The facts of the case were interesting. Mr. X had lots of money in the bank. WestX, the bank, marked his account as one not allowing funds to be drawn, only to have funds desposited. When Mr. X therefore drew 30 cheques (for which the money was there in the account), the bank marked all of them as ‘refer to drawer’, implying that the money was not there in the relevant account. This was held (by a jury) to be defamatory, but the bank won the original court case because (so the judge said), communications from the bank to the people depositing the cheques (who were told ‘refer to drawer’) are protected by Commonwealth common law qualified privileged. In other words, it’s OK for a bank to say you don’t have the cash to pay the cheque (even though you do), because they have a duty to inform the people you wrote the cheque to, as soon as possible, as to the status of their accounts, once they decide to refuse payment of that cheque.

The defence (the side my friend was working on, and hence “our side”) argues that whilst a duty to inform payees of non-payment of funds might ordinarily arise (and if you have a duty to inform, qualified privilege would apply), it is not possible for a mistake to cause a duty to inform to arise. In other words, the bank in our case actually had a duty to pay the cheques. If it *mistakenly* believed the cheques were not payable, that did not cause a duty to inform (and thus defame). Accordingly, the defamatory statements would not be protected by qualified privilege, and the cash tills will start ringing!

To me, this defence poses a big public interest issue (which is why their honours, presumably, were interested in accepting the appeal in the first place): if every mistake of a bank were to give rise to a defamation action, the courts would be jam-packed with defamation actions. And, as a consequence, the banking system would collapse.

On the other hand, and as argued by our barrister, society has an interest in an *efficient* banking system which doesn’t rely on common law minutiae to protect it from stuff-ups in its data processing departments.

It’s a very finely balanced argument, and I reckon it’s going to come down to a 3-2 decision either way. From the questions posed by their honours, I’m pretty convinced we got two of them on-side. But I suspect it will all come down to which way the Chief Justice decides to go. There was a vague sense in which their justices seemed to want to put banking regulation on a 21st Century unambiguous footing (the fact that all precedents cited stemmed from the 1890s to the 1950s kind of gave the game away that the precedents in this area of the law are not wholly relevant or convincing. Something new is needed), so it is possible they will want to shift away from the traditional sense of ‘bank errors tend to be in the banks’ favour’. But it wasn’t obvious that this sense would carry the day.

In about six weeks, I expect we’ll know for sure. Whichever way it goes, I suspect this case will be as definitive in banking law as Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. or Donoghue v. Stevenson are in contract and negligence (tort) law… and it’s rather nice to think I was there to here the arguments for such a decisive case, especially one in which m’learned friend Campbell was involved from day one!

1. Music Composition and Midi File production
I used to use Noteworthy Composer, but it costs money (and quite a lot of it, all things considered). So now I use Musescore, which is GPL’d and thus entirely zero cost. It does an excellent job with music notation, and also exports to midi and WAV and a whole lot else. Excellent for writing that symphony you’ve always wanted to pen, and also good at setting down Bach music examples! Without dedicated midi hardware or additional configuration, Noteworthy does a better job of approximating violins and other instruments (everything in Musescore sounds like a piano out of the box!), but it’s not enough to convince me it’s worth paying for the upgrade. Musescore it is.

2. Blu-Ray Playing
I’ve used the trial versions of Cyberlink PowerDVD and ArcSoft Total Media Theatre. Both cost in excess of $100. Both integrate nicely into Windows Media Centre (so playing a Blu-Ray or a DVD with either of them is a simple menu option selection using the standard Windows TV remote control). However, I found the Cyberlink product to be a nightmare to use (it rarely worked flawlessly). Arcsoft’s offering is much, much better in that regard.

However, I don’t actually play Blu-Rays very often: I much prefer to extract the .mt2s stream from the Blu-Ray and play that off the hard disk. Neither Cyberlink nor Arcsoft handle that particularly well.

Thank God, therefore, for the ever-so-humble but oh-so-brilliant Media Player Classic Home Cinema. It comes in a 64-bit version, which is good. It plays .mt2s streams without a drama. It does not integrate with Windows Media Centre, which is a shame… but it’s 100% zero cost, so that makes up for everything else. In short, it might not be as convenient to use from the Home Cinema lounge, but it does everything else that I could want it to do. Blu-Ray player problem solved.

3. Blu-Ray Ripping
First off, you absolutely have to have AnyDVD HD. That will cost you money, but is definitely worth it, and will leave your Blu-Ray disks unencrypted. Turning the contents into a single, playable, still high-def file is, however, still trickier than it ought to be. The tool I use more than anything else is called Clown BD, which usually correctly outputs a single .m2ts file containing the entire movie in one hit. Subtitles seem to be trickier to handle than I expected, especially when they are of the sort where a character in the movie speaks in a foreign language for only part of the movie (ie, you don’t want the entire set of English subtitles, just for the bit where fluent German, French or what have you is being spoken).

