Sacred Baroque

For Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whose whole career orbited the Lutheran church and who never composed operas, the cantata became his primary vessel for solo vocal music. He composed hundreds of sacred cantatas that were sung in German during church services every Sunday and feast day, and he wrote dozens more for secular festivities, including the cantata Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten (Dissipate, You Troublesome Shadows) to celebrate a wedding. He might have composed it as early as 1714, when he was a court organist in Weimar, or maybe it came from his time as the Kappelmeister for a prince in Cöthen, from 1717 to 1723. The earliest surviving source is from the 1730s, when Bach directed music for an amateur group that performed cantatas and instrumental pieces in a Leipzig coffee shop, so he surely dusted it off there for a repeat performance.

This cantata features an obbligato oboe to complement the soprano voice in three of the arias, including the gorgeous opening aria where they hold impossibly long phrases and intertwine in fluid counterpoint. The second aria is distinctive in that it uses only basso continuo for the accompaniment (a shared bass line with played here by cello and harpsichord, with the right hand of the keyboard ad-libbing the harmonies), while the next aria uses violin as the melodic foil. The full ensemble only joins back in for the short final aria, set in the dance pattern of a Gavotte.

The German-born George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) found his greatest fame in England, but he got there by first mastering Italian opera. At 18, he got a job at the opera house in Hamburg, Germany, initially joining the second violin section and later playing harpsichord in the continuo group. Sometime around then he composed the Oboe Concerto in G Minor (HWV 287), trying his hand at another style that emanated from Italy. The slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of the movements was a signature of Arcangelo Corelli and other Roman composers, while the dotted rhythms (i.e. alternating long and short notes) in the Grave first movement and Sarabande designation in the third point to the influence of the dance suites that were all the rage then in France. Handel borrowed from himself—in what would be a fruitful, lifelong practice—to craft a lively finale out of the theme he used in the Grave.

After his time in Italy, Handel found a job working for a German prince in Hanover who happened to be the closest living protestant relative (a second cousin) to England’s Queen Anne. Handel capitalized on that relationship with the future King George I by establishing ties with London, and in 1711 he wrote the first Italian opera created expressly for British audiences. It proved to be a spectacularly appealing and lucrative endeavor, and Handel set himself up as the top impresario for Italian opera in London—not just composing the scores, but also producing and conducting the performances, selling subscriptions, and importing the best Italian divas to sing his florid vocal parts. Handel was so at home in England that he became a citizen in 1727, and when the local appetite for Italian opera finally waned in the 1730s, he remade himself as a composer of oratorios set in English, including his immortal Messiah.

In 1732, when Handel presented Esther, his very first English oratorio, some of the music was recycled from an earlier project he composed between 1723 and 1725, Silete Venti. With a sacred text in Latin, Handel described that score as a motet—a term for a type of sacred vocal music that often used multiple singers—but stylistically it is really akin to Handel’s cantatas, those mini-operas for voice and ensemble. A stately overture in the French style whips itself up into a windy, contrapuntal storm, setting up an arresting entrance for the soprano who commands the winds to be silenced in the title aria. The love song that comes next (Dulcis amor) would be right at home in an opera, except that the object of rapture in this case is Jesus. In a pleasing bit of symmetry, the aria Date serta invites the winds to arise in a dramatic contrasting section so as to welcome back the “bright breezes of heaven.” The single word of the final aria, Alleluia, lets the soprano show off on endless “ahs” that spin in a triplet pulse related to the gigue dance that often appeared at the end of French suites.