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• 1 2023-09-26T09:37:19+00:00 Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd BWV 208 / BC G 1 14 Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd BWV 208. First performed on Feb 27, 1713 for birthday celebration cantata for Duke Christian, Sachse-Weissenfels. Text by Salomo Franck. plain 2024-04-24T14:58:48+00:00 1713-02-27 BWV 208 Weißenfels 51.21941422591295, 11.955274281618594 Birthday celebration BC G 1 Johann Sebastian Bach Salomo Franck Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd, BWV 208 / BC G 1" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 659 James A. Brokaw II Saxony-Weißenfels Duke Christian, Sachse-Weissenfels

  Court of Saxe-Weissenfels, 1713

  The significance of Bach’s secular vocal compositions is often underestimated. Seen as occasional works of middling rank and as too closely bound to the spirit of the age, they often provide us the only opportunity to discuss the whole complex of Bach’s parody technique in its entirety, based on the transfer of individual arias and choruses into his sacred vocal music and his procedure for providing them with new texts. Philipp Spitta, the most prominent Bach scholar of the nineteenth century, actually maintained, categorically, that Bach’s compositional style was principally sacred and that he was practically unable to produce secular works; rather, his music was only temporarily on loan to texts that were inappropriate: “His secular occasional works were, rather, nonsecular, and as such they did not fulfill their purpose. The composer returned them to their true home when he transformed them to church music.”¹
  
  But even such a broadside—which recalls Christian Morgenstern’s formulation that “was nicht sein kann, nicht sein darf” (that which cannot, must not be)—cannot erase an entire field of creativity.² To the fifty or so such works from Bach’s pen whose music or at least text is preserved, at least as many have been lost without a trace. Nothing justifies the assumption that the composition and performance of a secular vocal work seemed a burdensome obligation to Bach or that he was never in more of a hurry than when he supposedly rushed to integrate such a piece in his sacred vocal works. Instead, closer study of the secular cantatas shows that they were not handled any differently than church cantatas, oratorios, masses, or passions. In other words, they were treated as repertoire pieces to be reperformed at the next appropriate occasion with as little effort devoted to revision as possible. This procedure shows, on the one hand, that Bach valued these works as essential components of his entire oeuvre in the way Goethe did, so to speak, and, on the other, that he was as unwilling to tolerate any lapses in quality in this area as in any other. Instead, he always gave his best here and considered the results to be presentable on any occasion.
  
  The Hunt Cantata BWV 208 can serve as a perfect example for Bach’s management of his secular vocal works as outlined here. The composition originated rather early, no later than 1713 (BWV 208.1); Bach performed it for the last time about thirty years later, in the summer of 1742 (BWV 208.2). In the intervening years, three of its movements were provided with new texts and adopted by various church cantatas; yet this did not affect the continued presence and reperformance of the entire work in Bach’s last decade.
  
  Bach’s autograph score gives no hint as to the original reason for the work’s composition. In it the work is simply entitled “Cantata,” although either “Serenata” or “Dramma per musica” would have probably been more appropriate. More clarity is provided by a 1716 reprint of the text, found in part 2 of Salomon Franck’s Geistliche und Weltlichen Poesien (Sacred and secular poetry). There, the four mythological personages in the libretto are named, along with the following remark: “At the High-Princely Birthday Celebration for Lord Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels, Performed at a Banquet Concert Following a Sport Hunt held in the Princely Hunting Lodge.”³ Christian’s birthday fell on February 23 and was usually celebrated on that day or immediately before or afterward. Christian became duke upon the death of his older brother Johann Georg in May 1712. Since the features of Bach’s handwriting exclude any later date, the Hunt Cantata consequently was composed in February 1713 and dedicated to Christian’s first birthday as regent.⁴
  
  The “Princely Hunting Lodge” belonged to the Weissenfels castle complex. What a “Sport Hunt” looked like in practice can be deduced from certain traditions that continue up to the present day (or the recent unhappy past). To spare the potentate the exertion of a real hunt, the game to be killed was driven into an enclosed area, where it fell victim to the hunting party.
  
  The title of the banquet music performed in the Weissenfels hunting lodge is found neither in Bach’s score nor in Salomon Franck’s reprint of the text. Instead, it is contained in a handwritten note accompanying the score in which the outlines of a dedication can be seen for a print that must have been produced in the past but of which not a single exemplar survives. The note reads: “Frolockender GötterStreit bey des etc. Hochfürstlichen Geburths Tage Unterthänigst aufgeführet von etc.” (Jubilant battle of gods at the etc. high-princely birthday, most humbly performed by etc.). While the first “et cetera” can be deciphered easily—it can only refer to Duke Christian—the writer spared himself the duke’s complete and long-winded title—we would love to know more about the “Performed by etc.” It cannot simply be assumed that the name of the composer and his rank and title stood here (“Fürstlich Sachsen-Weimarischer Hof-Organist und Cammer-Musicus”); the performing ensemble, the Weissenfels Hof-Capelle, might also have been mentioned here.
  
  Finally, the title “Jubilant dispute of the gods” gives us an indication as to the structure of the libretto. In accordance with the way the aristocracy of the era understood themselves, a congratulation could only be accepted from a person of equal birth rank. In the age of the divine right of kings, “equal birth rank” included the gods and heroes of antiquity, and so nearly every librettist helped themselves to the nearly inexhaustible arsenal of ancient mythology. To bring at least a hint of plot into the course of a text of this sort (whose function of homage and tribute inherently destined it to one-sidedness), one happily set up a sham dispute about rank between those to be honored, which would be resolved at the end as quickly as the quarrel had been picked out of thin air at the beginning. Admittedly, even this element is inadequately developed in the text for Bach’s Hunt Cantata, and the libretto—the work of Weimar ducal consistory secretary Salomon Franck—lacks dramatic tension. Four gods of the antique world are mustered: Diana, the goddess of the hunt, also known as Artemis by the Greeks; Pales, the goddess of shepherds and pastures; Endymion, an Aeolian legendary figure, a son of Zeus, who gave him eternal sleep and eternal youth; and Pan, the goat-footed god of mountains and flocks whose home is Arcadia. 
  
