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• 1 2023-09-26T09:37:19+00:00 Entfliehet, verschwindet, entweichet, ihr Sorgen BWV 249.1 / BC G 2 8 Entfliehet, verschwindet, entweichet, ihr Sorgen BWV 249.1. . Birthday celebration cantata for Duke Christian, Sachse-Weissenfels. First performed on Feb 23, 1725 in Weißenfels. Text by CF Henrici (Picander). plain 2024-04-29T16:33:04+00:00 1725-02-23 BWV 249.1 Weißenfels 51.21941422591295, 11.955274281618594 Birthday celebration BC G 2 Johann Sebastian Bach CF Henrici (Picander) Hans-Joachim Schulze, "Entfliehet, verschwindet, entweichet, ihr Sorgen, BWV 249a / BC G 2" in Die Bach Kantaten: Einführungen zu sämtlichen Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs, (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt 2007), p. 663 James A. Brokaw II Saxony-Weißenfels Duke Christian, Sachse-Weissenfels

  Members of Princely Houses: Saxe-Weissenfels, February 23, 1725

  It was during the years of the Second World War that the cantata Entfliehet, verschwindet, entweichet, ihr Sorgen BWV 249.1 (Flee, vanish, fade away, you cares)—often referred to as the Shepherds’ Cantata for short—was recovered. Friedrich Smend, one of the most important Bach scholars of his era, happened upon a text to an homage cantata in Picander’s Ernst-schertzhafft und satirischen Gedichte that closely matched the text of Bach’s Easter Oratorio BWV 249 in the meter and rhyme schemes of its arias and related movements. A comparison with the oratorio quickly brought confirmation: the rather idiosyncratic music and text of the cantata for the first day of Easter was a reworking of a musical birthday tribute for Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels. In his second printing of the text, Picander titled the libretto Tafel-Music bei Ihro Hochfürstlichen Durchlaucht zu Weissenfels Geburts-Tage den 23. Februar 1725 (Table music for His Serene Highness of Weissenfels’s birthday on February 23, 1725), thus confirming the date and occasion for the performance. The only remaining guesswork concerns the place of the performance. The castle at Weissenfels seems most likely, but other buildings within the court’s jurisdiction are worth considering as well. The text of the Hunt Cantata BWV 208, written twelve years earlier for the same duke of Weissenfels, offers a good reason to look outside the castle complex: it expressly names the “princely hunting lodge” (fürstliche Jägerhof) as the performance venue. 
  
  In his libretto—his earliest known collaboration with the cantor of St. Thomas—Christian Friedrich Henrici draws upon the Renaissance and Baroque tradition of pastoral poetry. His shepherds’ colloquy presents four characters, two of whom are denizens of the ancient world: the shepherds Menalcas and Damoetas are found frequently in Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues. The two shepherdesses, Doris and Sylvia, on the other hand, are only found in the poetry of the seventeenth century, in works by Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau, Gottlieb Stolle, and others. 
  
  Friedrich Smend summarizes the action as follows:

  A cheerfully animated duet for the men stands at the beginning of the poem, whose reprise is, surprisingly, sung by the women. This results in a brief dialogue (first recitative), which flows into Doris’s aria, which expresses the tender love of shepherdesses for their sovereigns. In the second recitative, the decision to go, all four together, to the court leads to the question, What will become of the herd in the meantime? Menalcas sings them to sleep with a lullaby. . . . The awkward situation of having no flowers in this season causes Sylvia to appeal to Flora, the goddess of flowers. . . . [H]owever, one dares to forgo festive decorations, since the duke certainly holds the love of his subjects to be more valuable than flowers . . . and the company unites in a closing ensemble.¹

  
  Five weeks after the Weissenfels performance, the arias and ensemble movements were performed in Leipzig with new text and enriched by new recitatives as the Easter cantata Kommt, eilet und laufet BWV 249.3 (Come, hurry and run). More than a decade later, Bach once again revised the work, redesignating it the Easter Oratorio BWV 249.4. Yet another use of the music, once again for a secular occasion (BWV 249.2), took place in August 1726. Here again, only the text has been preserved and, once again, in the poetry collection of Henrici/Picander. Yet there can be no doubt that this evening music for the birthday of Count Joachim Friedrich von Flemming, beginning with the perfidious words “Verjaget, zerstreuet, zerrüttet, ihr Sterne” (Dispel, destroy, shatter, you stars), is a new version of the Weissenfels table music, older by eighteen months.
  
  Bach was clearly so economical in his work habits that he left most of the instrumental parts from the Weissenfels table music unchanged when he reused them in the Easter cantata. After the discovery of the original text, this meant that the secular cantata could be recovered simply by restoring the vocal parts. Admittedly, the recitatives were entirely lost. If one wants to perform the cantata as a whole, the recitatives need to be newly composed, hopefully relying on Bachian models. 
  
  At the beginning of the work there are two instrumental movements, a cheerful concertante Allegro that depends on the interchange of contrasting timbral groups and a mournful Adagio with an expressive oboe solo. Both movements may go back to an older concerto, probably a product of Bach’s Köthen period before 1723. The first vocal movement takes up the relaxed concertizing of the opening movement. Despite its restriction to two voices, it offers a full instrumental complement, including trumpets and drums, prompting one to wonder whether it might be an offspring of the closing movement of the older concerto. In the soprano aria, voice and flute compete for the most intense formulation of “a hundred thousand compliments.” The lullaby aria for tenor and two string instruments with recorders at the octave unfolds with layered timbres, beguiling coloration, and heavenly serenity. The alto aria is positioned between vigorous energy and empathetic coaxing. The work concludes with an ensemble that, in its coupling of solemn hovering opening and quick fugal close, resembles the Sanctus of the later Mass in B Minor BWV 232.

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  Footnotes

  1. Smend (1942).↵