Assuming you get that far, it is then difficult to turn a 30 or 40GB .m2ts file into something usable (say, a 10GB mkv file). The standard tool I use for converting DVD movies to MKV is HandBrake (see below), but it usually chokes when presented with such a large input file. I therefore normally use Aieesoft HD Converter to turn the .m2ts file into a standard .avi or .wmv one. It’s not the greatest program in the world -it’s grasp of English syntax seems to be lacking at one or two points, for example!- but it (usually) does the job. Sometimes, I find the audio gets out of synch with the video, which is very annoying, but if you tweak the conversion settings enough times, it usually works in the end. When it doesn’t, I’ve also used the Free Video Converter from Koyotesoft to do the same thing, and it usually succeeds where Aieesoft’s offering fails (it also has failures of its own, though, so neither is perfect).

I must confess, though, that if we are ever presented with a choice between a Blu-Ray version of a movie and a DVD version of the same thing, we will usually buy the DVD version, simply because turning it into something we can actually use comfortably in the house is a lot, lot simpler. Blu-Ray ripping and converting is still not a seamless, painless exercise, in short, no matter what software you install.

4. DVD Ripping
As I mentioned above, you have to have AnyDVD HD: there’s simply nothing like it for making working with encrypted DVDs painless.

After that, I simply copy off the VIDEO_TS directory onto my hard disk and then point HandBrake at it. I run HandBrake at insane settings, extracting every last bit of quality out of the source, even though it takes 6 hours to convert (on an overclocked i7, 4 cores, 8 threads, with 8GB RAM to work in). Patience pays, however: you end up with 1.5-2.0GB MKV files that are a pleasure to watch.

5. Audio Ripping
Just as DVDs are a pain to have cluttering up the place in their physical form, so I haven’t played a physical audio CD in years. They all get ripped to lossless WMA format the minute they’re delivered from Amazon! My preferred tool for doing that is dbPowerAmp Music Converter. It incorporates AccurateRip, so you can be certain the final rip is as good as it can be; it’s multi-threaded (if you buy the Reference version), so my 4 hyperthreaded CPUs are used to their maximum potential; it has stacks of codecs which can be plugged in at any time, so if you happen (like me) to also need to convert your WMA rips to MP3 (or pretty much anything else) for the sake of your portable media player, that’s easy to do, too. The only bummer, I suppose, is that it’s not zero cost… and at US$36, it’s no longer the peanut-sized $18 it was when I first purchased it, either. But, all in all, it’s worth it.

I’ve experimented with zero-cost alternatives (like Exact Audio Copy), but I’ve never found anything with quite the ease of use of dbPowerAmp. To take just one example: if a CD contains three different Bach cantatas, I would like to rip them into three separate folders, each containing tracks numbered 1 to (say) 5. dbPowerAmp has a unique ‘track offset’ feature that makes doing that a piece of cake; nothing else I’ve ever tried has, so I usually end up with three folders containing, respectively, tracks 1-5, tracks 6-10 and tracks 11-15. It doesn’t make a lot of difference when you play the stuff what the tracks happen to be called at the OS level, I realise, but it’s just one of those organisational things that dbPowerAmp gets right.

6. PDF Creation
I’m not shelling out hundreds of dollars for the Adobe Acrobat product, thank you very much! My needs are much more modest… so I make do with Primo PDF Creator, which costs nix, nada, zilch. It doesn’t integrate well with anything and you can’t edit the PDFs after you’ve created them… but, if you can print it, you can create a PDF with it (since the software installs as a new printer driver).

For a PDF reader, I actually make do with the Adobe offering -but the Foxit alternative is just as free and rather smaller to download. It’s also less prone to ‘phoning home’ (tip to the wise: in the Adobe Reader, visit Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript and uncheck the Enable Acrobat JavaScript option, unless you fancy leaving your PC open to potential security exploits).

7. Graphics
The Other Half does a lot of fancy-shmancy effects work on photographs taken with a digital SLR. For that, nothing approaches the Photoshop/Lightroom combination, and ToH is happy with them. No way am I installing that behemoth on my PC, however. Apart from anything else, I’d spend the next three years learning how to use it all And besides even that, I don’t have $1000+ to spare! Therefore, I content myself with Paint.Net, which is entirely zero-cost and does all that I could ask it to do by way of simple (and also not-so-simple) image transformations and conversions.

Yup, I could use the GIMP, I suppose. But then I could also beat myself over the head with blunt hazlenuts in an attempt to look vaguely attractive. Both seem rather pointless wastes of my time! (Truthfully, the GIMP’s layout, menu structures etc. have never seemed half so intuitive as Paint.Net’s layout/menu structure etc. Your mileage, as they say, could well be different).

8. Scratched Disk Repair
I do get the occasional DVD or CD with a nasty scratch on it. The only way I know to retrieve anything from such a disk is with the IsoBuster. It can take hours to navigate past a defective patch on a disk, and you may end up having to pad the output with zeroes (which is, effectively, a data loss situation), but it will usually get there in the end. When I’ve done that on a DVD, for example, I’ve seen a second of so of cubist garbage flash up on the TV before the thing continues to play completely normally: better that than a completely unplayable disk, surely?! As a bonus, it’s completely zero-cost (well, there’s an option to upgrade to the PRO version for US$29.95, but I’ve never taken that option, and I’ve still saved disks with the freebie version).

