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Zerreißet, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft BWV 205.1 / BC G 36
University Events, August 3, 1725
The dramma per musica Der zufriedengestellter Äolus BWV 205 (Aeolus placated) is among the earliest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular festival compositions from his Leipzig period. Before his appointment as cantor of St. Thomas School in Leipzig he had consistently written similar compositions for events in his official capacities at the court of Weimar and at Köthen after 1717–18. By contrast, in Leipzig such occasions were for the most part private commissions in the broadest sense. Their fulfillment must have been important to him, not simply because they opened up welcome extra sources of income but also because they served to expand the position of school cantorate toward that of municipal music director. Sometime afterward, the activities of the Collegium Musicum, revived earlier by Georg Philipp Telemann, proved to be a solid basis for realizing such ambitions. In the spring of 1729, Bach was able to take over leadership of the Collegium Musicum in a clever move. Afterward and well into the 1740s, the Bachian Collegium Musicum, with its weekly gatherings, was the most prominent institution of musical life in Leipzig outside the church. For particular occasions—especially the performance of festival cantatas in honor of the house of the elector of Saxony—newspaper notices gave the place of performance in addition to the time: in winter at Zimmermann’s Coffeehouse on Cather Street (Katherinenstraße) and,in summer, Zimmermann’s Gardens at the Grimma Gate. Occasionally we learn how many copies of the text were printed for these events—from 150 to 700—and thereby gain a sense of the size of expected audiences (or at least what was hoped for).Audience response was not the only factor affected by the choice of performance venue; composition and scoring were significantly influenced as well. However, Johann Sebastian Bach was able to call on his rich wealth of experience. According to the testimony of his second-oldest son, this resulted in “the performance of many strong works in churches, in courts, and often in the outdoors, in many strange and uncomfortable places.”1
One such consideration of external circumstances seems to have played a not insignificant role for the Aeolus cantata, which was performed on August 3, 1725, as a student homage for the philosophy docent Dr. August Friedrich Müller. The issuers of the commission, certainly members of the student body, the librettist, and the composer were probably all in agreement that the performance, in festival scoring, would take place in out in the open on Leipzig’s most fashionable boulevard, the Katharinenstraße[.] Accordingly, the libretto, alluding to a place in Virgil’s Aeneid, features the outbreak of an autumn storm, until near the end peace is restored by the incantation “August Müller” and a reference to the celebration of his name day, which calm the storming god of wind, Aeolus.
The libretto, by Christian Friedrich Henrici, seems intended to be more than a superficial scenario. The “humor, satire, irony, and deeper meaning"”2 of the libretto have to do with the honoree, his teaching activities, and above all his school of thought. August Friedrich Müller, born in late 1684 in Obergräfenhain, Saxony, began to develop his own philosophical school shortly after his promotion at the University of Leipzig. It is said that “because of his uncommonly clear and concise presentations it was one of the strongest in Leipzig, so that two hundred or more listeners have often visited his philosophy lectures.”3 This success continued over the course of his fifty-year career while admittedly attracting some envy, especially in its early years. Müller earned a steady stream of income from his publication of Kunst-Regeln der Klugheit, a translation of the writings of the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián that appeared in print between 1715 and 1719. His remarks strive to elucidate the “doctrine of prudence” (Klugheitslehre) developed in France, which—according to Müller—demands of a “spirit of the highest degree”4 that he be “freed from the servitude of foreign mental impulses to which common minds allow themselves to be subjected. There is no greater mastery than the mastery of one’s self, and one’s affects.”5
To a remarkable degree, this life maxim coincides with the assessment of the wind god, Aeolus, as formulated in a lexicon of mythology that appeared in Leipzig a year before the performance of our cantata.6According to ancient tradition, the winds are related to the four temperaments, which are naturally difficult to tame. As their ruler, Aeolus has the winds locked in a cave in Thrace and releases each at the discretion of one or more of the others. According to the lexicon, “Several understand him (Aeolus) to be a wise man who well knows how to moderate his affects, but especially his anger, and therefore allows it to be noticed and at other times to hide it, but above all to keep it from becoming too strong and ultimately to master it himself.”7 It was in this sense that Picander and, above all, Bach created the character of Aeolus. His first aria,
Wie will ich lustig lachen,
Wenn alles durcheinander geht,
Wenn selbst der Fels nicht sicher steht
Und wenn die Dächer krachen,
How merrily I will laugh
When everything is thrown into confusion,
When even the crag does not stand securely,
And when the roofs collapse,
offers sturdy melodies and plain coloraturas, angular and unpolished rhythms, and deliberately simple counterpoint while remaining self-controlled in expression and form. This recalls a fitting remark of Mozart’s: “For just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation and propriety and completely forgets himself[,] so must the music too forget itself. But as passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed in such a way as to excite disgust, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the hearer, or, in other words must never cease to be music.”8 In Bach’s cantata, Aeolus the god of wind is in no way conceived as a villain or as the devil’s advocate. This can be seen in the second aria, in which he announces a moratorium for the storms of autumn in consideration of the name day of the Leipzig doctor of philosophy. Three trumpets with drums and two horns unfold a truly royal brilliance—and thereby disguise the fact that this time the fanfare signals retreat, if with all princely pomp.
