Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 ? 28 July 1750) was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity.[1] Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation in composition for diverse instrumentation, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.
Revered for their intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty, Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos, the Goldberg Variations, the Partitas, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, the Magnificat, The Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, the English Suites, the French Suites, the Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo, the Cello Suites, more than 200 surviving cantatas, and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
While Bach's abilities as an organist were recognized and highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, he was not particularly well-known as a composer. His adherence to Baroque forms and contrapuntal style was considered "old-fashioned" by his contemporaries, especially late in his career when the musical fashion tended towards Rococo and later Classical styles. A revival of interest and performances of his music began early in the 19th century, and he is now widely considered to be one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition. (Collapse)...(Read more)
Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott (Fortunate the person who upon his God), BWV 139, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the cho...
Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott (Fortunate the person who upon his God), BWV 139, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the chorale cantata in Leipzig for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity and first performed it on 12 November 1724. It is based on the hymn by Johann Christoph Rube (1692).
Bach composed the chorale cantata in his second year in Leipzig for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity. The prescribed readings for the Sunday were from the Epistle to the Philippians, "our conversation is in heaven" (Philippians 3:17–21), and from the Gospel of Matthew, the question about paying taxes, answered by Render unto Caesar... (Matthew 22:15–22). The cantata is based on the hymn in five stanzas by Johann Christoph Rube (1692). It is sung to the melody of "Machs mit mir, Gott, nach deiner Güt" by Johann Hermann Schein (1628). An unknown poet kept the first and the last stanza as movements 1 and 6 of the cantata. He derived the inner movements as a sequence of alternating arias and recitatives from the inner stanzas. He based movement 2 on stanza 2, movements 4 and 5 on stanzas 3 and 4, and inserted movement 3, based on the gospel. According to Hans-Joachim Schulze in Die Welt der Bach-Kantaten (vol. 3), Andreas Stöbel, a former co-rector of the Thomasschule is a likely author of the chorale cantata texts, since he had the necessary theological knowledge, and Bach stopped the cantata sequence a few weeks after he died on 31 January 1725.
Bach first performed the cantata on 12 November 1724. He performed it again between 1732 and 1735, and between 1744 and 1747. For the second movement, the part for an obbligato violin is extant, but the part of a second obbligato instrument, possibly a second violin or an oboe d'amore, is missing.
The opening chorus is a chorale fantasia. Strings and the two oboes d'amore play concertante music, to which the soprano sings the cantus firmus, and the lower voices interpret the text, speaking of "child-like trust of the true believer" in the first section, of "all the devils" in the second, "he nonetheless remains at peace" in the third. The key is E major, a rare, "rather extreme" key at Bach's time, as musicologist Julian Mincham notes: only about a third of Bach's chorale cantatas begins in a major key at all, and only two in E major, the other being Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben? BWV 8, "a musing on death and bereavement and one of his most personal works".
In the tenor aria, movement 2, the motif of the first line "Gott ist mein Freund" (God is my friend) appears again and again in the voice and the instruments. The voice is "more convoluted" when the raging enemies and the "Spötter", those who ridicule or mock, are mentioned.
In movement 4, a bass aria with solo violin and the oboes d'amore in unison, Bach changes seamlessly from loud double-dotted music to "the most nonchalant texture imaginable" in 6/8 time to illustrate the text "But a helping hand suddenly appears", compared by John Eliot Gardiner to "God's outstretched hand as painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel".
Although originally scored for four vocal soloists (soprano, alto, tenor and bass), a four-part choir, two oboes d'amore, two violins, viola, and basso continuo, I created this arrangement for Flute, French Horn & Cello.
GUITAR
KEYBOARD
STUDIO
PA
LIGHT
DEEJAY
MIC
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