9. Codecs
With all my movies in MKV format, it’s a little tricky to persuade Windows Media Centre to play them. But Shark’s Codecs make that a non-issue. (It also means Media Player can cope with FLACs and so on) I’m not usually a fan of installing codec packs (they are often virus/trojan infested, for example; and if not that, then they have a habit of making your PC as stable as a jelly in a gale), but Shark’s ones are safe, competent and comprehensive and make your choice of format for your multimedia files an entirely moot point.

10. Editing of Recorded TV Programmes from Media Centre
Sometimes, we want to save a TV programme recorded with Windows Media Centre. This is not especially easy, since the Windows 7 MC records in a weird format that Microsoft themselves don’t support very well (.wtv, if you’re interested). If we want to top-and-tail a recording (or strip out adverts, etc), we first right-click the file and turn it into a .dvr-ms file (that’s the format used, I think, by the much older XP media centre). Then we can load those converted files into DVR-MS Editor. That lets you edit the file to your heart’s content, and is completely zero cost.

Obtaining DVR-MS Editor is not exactly a piece of cake, however! It’s actually downloadable from Stephen Toub’s blog, right at the end of a very long article, and from a very small hyperlink called ‘OldCode.zip’. Once you’ve downloaded and unpacked that, the relevant executable (which needs no installation) is found in ..\OldCode\Code\DvrmsEditor\bin\Debug\. Easy, huh?! Still, works just fine.

I think that’s just about it. Scanning through my ‘Programs and Features’ screen in Windows 7, at any rate, that would appear to be most if not all of the key multimedia-related software I’ve currently got installed on my PC. Should make any future re-installation a bit easier, I hope!

Naturally, all this faffing around with domain names means changes to DNS records and consequent disruption to accessibility, but that should pass within a day or two as the DNS updates propagate around the globe.

What happens to websites that don’t, in any case, have much -or indeed anything- by way of accessible content is probably irrelevant to almost everyone. But there are email consequences, too. I’ve fiddled with the MX records for the dizwell domain so that email to hjr@dizwell.com should still get through. But that was getting pretty spam-ridden in any case, so I’m going to switch over to a diznix.com address. Mail sent to the one should get forwarded to the other, but eventually even that will get switched off. I shall be contacting those I know are not spambots in the near future to tell them the new email address details.

I get a tad nostalgic at all this: dizwell.com has been around for seven years (which counts as half a lifetime on the Interwebs, I think!), but now it is, effectively, no more. Ah well. Onwards, diznix!

The lectionary readings for today are (inevitably!) the same as they have been for the two cantatas I’ve discussed previously -but unlike those cantatas, this one pays barely a passing nod to anything specific contained in any of the day’s old testament, gospel or epistle texts. The Luke text for the day (as was mentioned a fortnight ago) talks about Jesus ‘going up to Jerusalem’ (where he will, of course, be arrested, tortured and crucified), and in a general sense the cantata uses that as a cue for meditating on the pain and torment of the Passiontide story. The cantata text then turns that well-known ‘external’ story into a personal and internalised reflection on how, through that suffering, a Christian will get through the Day of Judgement at the end of time. After all, “I break the powerful bonds of death”, says Jesus at the very end of the piece. All in all, it’s a very apt piece for getting you into the Lent/Easter pentitential mood, suffused as it is with a sense of time passing, judgement coming… and Jesus standing by you through it all.

It’s also an incredibly complex piece, musicologically speaking! The first movement is based on (or at least contains, buried within it) three different chorale themes. Here’s the first of them, visible in the first four bars of the first violin part, page 1 of the PDF linked to at the end of this blog piece:

If you click on that, you’ll get to hear the notes bashed out on a piano. You ought to be able to recognise the tune, too: it’s exactly the same one mentioned last week, to which the closing chorale’s version of the Agnus Dei was set:

Different pitches, certainly, but exactly the same pattern: the music tells you, even if the words aren’t actually set, that this is a plea for God’s mercy, mediated through ‘the Lamb of God’, Jesus -which fits the words perfectly, of course. (Actually, because it is quite difficult to hear those notes being played, at least one conductor -John Eliot Gardiner- has recorded a version in which that tune is explicitly sung by the sopranos, his argument being that this is what, in all likelihood, Bach would have done originally). So that’s ‘big tune 1′.

The second chorale theme is the one you can hear the sopranos sing in their long notes whilst the other voice parts flit and dance around them. That comes from a hymn written way back in 1562 by a chap called Paul Eber. Bach very commonly took chorale tunes known to his congregation from long-standing sources and adapted them to fit his original work, and this is an example of that happening:

Now, if you take that second chorale tune and shrink its note values down, you get this:

That’s from the very first bar of the very first page of the PDF full score -and you’d better get used to that sequence of notes, because it pops up everywhere! Bar 3 in the recorders/flutes; Bar 4 in the oboes again; bar 5 in the continue; bar 6 in the violins and so on and on. The ‘motif’ even appears outside of the first movement altogether. Take a look at page 14 of the score, for example, and see what’s accompanying the tenor in his recitative at bar (measure) 13:

Now, I’ll readily concede that it’s not exactly the same, but I think you’ll hear at least the strong family resemblance to the original theme! Now jump to the fifth movement (the bass aria), page 22 of the PDF, and see what the bass sings:

Again, there’s that repeated-note theme, though of course it then goes off and does its own thing. Still, that repetition of ‘fürwahr, fürwahr’ happens time and time again throughout the bass aria: it’s quite a striking motif in its own right, and I don’t think it’s any accident that it can trace its ancestry back to the very first bars of the first movement! Anyone claiming that merely repeating notes doesn’t count as echoing an earlier theme, however, needs to read on just two bars more and look at what the continuo line is playing, starting three quavers before the end of that bar:

Despite the very different note values and starting pitches, there’s that same theme all over again, quoted completely, yet appearing in the fifth movement rather than the first. You can play this hide-and-seek-the-theme game lots more times than I’ve got room (or time!) for here and yield lots of other results. But this isn’t just a game, of course: Bach is carefully using this second theme in the first movement to permeate the entire cantata and thus tie it all together, musically and emotionally.