The futile pleas of Zephyr, the god of the evening wind, precede this turning point; in his melancholy aria, the silvery, delicate colors of viola d’amore and viola da gamba, a restrainedly moving melody, and a touch of painful chromaticism give expression to his powerless lament. Pomona, guardian of fruit, also acts without success: neither ascending triadic structures, a symbol of her pride in her ripe fruit, nor the falling sigh motives that express her sadness at the loss of falling leaves can move Aeolus. Pallas-Minerva, goddess of learning, is the first to succeed in this; with the brilliant E major of her aria, its
8 meter symbolizing completeness, and its agile and expansive violin part she signals peripeteia, or a sudden reversal of fortune. In the ensuing dialogue with Aeolus, the name August Müller appears as a magic word enveloped in the tender timbre of the flute like an aureole and probably met with understanding smiles on the part of the listeners.
The question remains open as to how easily perceptible such details were in the open-air performance. In any case, both the short chords in the orchestra in the opening chorus and the reverberating calls of “Vivat!” in the final chorus are designed with the echo in Katharinenstraße at the marketplace in mind, which poets have written about since the seventeenth century. If this interplay of calling and listening is lost, the final movement loses an important dimension. Admittedly, Bach himself omitted this effect when he reperformed the cantata with a new text in honor of the elector of Saxony in February 1734 in Zimmermann’s Coffeehouse. Bach’s oldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, went even further; he performed the cantata in 1756 and 1757, each time with a new text in honor of King Friedrich II of Prussia in the Church of the Madonna in Halle.9
Footnotes
- “Aufführung sehr vieler starker Musiken in Kirchen, am Hofe und oft unter dem freien Himmel, bei wunderlichen und unbequemen Plätzen.” Vetter(1950, 29).—Trans.↵
- “Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung.”—Trans.↵
- “wegen seines ungemein deutlichen Vortrags im kurtzen eine der stärksten in Leipzig war, so daß öfters 200 und mehr Zuhörer auf einmahl seine Philosophischen Stunden besuchet haben.”—Trans.↵
- “im höchsten Grad hohen Geist.”—Trans.↵
- “von der dienstbarkeit fremder gemüths-impreßionen, denen sich gemeine gemüther unterwerffen lassen befreiet ist. Es ist keine höhere herrschaft, als die herrschaft über sich selbst, und über seine affecten.”—Trans.↵
- Fullenwider (1990).↵
- “Einige verstehen unter ihm (Äeolus) einen weisen Mann, der seine Affekten, insonderheit aber seinen Zorn, wohl zu moderieren, und mithin denselben bald merken zu lassen, bald wieder zu verheelen, vornehmlich aber einzuhalten wisse, daß er nicht zu stark werde, und endlich ihn selbst bemeistere.”—Trans.↵
- Letter to Leopold Mozart, Vienna, September 26, 1781, in Anderson (1938, 3:1144).—Trans.↵
- Schulze (1975).↵