This tag was created by James A. Brokaw II. The last update was by Elizabeth Budd.
Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten BWV 202 / BC G 41
Secular Wedding, before 1730
Among the secular cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach, the wedding cantata Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten BWV 202 (Retreat, you gloomy shadows) enjoys a special popularity. This is due, on the one hand, to its high musical qualities and, on the other, to the truly timeless effect of its text, which is easily grasped by those not familiar with Baroque language. Even so, there is a complication: this particular solo cantata, performed so frequently in our time, yields very few hints as to the secret of its origin. Its rather peculiar transmission also leaves several questions unanswered. This simple fact alone is nearly incomprehensible. This unique work survived only because of a stroke of luck: a thirteen-year-old prepared a copy during the composer’s lifetime, and this singular copy fell into the hands of knowledgeable collectors during the nineteenth century, who preserved it for posterity.The search for the origins of this crucial copy of the cantata leads one to Gräfenroda in Thuringia. About halfway between Ohrdruf and Ilmenau, Gräfenroda was a relatively small settlement during the eighteenth century, with only a few hundred inhabitants. It was the birthplace and center of activity for Johann Peter Kellner, one of the most enthusiastic and industrious collectors and performers of Bach’s compositions in his era. Kellner, born in 1705 and thus twenty years younger than Johann Sebastian Bach, began amassing a comprehensive collection of his organ, harpsichord, and violin works as a young man. In his autobiography, published in 1760, Kellner remarked: “I had once seen and heard a great deal about a great master of music and found exceptional pleasure in his work. I refer to the late Capellmeister Bach in Leipzig. I longed for the acquaintance of this excellent man and was so fortunate as to enjoy it. In addition to him, I have had the honor of hearing the famous Herr Handel, capellmeister in London, and getting to know him as well as still other living masters of music.”1
Kellner’s own role in the preservation of our cantata remains open to conjecture. One of his students is more important in this connection: Johannes Ringck, born in 1717 in Frankenhain, a village near Gräfenroda. In 1730, when he was only thirteen, he copied not only our Bach cantata with all the care he could muster but also an extremely long organ work by Dieterich Buxtehude, a Te Deum Laudamus, no fewer than 268 measures in length. Several years later, Johannes Ringck went to Gotha to continue his training with the famous court music director and composer Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. Shortly after 1740 we find him in Berlin, first as music teacher and opera composer and then, after 1755, as organist at St. Mary’s Church, where he played the Joachim Wagner organ, still extant today. In October 1772 the English music scholar Charles Burney judged Ringck’s musical capabilities thusly: “In the church of St. Mary, there is a fine organ, built by Wagner; Mr. Ringck, the organist, is much esteemed as a performer of ex tempore fugues, though he is possessed of less brilliancy of finger than the organist of St. Peter.”2After Ringck died in the summer of 1778, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach—now sixty-eight years old and without a position—sought to succeed him, but without success.3 As late as 1829 Ringck’s name is found in a letter to Goethe from the Berlin building contractor and director of the Sing-Akademie, Carl Friedrich Zelter. A month after Mendelssohn’s sensational revival of the St. Matthew Passion, Zelter looked back with pride upon the continuity of the Bach tradition in Berlin in a letter received by Goethe: “For fifty years I have been accustomed to honoring the genius of Bach; Friedemann died here; Emanuel Bach was royal chamber musician here; Kirnberger, Agricola were students of old Bach; Ringck, Bertuch, Schmalz, and others performed scarcely anything other than pieces by old Bach; I myself have been teaching [Bach’s music] for thirty years and have students who play all of Bach’s things well.”4 At the time Zelter wrote this, when a good measure of Prussian hegemony was in the air, Ringck had died half a century before, and his copy of the cantata Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten was twice as old as that.
No tradition tells us whose wedding Bach composed this work for, who provided the text, or who sang the challenging soprano solo. It has been suggested that Johann Peter Kellner, only twenty-five years old in 1730 and still working as a cantor’s assistant in Gräfenroda, may have had another score at his disposal that he presented to his pupil Ringck for copying and that has been since lost; but this does not lead any further either. The only certainty is that the work existed before 1730. Whether it was composed after 1723 in Leipzig or earlier in Köthen, as is often suggested, remains unclear at this time.
As might be expected, the names of the wedding couple remain shrouded in darkness, as well as nearly all accompanying circumstances. The text of the sixth movement does provide a rather vague clue:
Und dieses ist das Glücke,
Daß durch ein hohes Gunstgeschicke
Zwei Seelen einen Schmuck erlanget,
An dem viel Heil und Segen pranget.
And this is good fortune,
That through a lofty, benevolent fate
Two souls attain an ornament
On which much salvation and blessing are emblazoned.
With a little imagination, one might interpret “hohes Gunstgeschicke” to be an allusion to the permission to marry from the authorities, which might indicate a rural situation. What is missing from the final movement may offer another clue. Ribald wishes for the quick appearance of progeny, so typical of the era, are found here only cryptically:
Sehet in Zufriedenheit
Tausend helle Wohlfahrtstage,
Daß bald bei der Folgezeit
Eure Liebe Blumen trage.
May you see in contentment
A thousand bright days of well-being,
So that in the near future
Your love may bear flowers.
This abundance of good taste and consideration is easier to ascribe to an amateur librettist than a professional poet. In any case, a concluding movement of this sort made sense because the entire cantata text takes place in a natural idyll in which Flora, the ancient Italian goddess of blossoms and flourishing, plays the lead role.