  All four enter the stage with a recitative and aria, one after the other. Diana begins, praising the hunt as “pleasure of the gods” and an appropriate activity for heroes. Endymion lodges a weak protest and recalls being a prisoner in the “snares of Cupid.” Diana takes him to task, saying that such things cannot now be thought of, because the “high birthday feast” for “dear Christian” must be celebrated. Pan rushes to lay down his shepherd’s staff and praise the duke as the “Pan of his country,” without whom the country would seem like a body without a soul. Pales aims in the same direction, praising serenity, peace, and good fortune as the blessings of the regent who protects his subjects as a good shepherd watches over his flock. All four join together in the song of praise “Lebe, Sonne dieser Erden” (Live, sun of this earth), with which things might be brought to an end. However, all four speak up again: Diana and Endymion together, Pales and Pan at odds, and only a second song of praise at last provides the finale: “Ihr lieblichste Blicke, ihr freudige Stunden, euch bleibe das Glücke auf ewig verbunden” (You loveliest sights, you joyous hours, may good fortune remain yours forever).
  
  Details about how the musical performance proceeded must remain largely a matter of conjecture. In comparison to the four soloists, who probably had no additional support even in the two ensemble pieces, the orchestra was relatively richly scored: two hunting horns, two recorders, three oboes, strings, and basso continuo. One can assume that all participants came from Weissenfels, with the exception of the composer, who may have conducted from the cembalo. The demands on the virtuosity of soloists and instrumentalists remain limited for the most part; evidently, Bach was more interested in textual characteristics and the effective use of timbre. Thus the hunting horns are naturally assigned to Diana’s aria, the oboe trio to Pan’s song of praise, the bucolic coloration of recorders moving in parallel thirds and sixths to Pales’s first aria, and a solo violin to Diana and Endymion’s duet. On the other hand, Endymion’s aria and each of Pales’s and Pan’s second arias forgo obbligato instruments; their only instrumental accompaniment is the basso continuo. Bach himself may have artistically enriched this part improvisationally, but the only score handed down to us shows no trace of this. Alert observers at the time may have taken critical note of the way that Bach, in the last two arias, ignored the jurisdiction of the mythological figures of Pan and Pales as he gave the text on “Felder und Auen” (fields and valleys), appropriate for Pales, the goddess of shepherds and fields, to Pan, just as Bach allowed Pales to enthuse about “wollenreichen Herden” (large flocks rich with wool).
  
  The two ensemble movements are partly homophonic and chordal and partly canonic or fugal. In the late 1720s Bach transferred the closing movement of the Hunt Cantata to a church cantata for St. Michael’s Day and did so again in 1740 for a cantata for the Leipzig city council election.⁵ In 1725 Pan’s aria, accompanied by three oboes, found its way into the Pentecost cantata Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt BWV 68 (God so loved the world), as did Pales’s second aria, after extensive revision. With its new text, “Mein gläubiges Herze, frohlocke, sing, scherze” (My faithful heart, rejoice, sing, play), it became widely known in later eras.
  
  As mentioned, these borrowings did not inhibit further performances of the Hunt Cantata in its original or slightly modified form. Only a few years after its premiere in Weissenfels, a second performance is likely to have occurred in Weimar to honor Duke Ernst August. Another performance in Weissenfels is at least within the realm of the possible. There is evidence of another performance in Leipzig at a concert by Bach’s Collegium Musicum. One would very much like to know how listeners in galant Leipzig may have responded to the music, then thirty years old. It can hardly escape the alert listener that the last six movements are all in F major. The composer may have sought relief by working in one or another instrumental movement from his repertoire as an introduction or interlude—a possibility, given the practices common at the time, that one must also consider for the performances in Weissenfels and Weimar. Many questions remain open in this regard.

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  Footnotes

  1. Spitta (1899, 2:576–77).—Trans.↵
  2. Christian Morgenstern’s poem Die unmögliche Tatsache (1909) recounts the plight of Palmström, an elderly gentleman who looks the wrong way at a busy intersection and is run over. Railing at the city administration, at the police, at automobile drivers, he nonsensically concludes that cars are not permitted there and that his mishap never happened at all: “Weil, so schließt er messerscharf, / was nicht seinkann, nicht sein darf ” (For, he reasons pointedly, / that which cannot, must not be) (Knight 1964, 34).—Trans.↵
  3. “Am Hoch-Fürstlichen Geburths-Festin Herrn Herrn Hertzog Christians zu Sachsen-Weissenfels nach gehaltenen Kampff-Jagen im Fürstlichen Jäger-Hofe bey einer Tafel-Music aufgeführet.”—Trans.↵
  4. “Am Hoch-Fürstlichen Geburths-Festin Herrn Herrn Hertzog Christians zu Sachsen-Weissenfels nach gehaltenen Kampff-Jagen im Fürstlichen Jäger-Hofe bey einer Tafel-Music aufgeführet.”—Trans.↵
  5. The cantata for St. Michael’s Day is Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg BWV 149. The cantata for the city council election is Herrscher des Himmels, König der Ehren BWV 1141.↵