Marie Luise Knott

Even though we are talking about pleasure here, ladies and gentlemen, I imagine that, on deeper reflection, it was sadness that moved Bach to compose this cantata. But what do we know? Even research knows little about it. And whenever I am groping in the dark, I start to open a little door for myself through speculation. This is how I open up and expand my world. I try to make sense of it – even if only temporarily perhaps.

But let me start at the beginning. When I first read the text of the cantata we have just heard, I was disconcerted. I am not at home in Bach’s time. Nor am I at home in the gallant literature of Christian Friedrich Hunold, who wrote most of the text. For four recitatives, a female voice sings virtually the same thing with different words each time: “Ich bin in mir vergnügt / Ich brauche keinen Ruhm / Ich trag mein Päcklein still, / … I fear no need, do not ask for vain things. / He who has his treasure with others is like a merchant, rich from other fortunes”, or: “May my soul be happy, however God leads.” – A text that is completely with God and, condemning all striving for wealth, greatness, fame and lust, celebrates joyful contentment. What baroque anti-ethics.

The context in which this secular cantata was composed is shrouded in mystery. Why would Bach have pulled this Hunold text from 1713 out of a drawer around 1727? And: who is this I who praises abstinence, chastity and asceticism here? Why all this and why in the middle of the 4th recitative – you heard it earlier – this attack on friendship: “Nothing is to build on friends / Your many go on a plumb line.” Why is that? Friendships humanize the world!

I remember how much I loved singing in church as a child. “What God does is well done, his will remains just. As he begins my things, so will I keep still!” As joyfully as I belted it out back then – singing is, after all, embodiment – something inside me resisted the lyrics: Was everything God did really good? And: Why, by God’s will, should I keep quiet? Perhaps because silence rhymed so well with will? I certainly didn’t want to rhyme with anything back then, and even less so in silence – even though I hadn’t heard of Immanuel Kant at the time and knew nothing of his statement that it was sweeter to think up laws than to quietly obey the existing laws. –

Please excuse the digression. But: thinking up new laws, creating worlds – that was more to my temperament than this “I’ll keep quiet for myself” we just heard.

Before we return to pleasure, a few words about silence. A volume of poetry on my bookshelf is entitled The Silence of the World before Bach. In it, the passionate poet, philosopher and mathematician Lars Gustafsson, who has unfortunately been dead for a while, puts into words the question of what a world before Bach might have been like. And he doesn’t mean the world before Bach’s birth, no, he tries to remember the sounds of his childhood, the time before Bach’s polyphonic music burst into his life, overwhelming him sensually – like puberty perhaps. Bach’s polyphony opened up a whole new beauty for him, as he recounts, the beauty of a soprano voice entwined “in helpless love around the gentler movements of a flute”. We heard such a love entwining of voice and instrument today in the 3rd aria, and the entwining there is no less tender, helpless and gentle.

But now back to the pleasure. It seems to me that Cantata 204 creates its very own beauty from the tension between the earthly asceticism in the recitative on the one hand and the heavenly serenity in the arias on the other. The dance rhythms in the arias make the text and sound seem to float.

But what does this text want? I have already quoted the line “Meine Seele sei vergnügt, wie es Gott auch immer fügt”. In another cantata of the same year, the following lines are addressed to God: “I live in you joyfully / And die without all sorrow.” And in the same year, another cantata reads: “Ei, wie vergnügt ist mir mein Sterbekasten.” Truly: a “pleasurable longing for death”, as Anna Prohaska put it.

Words, ladies and gentlemen, carry within them what we hear in them. There are no words that are understood in the same way by everyone. What’s more, language is constantly changing. And we also encounter what we read or hear in a new way every time – depending on the shape of our own day or brain. But it seems that the pleasure intended in the cantata is far removed from what we understand by it today. We must therefore take the cantata not by today’s word, but by its “contemporary” word.

Grimm’s dictionary states that the word “vergnügt” originally came from Middle High German and was mainly used in the “Kanzleisprache” and was synonymous with “genügen”. You were “pleased” because you were satisfied. If a person was promised interest, for example, it was said: “She has been made happy.” In other words: you have been satisfied.

Even here, in the cantata, “vergnügt” obviously follows the meaning of satisfying or being satisfied. The 1st aria repeats the word “zufrieden” (satisfied) x times. But words have many aspects and many possibilities, and the word “pleasure” must have already existed back then in the meaning we know today. Barthold Heinrich Brockes, for example, a poet and contemporary of Bach, wrote seven volumes on “Earthly Pleasures in God”. And the early feminist poet Christiana Mariana von Ziegler, who lived in Leipzig at the time, ran a salon and also wrote cantata texts for Bach, also knew a “pleasure” beyond being satisfied. In one of her odes, she wrote the following lines: “What are the people running and walking up and down the streets, / So cheerfully and happily?”

Obviously, the word “vergnügt” underwent a transformation in Bach’s time to become the word we associate with the word today. In the course of the Enlightenment, the idea spread that it could also be possible and even desirable for the former subjects to forge their own earthly pleasures. In the 19th century, the search for pleasurable debauchery increased. Words such as amusement park, amusement tax, amusement industry did the rounds. An addiction to pleasure arose.

While pondering this addiction, a painting suddenly comes to mind: “The Pleasure” by the painter and surrealist René Magritte. A young girl with a pageboy cut stands leaning against a tree with several birds perched on its bare branches. The brown dress, collar and cuffs allude to the girl’s distant origins, but in her hands she is holding a bird whose head she has just – heartily – bitten off. As if the bird were an apple. A gruesome scene. Blood drips down. It is as if the painter wanted to depict the murderous perversion of pleasure in the modern age.