So, that’s two chorale tunes. One using the Agnus Dei motif, and the second this repeated-note them from the Paul Eber chorale of 1562. But that’s not all, for there is yet another, buried in the continuo part on page 1 of the full-score PDF, bar 6:

Now that is a slightly garbled version of a tune you hear properly in Cantata BWV 159, second movement, when the soprano sings:

Again, Bach uses these chorale tunes which were written by others decades earlier (in this case, by Paul Gerhardt in 1656) because the tunes will be familiar to his audience (the church congregation) and they can therefore be expected to attach meaning to them that might pass you and I by. In this case, for example, the words associated with the original chorale were:

You maybe get the idea, therefore, that Bach is quietly dropping this tune into his cantata 127 so that his listeners will quasi-subconsciously call to mind the sufferings Christ endured during his Passion, which would be an entirely appropriate thing for them to do, given that this would be the last music heard before the start of the Lent/Easter season for that year. It’s very subtle, of course -and if you aren’t familiar with the original chorale tune, it might well pass you by. But it means Bach is working at many different levels at once to inspire a given set of emotions in his audience.

Now, that’s already a pretty complex piece: three different chorale tunes playing their part in this opening movement, each giving it multiple meanings, associations and resonances; and some of which are destined to colour or influence parts of all the other movements too. But that’s not quite all! There’s yet another feature of the first movement which has to be mentioned, if only because it gives the entire movement its particular colour and character: the dotted rhythms played (initially) by the two recorders (or flutes):

That rhythm gets passed from instrument to instrument, on and on, page after page -and I wish I could tell you what it represented! Alfred Dürr (he of the mega-expensive book on Bach cantatas) says, “…the scoring with recorders and the invariable dotted rhythm evoke the impression of submissive, beseeching gestures”. Really??! Not for me they don’t. Not unless the beseeching person involved has some sort of manic muscle twitch. Perhaps he’s suffering from Tourette’s? Or maybe, the idea the thing has anything to do with ‘beseeching’ is not a particularly good one! Alternatively, I’ve seen someone claim elsewhere on the web that the rhythm is like the beating of angel wings… but that strikes me as mere fanciful whimsy on that listener’s part. I could just about imagine the jerky flapping of a butterfly’s wings, but if angels beat their wings like that, they’d be airsick pretty quickly, I think! The Other Half suggested that it sounded a bit like a march -but it’s written in 4/4 and marches ought to be in 2/4, so that one doesn’t convince me either, though a sedate funeral march sounds a lot more convincing than twitchy angels or beseeching beggars, especially given that the entire cantata text is all about death and judgement. Finally, I suppose, you could note that recorders have a rural/pastoral flavour about them -in which case it could just be a bunch of shepherds having a knees-up. The nature of the text tends to suggest that would be somewhat inappropriate, however, so no joy there either!

My own best guess is that the dotting is there simply to avoid monotony, but that what’s really important is the insistent pulse of the underlying quavers… because that same quaver pulse rhythm is what opens the third movement (soprano aria). So, again, Bach is tying different parts of the cantata, rhythmically, together -and the bouncy dottedness of this version of that underlying rhythm is there just to keep the ear interested. Anyway, that’s just my best guess: I can’t honestly say with any certainty why Bach adopted that figuration, though I’m glad he did!

All in all, what an opening movement! Three completely independent chorale tunes wrapped up together and topped off with a layer of dotted quaver icing played by some gorgeous-sounding recorders. They don’t come any better than that, I think!

I’ll pass on over the tenor recitative, because there’s not a lot to say about it, and come directly to the core of the work: the soprano aria. It’s a wonderful thing, and I definitely want it at my funeral! There is just a luscious, simple beauty about the soprano tune. (That said, it’s anything but simple musically -wandering through modulation after modulation. I tell you, if you bashed out those notes on a keyboard stripped of their context, casual listeners would think you were playing some awfully modern quasi-atonal composition by some 20th Century wünderkind or other). The bit that really gets to me, though, is when the soprano sings about funeral bells: and Bach has the violins and viola play pizzicato: mention bells in the text and you get bells in the string section! Throughout, there’s a measured quaver pulse which reminds me of the ticking of a clock (presumably, time passing as we make our way to Eternity). It’s calm and sure, however; not at all panicked or resentful of time having run out. If this is what it’s like to kark it, this is the way I would want to go! Even better: it’s a da capo aria, so once the soprano gets to the end of the thing, she re-starts the whole thing from the beginning. It’s true that on the repeat, we stop short of the funeral bells; but you get pretty much everything else for a second helping.

