Er ernähret
Unfall wehret;
Drum sich nun die Hoffnung paart,
Daß er werde Anhalts Lande
Setzen in beglückten Stande.
Like the father of the people
He nourishes,
Guards against disaster;
Therefore, hope is now conceived
That he may place Anhalt’s lands
In a fortunate condition.
This sequence of a recitative and three arias is repeated in the second half of the cantata. Still, however, in the four remaining movements the struggle with the German language and futile search for useful ideas remain constant companions. All the same, the first aria in the second half—fourth in the entire cantata—gets to the point, insofar as it has a glimmer of congratulation:
So schau dies holden Tages Licht
Noch viele, viele Zeiten.
Und wie es itzt begleiten
Hohes Wohlsein und Gelücke,
So wisse es, wenn es anbricht
Ins Künftige, von Kummer nicht.
Then may you see this lovely day’s light
Many, many more times.
And as it now is accompanied by
High prosperity and good fortune,
So may it know, when it dawns
In the future, nothing of trouble.
From the break of day that is the subject here it is only a short distance to the sun; consequently, a description of this heavenly body lends itself to another aria:
Dein Name gleich der Sonnen geh,
Stets während bei den Sternen steh.
Leopold in Anhalts Grenzen
Wird im Fürstenruhme glänzen.
May your name move like the sun
While it ever stands among the stars.
Leopold, in Anhalt’s borders,
Will gleam in princely renown.
With luck and skill of this sort, the finale is reached and with it an opportunity for the customary curtain call:
Nimm auch, großer Fürst, uns auf
Und die sich zu deinen Ehren
Untertänigst lassen hören.
Glücklich sei dein Lebenslauf,
Sei dem Volke solcher Segen,
Den auf deinem Haupt wir legen.
Receive us as well, great prince,
And those who, in your honor,
Most submissively allow themselves to be heard.
May your life’s course be happy,
May such blessing be to the people
That we lay upon your head.
We have no way of knowing what the honoree may have made of this kind of treatment of the German language. He certainly would not have been able to look past it and tune it out, for by custom he would have been presented with a sumptuously printed copy of the text before the performance. We can only hope that Bach’s composition was able to help the prince get past the rough edges of the libretto.
Along with the surplus of instrumental roles and the chamber music filigree of the writing, it is above all the dance-like quality of the arias that betrays the music’s context of Bach’s instrumental composition in Köthen. With an impressive declamatory intensification over its entire course, the first aria in particular demonstrates how the periodicity of the dance texture dovetails easily with a subtle syntactic gesture. The next movement, the paean to Leopold’s excellence, can be understood as a gavotte. Here, the string instruments with their busy figuration have to depict the eagerness described in the text, even as formal coherence is maintained chiefly by the dance character.
The three-strophe complex Aria al Tempo di Minuetta occupies a nearly unique position in Bach’s output. The pleasing theme in the strings is taken up by the bass voice, with the first violin at the octave and developed in G major. The second strophe—a thinly disguised variation of the first—modulates to D major and brings the flutes into the mix. The quarter-note motion that has prevailed up to now is replaced by steady eighth notes, and the first flute, the soprano in unison with the second flute, and a high foundation part formed by violins and violas, known as a bassetto, form a trio. The third strophe (or second variation) is in A major, two fifths above the initial key of G major, and it produces yet another intensification through the constant sixteenth-note figuration of the first violin; the soprano and bass enter together with the flutes and second violin at the octave, and the bass takes up the melody. In different ways, the two remaining arias resemble the bourrée dance type in their structure. While the one intended for the soprano, whose text begins “So schau dies holden Tages Licht,” finds a tone of untroubled cheer and its instrumental part approaches the writing in the orchestral suites, the bass aria, “Dein Name gleich der Sonnen geh,” is more distant, with its low-lying obbligato part comprising cello and bassoon. The movement’s strict form plays no minor role here: in accordance with the text’s main idea, the sun’s annual course is symbolized by ostinato structures in the instrumental parts. A binary suite movement serves as a rousing finale, in which the voice is woven into the repetitions of each of the two sections.
With the onetime performance in honor of the prince of Köthen, the cantata’s purpose was fulfilled—at least with respect to its original text. As far as the music was concerned, the composer soon found an opportunity to use it again: in his first year at Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, he supplied most of the movements of the Köthen congratulatory cantata with new text and performed the resulting work, Erhöhtes Fleisch und Blut BWV 173 (Exalted flesh and blood), on the second day of Pentecost. A few compositional alterations were required here; there were opportunities for further revisions later on for one or another reperformance. In this way, Bach’s occasional composition for Köthen was seamlessly transplanted to his Leipzig church cantata repertoire.
Footnotes
- “zu fürstlichen Tafel- und Abendmusicen, ingleichen bei großen musicalischen Concerten gebraucht werden” (Gottsched 1730).—Trans.↵
- “die Zärtlichkeit, la tendresse” (Mattheson 1739).—Trans.↵
- “Nirgend läßt sich eine solche Serenate besser hören, als auf dem Wasser bey stillen Wetter: denn da kan man allerhand Instrumente in ihrer Stärcke dabey gebrauchen, die in einem Zimmer zu hefftig und übertäubend klingen würden, als da sind Trompeten, Paucken, Waldhörner etc.” (Mattheson 1739, 216).—Trans.↵
- “Die Serenaten . . . wollen alle mit einander vornehmlich von nichts anders, als von zärtlicher und starker Liebe, ohne Verstellung, wissen, und muß sich der Componist allerdings, sowol als der Poet, bey denselben darnach richten, wenn er ihr rechtes Wesen treffen will. . . . Es läuft demnach wieder die eigentliche Natur der Serenate, wenn man sich ihrer, so zu reden, ausser ihrem Element (ich meine den Affect) bey Glückwünschungen, öffentlichen Geprängen, Beförderungen auf hohen Schulen usw. Bedienen will. Staats und Regiments-Sachen sind ihr fremd: denn die Nacht ist keinem Dinge mit solcher innigen Freundschafft zugethan, als der Liebe und dem Schlaf. Jenen Händeln dienen die Oratorien und Aubade oder Morgenmusiken allerhand Art. . . . Derowegen haben auch die Oratorien mehr Stimmen nöthig; da es hiergegen bey den Serenaden gar wol ein Solo, oder nur ein Paar Sänger bestellen können; welches ein abermahliges gutes Abzeichen ist” (Mattheson 1739, 217).↵