Unfortunately, this is not the place or time to reflect on the difference between joy and pleasure. But this much is certain: language is made of diversity. And although we consider the old meaning of pleasure to be extinct today, the word pleasure still exists today as an expression of inner serenity – beyond any addiction to pleasure. For example, in a two-liner by the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who spent the last years of his life not far from here, pleasure and amusement sound one and the same.

On the walk I took yesterday, quietly /
I laughed softly with amusement, of course.

“quietly made … laughed softly”. The sound of these lines alone is inspiring – and very much so today. – Bach would certainly have enjoyed setting texts by Robert Walser to music.

The fact that I came up with the idea, as I said at the beginning, that Cantata 204 could be a funeral cantata is yet another story that is linked to pleasure in many ways. According to Luther, a happy household is the most beautiful ornament of God, and the Bach family lived from music. Music provided them with both income and pleasure. Bach, who had to produce cantatas on an assembly line in Leipzig at the time, was an avowed Protestant. When the Elector of Saxony, Augustus II, converted to Catholicism in 1697 in order to receive the title and property of the Polish crown in addition to his previous titles, many of the citizens of the state were outraged. The Bachs are also likely to have sided with the princess in this religious dispute. At least that’s how I imagine it. – Because August’s young wife, Electress Christiane Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, refused to convert to Catholicism at the time. And when the Polish Sejm banned her from practising her Protestant religion, the princess decided to lead an independent life from then on, presumably in protest against her husband’s “betrayal of faith”. While her husband, the king, strove to increase his influence, wealth and honor and indulged in something akin to luxury, the Saxon electress lived a frugal life for almost 30 years on a country estate on the Elbe. There she devoted herself to numerous works of charity, regularly attended the Easter mass in Bach’s Leipzig and cultivated a certain asceticism, probably also, as it was said at the time, to atone for her husband’s conversion. The people gave her the nickname “Saxony’s Pillar of Prayer“, which was probably an honorary title from the Protestant point of view.

When the Princess died on September 4, 1727, a bleak time must have begun for Bach, his wife and his entourage, as public musical performances were forbidden during the five months of national mourning. Even in churches. This meant no music – and therefore no commissions, not even at Christmas time.

It was the memory of the Corona period that led me to my mourning thesis. If Bach did not want to be completely deprived of music during his mourning period, he had to rely on domestic music. And there were enough musicians in his house. So he composed the solo cantata 204 during the month-long break in composition, which, with its extremely sparse instrumental scoring, seems to have been made for domestic music. It was sung by his wife, Anna Magdalena, who was probably one of the most important soprano soloists at the time. According to this speculation of mine, the cantata was therefore not a commissioned work, but a self-commissioned work. Was there such a thing?

As a strong indication for my thesis, I read the fact that the text of the official funeral ode, for which Bach composed the music in 1727, begins with the cry: “How the princess died so happily!” Due to the marital upheavals, there was no representative celebration of the titular queen’s death, but when the ode was performed on 17 October 1727 – breaking the ban on music – at a privately organized funeral service in Leipzig’s university church, numerous dignitaries attended. Bach himself sat at the harpsichord to conduct. It must have been a great social success for him.

I asked at the beginning which I actually speaks in the cantata text? And suddenly I imagined how that “Ich bin in mir vergnügt” (I am happy in myself) sounded as the words of the Electress in the voice of Anna Magdalena in Bach’s house: the soprano, so close to the angels, led the faithful pleasure into heaven. Thus the princess lived on, even though she was gone.

Before I conclude, let me briefly return to the criticism of friendship that irritated me so much at the beginning: “I would rather trust the winds than friends in need”, we heard earlier. Why this mistrust? If there is something to my speculation about grief and the princess is actually speaking here, then this passage suddenly makes sense to me. Because for the young princess, when her husband converted to the Catholic faith and moved to Poland, it must have been a little hell to see how many of her “friends” turned their backs on her to follow the glamor and glory of the new king. Incidentally, it was he who, among other things, invented the Green Vault, the Saxon treasure and splendor chamber in Dresden.

I said at the beginning that the imagined genesis helps me to shed light on what alienates me. But something in the text of the cantata irritated me irretrievably. Let’s call it provisionally: a lack of joie de vivre. To conclude, I would therefore like to talk briefly about a pleasure song that does not practice pleasure. The song was written by the African-American singer Nina Simone. “Ain’t got no / I got life” is the title (I have nothing – except my life). Nina Simone was born into a Protestant family and received classical piano training thanks to outside support before she became what she went down in history as – a “high priestess of soul”. Unlike the princess, she had to make do with very little in real life. “I have no home, no shoes, no money, no education, no perfume, no love, no mother, no friends, no air and no God,” she sings. A crescendo that culminates in the question: “Why am I alive, anyway?” Then the rhythm changes, it starts to dance – as in the arias we have just heard – and Nina Simone’s voice takes off again: “I am alive, because I have what I need: arms and legs and tongue and thighs and hair and in general: happiness and unhappiness. The whole of life. I got life / I’m happy!” – so to speak. I ask myself, and this brings me to the end: Is this perhaps a unifying “We got life” that Anna Magdalena sang to her Johann Sebastian in 1727 into the musicless silence?

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).