The bass aria (fifth movement -though, technically, it’s just a follow-on to the fourth movement recitative) is also wonderful: the trumpets that shall sound at the last judgement make an appearance, and I just love baroque trumpets! The piece is cunningly composed (of course!): the bass starts quietly, with just a continuo accompaniment. Then he has a trumpet-introduced interlude; another continuo-accompanied interlude; more trumpets and so on, the two styles alternating about six times in all.

To wrap it all up, there’s a deceptively simple-sounding chorale (check out the last three bars and work out how many keys it wanders through, with all those sharps, flats and naturals scattered around like confetti!)

I’ve gone on at some length about this cantata, simply because I’ve been blown away by it (never having heard it before this week -very much my loss). I’m giving it a rating of 6 out of 5 because it’s just so far out of the realm of any other cantata I’ve discussed up to this point. The text says wonderful things, and the music is just at a level of inspiration that defies proper categorization. Some have claimed it to be Bach’s best cantata: well, I wouldn’t know about that (I’ve still got 150 or so of them to go!), but I think it must definitely be in the premier league of cantatas! Wonderful stuff.

Further Information

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

Foolishly, I happened to mention at the time that my left foot had a bit of a callus on it. Within seconds, the doctor had her canister of liquid nitrogen out, and I am now the painful possessor of a 2cm-diameter ‘burn’ that has turned into a small egg-sized blister, making walking practically impossible. It is good to see GPs finally doing what amounts to 21st Century voodoo (because that’s all I reckon GPs have usually been capable of), but it does rather hurt!

As a bonus, I got to use the stethoscope (on the doctor’s own ample bosom, I will confess). I was always of the opinion that most of the ritual involved with stethoscopes was largely voodoo, too; but having finally heard it with my own ears, I am convinced that you could actually diagnose something significant with it. It doesn’t change my belief, however, that most doctors just wield it to impress the wishful thinking!

ToH has finally started digging my vegetable garden. It’s about time: I’ve only been moaning about the lack of one for about three years. The trouble is that nothing will grow in this place unless it is first fenced in to protect it from the wallabies, and it’s that expenditure on fencing that has been the show-stopper until now. Given the precarious state of my left foot, I spent today doing what I do best: watching someone else doing all the hard work and pointing out where they’ve missed a bit. It doesn’t make me friends with anyone, but I feel a certain sense of fulfilment!

Of the two, I have to say I much prefer BWV 22, but number 23 has a doleful charm all of its own, too.

The cantata text, as usual, takes the Gospel reading for the day and runs with it. In this case, that’s Luke 18, v.31 to 43, which is the same reading I discussed last week (involving thick disciples who couldn’t understand what Jesus was on about). This cantata text, however, picks up on the second part of that reading:

And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging and hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant. And they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by. And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and when he was come near, he asked him,saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight. And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee. And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, glorifying God: and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God.

This reading obviously gives the cantata its title (Du wahrer Gott und Davids Sohn means ‘you, true God and David’s Son’, which is the blind man’s cry, near enough). It also sets the tone: someone suffering, waiting endlessly for something good to come along to relieve the agony. The entire piece is accordingly imbued with a sadness and plaintiveness, entirely fitting the blind man’s mood. The first movement, involving a close duet of alto and soprano, accompanied by the despondency that seems inevitably to arise when oboes do their thing, is unbelievably moving, in fact. Textually, throughout the entire cantata, there are verbal echoes of the blind man’s plea for mercy -culminating in the fourth movement with an explicit setting of the Agnus Dei (though, obviously, in German!):

Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, grant us peace.

Musically, Bach was showing off a bit -because the tune to which that Agnus Dei is set appears as the instrumental tune to the accompaniment of the second movement recitative -thus making the call for mercy appear, literally, throughout the entire work… even if, in one part, wordlessly.

On page 12 of the 32-page PDF of the full score linked to at the end of this post, for example, you’ll see this in the oboe/violin opening to the second movement:

That’s a sequence of Eflat -> F -> G -> G -> Aflat -> G, which you can hear by clicking on the music example.

And on page 25 of the same PDF, you’ll see the Sopranos open movement four as follows:

The clef used perhaps makes it a little trickier to see, but that is a sequence of Bflat -> C -> D -> D -> Eflat -> D, and again, you can hear what that sounds like by clicking on the music example. The two cases are a fifth apart, so the second sounds higher than the first, but the pattern is exactly the same in each case. Given that the fourth movement was only added later to the cantata (only the first three movements were included at the first perfomance in 1723), it would seem that the sequence meant ‘plea for mercy’ in Bach’s head when he wrote it into the second movement. When he then came to set the words of the Agnus Dei to music, presumably he chose to re-quote the same theme because its ‘inner meaning’ matched the ‘outer meaning’ of the words, so it was appropriate to do so.

