J. S. Bach's Twenty-First Cantate in the Context of the German Protestant Glorical Tradition

Abstract

The poetic features of the poetics of the German Protestant cantata, which was closely connected with the Lutheran liturgical practice and played the role of a “musical sermon” defined at the level of Hauptmusik — the “main music” of worship, are summarized. It is established that the poetics of the German spiritual cantata was nourished by the teachings of Lutheran doctrine, as well as indicative of the thesis of “service to the glory of God”, correlated with the Protestant imperative “Soli Deo Gloria” (“Glory to God”). Structurally, the cantata was a combination in the end-to-end composition of episodes such as a motet based on quotations from Scripture and episodes created on a free spiritual and poetic text. The above-mentioned praiseworthy and preaching function of the spiritual cantata determined not only the key role of intonation and semantic indicators of the Protestant chorale, but also the creative reproduction of musical and rhetorical formulas indicative of German Baroque, including SDG (EsDG). The essential role of the spiritual cantata in the creative legacy of J. S. Bach, which covers five full church years of the Lutheran calendar, is noted. It is established that the twenty-first cantata, created in 1714 in Weimar on the texts of S. Frank, is directly related to the complex of Trinity holidays. The deep spiritual and semantic subtext of this cantata as “preaching music” is also complemented by its indicative musical and rhetorical symbolism, which is manifested in the widespread use of E flat major and C minor as tonalities associated with the image of the Trinity; in an appeal to the musical-intonational equivalent of the famous sacred Protestant formula “Soli Deo Gloria”. It was found that this intonation complex, arising in the first bars of the cantata, permeates all its sections, becoming in the final part of the melody of the Protestant chorale “Wer nur den lieben” quoted in the cantata and determining the dominant role of eulogy in the semantics of this work. This largely determines the compositional logic of the cantata, which consists of two sections and is performed, respectively, before and after the sermon. The main idea of the work is focused on the consistent movement from the “glorious in sorrow” to the glorious-alleluia quality of the final chorus.