In the Lutheran lectionary of 1724, the Gospel reading appointed for today was the one from Matthew 8, where Jesus calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee:

And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish! And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.

It’s easy to see how the story can be interpreted in a purely spiritual way: when we think Jesus is not with us, “asleep on the job”, as it were, life’s storms can threaten to overwhelm us. However, if we have faith, all will be well. And that’s pretty much what Bach’s librettist has done with this week’s cantata text. The title, translated, reads “Jesus is asleep -so what hope is there for me?”, and it’s mostly downhill all the way thereafter, except that by Movement 5 (a bass aria -and Bach invariably uses the bass to speak as Christ himself), we get the message of calm: Schweig, aufgetürmtes Meer! (“Be still, tempestuous seas!”) and the concluding chorale, as ever, points the message home: when Jesus is with me, Satan can do his worst, and all will be OK. A curious feature of that fifth movement, when Jesus calms the storm, is that it’s written in da capo form (which simply means you go back to the beginning and repeat what has already been played until a certain point is reached, when you can finally stop). The curious effect is that after Jesus goes to the trouble of calming the storm, the damn thing starts up again! Not sure if there’s a subtle point being made there, or whether musical form is playing inadvertently inappropriate tricks on us! But no matter…

Cantata BWV 81 is of particular interest for a couple of reasons, I think. One is its form and structure: there’s no opening chorale. Instead, we’re plunged (pun intended!) straightaway into an alto aria, built on a gentle accompaniment that suggests (to these ears) a boat bobbing gently on water: the musical calm before the storm, perhaps. At least one commentator has called it a “lullaby”, hinting at Jesus being asleep. Either way, the music is more literally dramatic than is usual with Bach’s cantatas, so in addition to lapping waves or lullabies, we get the violence of the storm graphically depicted in the third movement, for example, with the violins racing up and down the scales and the tenor voice part doing much the same (glad I’m not singing it!). Assorted critics have claimed all this makes the cantata quasi-operatic as a result, though I think that’s taking things a bit far (the liturgical nature of these works is always most apparent to me, anyway).

Apart from that, the cantata is of interest because of the textual disputes that have arisen concerning that same third movement. The words Bach wrote and set are

Die schäumenden Wellen von Belials Bächen
Verdoppeln die Wut.
Ein Christ soll zwar wie Wellen stehn,
Wenn Trübsalswinde um ihn gehn

…and the trouble is that repeated use of the word ‘Wellen’. The word literally means ‘waves’, and Die schäumenden Wellen means ‘the foamy/stormy waves (from Belial’s brooks -and Belial is another name for Satan)’. So far, no problem. But the second use of the word raises issues. The text is literally saying, ‘A Christian should, like waves, stand fast when troublesome winds blow about him’… but how can waves of water ever be said to “stand fast”?! The second use of the word ‘Wellen’ seems out of place, therefore. And to get around this conundrum of metaphors, inventive folk have supposed that Bach mis-wrote: that he intended to use the word Felsen second time around (because Felsen means ‘rock’, and it makes sense that a Christian should stand like a rock when waves of trouble crash about him). The only trouble with this theory is that it’s not what’s in the libretto as printed at the time, nor what Bach’s son clearly wrote about 20 years later (when he was in possession of the original performing materials and would thus have been able to check his father’s original work). In desperation, therefore, other inventive folk have noticed that “Wellen” can mean a shaft or axle of a wheel (’shaft’ is, for example, what Google Translate will tell you the word “Wellen” means, relegating ‘waves’ to a mere secondary meaning). The idea, they say, is that the Christian should be the immovable axle or shaft around which troubles fly -which is all well and good, but I have a hard time working out how anyone could write a text that talks about foamy waves and raging seas… and then stick a shaft in the middle of it, meaningfully! It’s this idea of an immovable shaft, however, that has many translations of this cantata’s text talking about ‘Christians ought to be like a pillar’ -and pillars in the middle of stormy seas don’t make a lot of sense to me either.

I’m not sure there’s any particularly good way of resolving this problem, so I’m going to be loose and free in my translation! I’m running with the idea that a wind causes (‘whips up’) waves on the sea, and that Bach’s librettist therefore had in mind that the winds of trouble blown by Satan would cause a Christian “sea” to ‘rise in waves’ to the occasion. It’s not an especially original idea (see, for example, Z. Philip Ambrose’s translation), but it avoids the need to suppose Bach couldn’t write correctly or that his librettist had axles in the middle of oceans on his mind!

Anyway, after all that lexicological drama, I have to say that I don’t particularly warm to this cantata overall. It’s OK, but nothing special (not like last week’s for example, which I’ve been listening to daily since last Sunday).

Further Information

• A full score of the cantata is available here.
• Commercial recordings of it are available here.

Tags: Bach, Cantata
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 6:23 am and is filed under Bach, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.