This repeated plea for mercy makes for a very melancholy work (begging for mercy has that effect on you). But it’s also a subtly strong work: there’s no question, from this setting at any rate, that the request for mercy will be granted -and, textually, there’s not a shred of doubt about the matter either. Ultimately, it’s therefore very reassuring: the final request for peace is, you feel certain, going to be granted. The final ‘Amen’ of the fourth movement ends on a blazing C major chord, for example: you can’t mistake the ‘coming home’ feeling and guaranteed solidity of that ending! But what I like about this piece, too, is that there is no whiz-bangery about the miraculous business of regaining sight. The emphasis of the text (and thus of the music) is on the quest for mercy, and the (quiet) miracle of it being granted. Those of us who are not particularly convinced about miracles of the wow-the-crowd sort don’t particularly have anything to carp about, therefore! Even the third movement, which deals with the topics of eyes and vision much more than the other movements do (and in a fairly joyous way, too) frames its observations as a private and inward allegory of the pursuit of ’spiritual light’, rather than as a piece of public magic, wonderful to behold.

Anyway, I am left in two minds about this particular cantata. One is that is simply a great work, mournfully beautiful to listen to, wonderfully calm and reassuring to contemplate. The other is, there are no trumpets, horns or organ, nor any dance rhythms to pleasure the ear: the Puritans (or maybe that should be Lutherans!) have the day -which makes it worthy, but not delicious fun. I can’t love this work, therefore; but I can admire it. 3.5 out of 5 from me.

Further Information

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

Having once started, I couldn’t help but poke around Google a bit more, and it turns out that good old John Butt has done rather well for himself in the intervening 25 years. Rather better, I have to say, than I seem to have managed! Yes, I have wallabies to feed and ten acres of bush to attend to. And yes, I’ve flown myself into Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. But lecturer, fellow and director of artistic endeavours I am not.

All of which rather put a dampener on proceedings, so I proceeded to Google for a couple of other people I’ve not kept in touch with but who shared those hard, wooden chapel pews with me back in the day. David Watkins used to be the principal tenor in the choir (I his mere colleague). He seems to be doing OK these days, too! I mean, he’s only played principal cellist for the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment… it’s not like he’s super-talented or anything! By this stage, I was sinking into a veritable Slough of Despond… so I checked out Ben Parry who also shared choir duties with me. I think it was who I saw him with when I clicked his ‘Contact’ link that finally persuaded me to stop the self-torture!

I’m actually happy these guys had the talent and the nous to make such a successful go of their lives -this isn’t an ‘envy’ thing, in other words. But I can’t help thinking that I’ve rather stuffed life up in comparison. The fact that none of them would have the faintest recollection of me rather makes the point, I guess! (Incidentally, the excellent series of films of David explaining the cello here remind me of just what a funny bloke he was to be around! The “outtakes” one, especially!)

Oh well, back to the hum-drum and inconsequential business of optimising a piece of SQL… whilst listening as it turns out to a very good Messiah after all (and it’s nice to be able to download FLACs).

So Bach had a bit of a holiday on his hands, and I suppose I could do likewise. The trouble is, Easter is a moveable feast (it depends on when the new moon interacts with the Northern Hemisphere’s Spring Equinox), so what is Lent in 2010 wasn’t necessarily Lent in the early-to-mid 1720s, when Bach was in major cantata mode in Leipzig. In fact, if you check the relevant Wikipedia page, you’ll find a number of cantatas for performance at Quinquagesima that have first performance dates ranging from 7th February -which is obviously well behind us now- to 27th February -which is still to come, of course; and then you’ll find the reference to the beginning of Lent, which is now four days ago. So, you see that trying to tie the 1724 or 1725 liturgical calendar to the 2010 one is not such a trivial task!

The net result is that whilst the fact that Lent has begun this year might make discussing a new cantata unnecessary, I’ll still discuss the first of those possible Quinquagesima cantatas -and in the remaining weeks of this year’s Lenten period, I’ll discuss the others, too.

And so down to business: Cantata BWV 22.

The original score of this cantata is annotated with the words, ‘Dies ist das Proberstück in Leipzig’, which translates as, ‘This is the Leipzig audition-piece’. In other words, this was written by Bach in February 1723 to get himself the job of Cantor at St. Thomas’, Leipzig, which adds a certain historical ‘zing’ to it, perhaps! The text of the cantata revolves around the Gospel of the day, which was Luke 18, v. 31 – 43 in which this passage appears:

Then he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them,
Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that
are written by the prophets concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.
For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked,
and spitefully entreated, and spitted on and they shall scourge him,
and put him to death; and the third day he shall rise again.
And they understood none of these things and this saying was hid from them,
neither knew they the things which were spoken.

I always think the disciples are being unusually thick at this point, since there doesn’t seem to be much ambiguous about Jesus’ words! But, the point is that Jesus ‘brought the 12 to him’ (which gives this cantata its title), warned them he was going to Jerusalem where he would die, and they didn’t understand a word of it. Bach’s librettist transforms this story into a personal affair for each modern-day Christian: it is you that must go to Jerusalem and take part in Jesus’ passion. It is therefore you that needs to understand Jesus’ words -and the text becomes, in parts, a prayer for understanding so that we, unlike the disciples, can understand what is about to happen. Remember the timing here, too: this is to be sung just before Lent starts, and Lent is the season that ‘leads on’ to the time of the passion of Jesus in Jerusalem, culminating in his crucifixion (and resurrection, of course!). So this is a nicely “preparatory” cantata, bending the congregation’s mind to the travails that are about to come, preparing us for the penitential time that is Lent and the agonies of Easter.