The change of seasons and the transitoriness of their splendor is the widely varied theme of the unknown librettist. The beginning of the libretto indicates a wedding in the early months of the year, as in the first aria:
Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten,
Frost und Winde, geht zur Ruh.
Florens Lust
Will der Brust
Nichts als frohes Glück verstatten,
Denn sie träget Blumen zu.
Retreat, you gloomy shadows,
Frost and wind, retire to bed.
Flora’s delight
Will grant the breast
Nothing but happy fortune,
For she brings flowers.
Then, with a recitative:
Die Welt wird wieder neu,
Auf Bergen und in Gründen
Wird sich die Anmut doppelt schön verbinden,
Der Tag ist von der Kälte frei.
The world becomes new again,
In the mountains and in valleys
Loveliness clings with doubled beauty,
The day is free of chill.
And once again in an aria that brings the sun god Phoebus into the scenario:
Phoebus eilt mit schnellen Pferden
Durch die neugeborne Welt.
Ja, weil sie ihm wohlgefällt,
Will er selbst ein Buhler werden.
Phoebus hastens with quick horses
Through the newborn world.
Yes, because she pleases him
He himself would become a lover.
A spring panorama is assumed in what follows, in which the goddess of flowers, Flora, and the sun god, Phoebus, are joined by the god of love, who is introduced in a recitative and extolled further in an aria:
Wenn die Frühlingslüfte streichen
Und durch bunte Felder wehn,
Pflegt auch Amor auszuschleichen,
Um nach seinem Schmuck zu sehn,
Welcher, glaubt man, dieser ist,
Daß ein Herz das andre küßt.
When the breezes of spring caress
And waft through colorful fields,
Even Cupid is wont to sneak out
To look for his prize,
Which, it is thought, is this,
That one heart another kisses.
Ultimately, the god Cupid commands the field and enjoys the advantage over the other deities—as in the next to last aria:
Sich üben
Im Lieben
In Scherzen sich herzen
Ist besser als Florens vergängliche Lust.
To practice
In love
In playfulness to embrace
Is better than Flora’s ephemeral delight.
The way that Johann Sebastian Bach uncovers ever new facets of this rather restrained libretto truly deserves admiration as he transforms the subtle intimations of the libretto into different characters. The three-part opening movement is the composition’s crown jewel. Its gently ascending chords in the strings and the rhapsodically hovering melodies of voice and obbligato oboe evoke the departing “gloomy shadows”; it changes to a cheerful scenario in the quick middle section, and, after this brief foretaste of longed-for blossoming splendor, it returns to the dark mood of the beginning. The second aria, accompanied only by basso continuo, depicts the “swift horses” of the sun god, Phoebus. The dance type that predominates here is that of the gigue, whose main characteristics are, according to Johann Mattheson, a Hamburg contemporary of Bach, “the most extreme speed and volatility, but mostly in a flowing and not impetuous way: like the smoothly shooting arrow of a stream.”5 The third aria, with obbligato violin solo, takes a more careful pace: no wonder, since it depicts the god Cupid, who is “wont to sneak out” (auszuschleichen pflegt) to be on the lookout for victims for his arrows. The fourth aria, “Sich üben im Lieben” (To practice love), is once again in a faster tempo; the soprano and oboe compete with one another in the dance character of a passepied. The concluding gavotte is designed as a stylized dance song: instrumentally compact in the framing sections, and with a more relaxed movement when the soprano enters. Its distinct three-part structure serves as a cheerful reminiscence of the cantata’s beginning, and the soprano voice, joined with the broken chords in the high string instruments, evokes once again the wintry gloom of the opening movement, now, however, on the firm ground of the irreversible change of season.
Footnotes
- “Ich hatte sehr viel von einem grossen Meister der Music ehemals theils gesehen,theils gehöret, und fande einen ausnehmenden Gefallen an dessen Arbeit. Ichmeyne den nunmehr seligen Capellmeister Bachen in Leipzig. Mich verlangte nach derbekanntschaft dieses vortrefflichen Mannes, und wurde auch so glücklich, dieselbe zugeniessen. Ausser diesen habe auch den so berühmten Herrn Händel, Capellmeisterin London, zu hören und ihm, nebst noch andern lebenden Meistern in der Music,bekannt zu werden die Ehre gehabt” (BD III:77 [no. 663]).—Trans.↵
- Burney (1773, 2:207).—Trans.↵
- Henzel (1992).↵
- “Ich bin seit 50 Jahren gewohnt, den Bachschen Genius zu verehren; Friedemann ist hier gestorben, Emanuel Bach war hier Königlicher Kammermusiker,Kirnberger, Agrikola Schüler vom alten Bach, Ring, Bertuch, Schmalz und Andereließen fast nicht anderes hören als des alten Bachs Stücke; ich selbst unterrichte seit30 Jahren darinne und habe Schüler, die alle Bachschen Sachen gut spielen.” Zelter sent the letter of April 6, 1829, to Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl and afterward sent a copy on to Goethe. See Schulze (1984b, 130).—Trans. ↵
- “äußerste Schnelligkeit und Flüchtigkeit, doch mehrentheils auf eine fließende und keine ungestüme Art: etwa wie der glattfortschießende Strom-Pfeil eines Bachs.”↵