Musically, the thing opens with a plaintive oboe line -again, sad, penitential, mournful. The text in the first movement is a direct quotation from the Gospel for the day, initially sung by the tenor (as Evangelist) and bass (taking Jesus’ part). The chorus chimes in as the bewildered and clueless set of disciples: the parts cross nicely, hinting at the complete chaos in their minds, as if to say, ‘What is he on about?!’

The second movement is an aria for alto -with an obbligato oboe accompaniment that, once again, gives the piece a plangent quality. The alto is supposed to be expressing our own thoughts, of course: we are (or ought to be) ready to share in the pain of Jesus in Jerusalem. For the most part, the music is straightforward enough (it’s Bach, though, so not that straightforward!), but there’s an extraordinary moment at the 1:44 mark when the alto is singing the word ‘Leiden’ (which means “suffering” or, in the specific context of Jesus’ sufferings, “passion”). The key suddenly shifts (to C flat major, as it happens), the oboe sticks on one note, and the continuo in the bass part falls away on a descending scale. A very effective ‘heart-stopping’ moment, as the awful truth dawns (and, one might think, a bit of compositional pizzazz to wow the people who were about to decide who to employ as Cantor!)

Next, the bass points out that it’s not so easy to understand after all: first, one has to ‘crucify’ one’s material desires. I find the opening of the movement almost unbearably lovely (the sustained chords in the continuo; the bass line weaving around it; the slow, deliberative tempo). There are two bits of word-painting: first, on the ‘laufen’ in line 1 (meaning ‘to run’, and the bass line certainly starts doing so!); second on the last line, where “Freuden” (joys) gets some suitably joyful airtime. There’s also a little in-joke on the ‘feste Burg’ bit: Ein feste Burg was one of Luther’s own compositions and Bach fleetingly quotes the tune at this point. When I saw the words in the libretto, and before hearing the piece for the first time, I bet he was going to do that… and I wasn’t disappointed! In the cantata’s score it looks like:

…which is three repeated notes, followed by a drop of a fourth.

And here’s what Luther’s hymn opens with:

…which is, er, three repeated notes followed by a drop of a fourth. Bingo!

Anyway, it’s a nice little in-joke, designed (I suspect) to impress long-time committed Lutherans who have your career prospects in the palm of their hands!

The tenor aria is a short affair, with nice word-play on ‘Frieden’ (peace), including a bit at 1:30 where the soloist holds the note steady whilst the continuo plays the opening theme under him. The overall mood at this point is one of happiness, I think: the idea of being eternal peace has that effect on people, I suppose.

We wrap up with a nice chorale, as usual -only this one is a little different in that each of the lines for the chorus is interspersed with an instrumental interlude, rather like what happens in the well-known ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’ chorale. The violin and oboe sustain semiquaver (16th note!) runs throughout the entire movement, giving it a nice sense of forward motion. I rather like the fact, too, that the chorale’s words aren’t of the usual, plodding “…and the moral of the story is…” type. Instead, we just get a rather nice reflection on the idea of making Jesus the focus of our thoughts.

All in all, and as you can probably tell by now, I like this one. I’m thus giving it a rating of 4/5, for whatever that’s worth!

Further Information

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

Anyway, down to business. The Gospel appointed for today in the Lutheran lectionary of 1725 (ish) was Luke 8, v. 4-15 -which is the well-known parable of the sower (“some seed fell on stony ground, some was eaten by birds, and some fell amongst thorns.”) At the end of the parable, the disciples ask Jesus what it all means, and his answer is:

Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.

This is real meat for Protestants, of course: to have Jesus himself talking about the word of God (as opposed to faith in priests, relics, saints and all the Hellish paraphernalia the Catholics put up with!) is the sort of thing that would have made Luther deliriously excited, I suspect!! Naturally, therefore, Bach’s librettist took this theme and ran -practically a marathon!- with it. The gist of the text is “The word of God is the treasure of my life, and I pray it is never taken away from me”. Explicitly, the librettist adds (and Bach dutifully sets) that this wonderful treasure is at risk from the horrid murder and blasphemy of ‘the Turks and the Pope’. So sweetness and tolerance is not exactly this cantata’s strong point! Which is a bit of a shame, because it’s rather a nice one, musically. I should mention in passing that this is a relatively early work, and not from the main Leipzig cantata cycle of 1724/25: it was actually written in Weimar in about 1714. I could equally well have selected BWV 181, which was the 1724 equivalent for this Sunday in the calendar -but that will have to wait until next year!

BWV 18’s title is the German for “Just as the rain and snow fall from heaven”, which is a direct quote from Isaiah 55:

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

…which neatly references the twin ideas of sowing seed and the word of God being like seed that germinates and yields a harvest of accomplishment. This is the text sung, verbatim, by the bass soloist in the cantata’s second movement.

The cantata opens, however, with a ’sinfonia’: a wordless orchestral introduction, scored for an interesting mix of 2 flutes or violins (the recording sample this week uses the violins), 4 (count ‘em!) violas, bassoon, cello and continuo. The massed ranks of the violas give the piece a dark, warm tone. The piece consists primarily of a repeated theme of strong quarter notes (crotchets to us English folk!) interspersed with a spiky bit of eighth-note (quavers!)  runs. Various sources will claim that this is a picture of rain/snow -the sort of weather you need for your seeds to germinate- even to the point of referring to it as a sort of ‘Bach’s Four Seasons’. In particular, it’s claimed by some, that the quaver runs (downwards, often enough) are the musical depiction of falling rain -as about to be described, verbally, by the bass soloist when he quotes the Isaiah passage mentioned earlier. But I can’t see it (or hear it) myself, and I don’t think there’s a need to force Bach into a ‘programme music’ mould. For me, it’s just an attractive and masterful piece of chaconne writing for sparse orchestral resources. But you can listen and decide for yourself, of course.

The second movement, as I’ve mentioned, is a rather fine bass solo, reciting the Isaiah text already quoted -and since it’s a literal and direct quotation from Isaiah, I’m rendering it here into Authorised Version English, despite Bach never using or reading the King James’ bible!

The third movement is very interesting: it’s a standard recitative, interspersed with chunks of the Lutheran litany (which is where the bit about ’save us from Turks and Papists’ comes from -Luther’s own lovely handiwork- and all marked in bold in the translation below). The recitative is relatively standard ‘basic cantata’: pleas for God to consider the supplicant, plant the seed of his word in his heart, and keep the devil and all his instruments (including Turks and Papists!) away. Each part of the recitative is taken by a different soloist -starting with the tenor (and his is a particularly beautiful bit of supplication, I think), then the bass, and then the two alternating for the remaining two bits of recitative. The litany parts are declaimed, mostly on a single note by a soprano -and then the Chorus comes in with the ‘hear us, good Lord!’ bits. I’ve borrowed from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for some parts of the litany’s translation (again, very anachronistic though doing so is, I think it sounds better that way). It’s a satisfying movement, musically and poetically, and there’s a bit of a feeling of the operatic about it -though also a bit on the preachy side!

The fourth movement is a breath of fresh air after all that: sung by the soprano (and thus with a cut-crystal clarity of tone), there’s a nice bit of emphasis on ‘Fort mit allen, fort, nur fort!’ -Away with everything! (Because I only need God’s word)’. It’s a jolly celebration of what the day’s Gospel was on about, and sounds like she’s having fun.

Finally, the thing wraps up with a fairly standard chorale fifth movement -nothing particularly remarkable about it, and in any case only a minute in length.

Overall, it’s a nice piece. The contents of the libretto are a bit on-the-nose in some respects: products of their time and thus sprinkled with the sort of religious bigotry that is a bit depressing to read in this day and age. But musically, there’s a lot of invention, the tone (or ‘colour’) of the piece is novel and interesting, and there’s a lot of subtlety and charm to listen to.

This week, I’m trying a new way of letting you sample Bach’s music. You’re only getting 80bps files, and extracts of the music even so, but hopefully there’s enough of each track available to let you get a sense of what the music is all about. Just click each of the movement titles in the text/translation below and the magic of mp3 streaming should let you enjoy the relevant bits and pieces. Enjoy!

Further Information

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

The gospel for today back in 1724 would have been Matthew 20 v. 1 – 16. That’s the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the essential gist of which is that a vineyard owner hires people at the start of the day and promises to pay them a penny; then he hires more at lunchtime and in the mid-afternoon. Finally, he hires some extra workers just one hour before works stops. Then he proceeds to pay everyone the contracted penny wages. Naturally, those who worked since early morning for the same pay as those hired just an hour before complain at their treatment. To which the vineyard owner retorts, ‘Were you not hired at a penny? And haven’t I paid you a penny? So what harm has befallen you? And why, therefore, do you complain? It’s my money and I can pay it as I like, so if I choose to pay these who came last the same as I pay you who came first, it’s not for you to question. Take what is yours and go away.’ In German, those last words translate to Nimm, was dein ist, und gehe hin -and thus gives this cantata its title.

In other words, this cantata seeks to deal with a central conundrum of religious belief: how come the bad guys always seem to get all the luck and the good ones get the shaft? The libretto for the cantata doesn’t really have much profound to say on the matter, other than ‘God knows what’s best for you’, so chin up and trust in Him. Sentiments which don’t really work for me, I’m afraid! The music is also curiously bland, with really nothing particular to commend it. There’s a weird ending to the last movement: just when you think it’s all about to resolve conventionally, the last cadence goes very peculiar. Other than that, it’s a workmanlike affair and not much else, so it rates a mere 1 out of 5 on my personal satisfaction meter!

Possibly more interesting than the music this week is the fact that today marked Septuagesima in 1724: approximately seventy days before Easter (though this observance was dropped from the Roman Catholic liturgy after Vatican 2, and the Anglicans followed soon after. Lutherans still observe it). Benjamin Britten wrote an operetta (Paul Bunyan) in 1941 to a libretto by W.H. Auden, one part of which contains the perhaps memorable line, Septuagesima …ate less and less-imer. Had them rolling in the aisles, I expect, but at least it sticks in my mind! Septuagesima fell rather earlier than that this year, because Easter is a moveable feast and falls this year on 4th April. Count seventy days back from that and you find out that, this year, Septuagesima Sunday was actually last weekend. No matter: it has traditionally marked the beginning of the ‘pre_lenten period’, and thus a time for carnival and other such festivities.

Further Information

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