Dear cantata community,

Today we are actually in the wrong place in a place of worship, as “my” cantata “Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten” is one of Bach’s few secular cantatas, which he composed in 1726 as a commission for the appointment of Gottlieb Kortte as Professor of Roman Law at the University of Leipzig. Bach had a large number of secular children and was dependent on such additionally remunerated commissions.

At one point or another, Bach did not actually compose, but copied and borrowed from his first Brandenburg Concerto for Cantata 207. An early form of copy & paste, which would probably be something for plagiarism hunters today. However, I think there is something to the fact that musicologists call this special gift of composers “parody techniques”: it also sounds more comical – in the sense of a parody – than talking about rewriting a score.

First of all, the language: in a review of Bach’s secular cantatas in the FAZ in 1997, it said: “In view of this worldly art of formulation (by the authors of the handbook), one almost regrets that … more linguistic capital was not made from the worldliness of the secular cantatas.”

As I am not a musicologist, but an economist, I will base my reflection on at least an attempt at “formulation skills”, because the language of this cantata really has it all. Unfortunately, the librettist is not clearly known, which is regrettable in view of this powerful text. I will come back to this.

When I was asked to write today’s reflection, I was told that this text was an eulogy par excellence, something that happens more often in the world of business, in which I operate, and that I was therefore suitable to take on today’s reflection. That may be true, but it’s not quite that simple, because business leaders are rarely praised linguistically and musically.

It should be noted at this point that I am deliberately using only the masculine form in accordance with gender, as women are still less common in the business elite and – at least the ones I know – are more immune to adulation than men. Women at the top of the business world are much less vain than men. And vanity is the breeding ground on which adulation can flourish.

Rarely have I prepared myself for twenty minutes longer, but also rarely more enjoyably, especially when you are trying to reflect on the language and the music together. As I said, I’m no musicologist, but when I listened to the music, the diligence described came to me with the lightness of the tenor and the honour achieved rather with the oppression of the bass. Was the work perhaps done more easily than the honour of what was achieved weighs on the praised?

Was Kortte one of those high-flyers to whom everything comes so easily? A kind of Sergio Ermotti, for example, to whom everything comes so easily? Even an entire bank that was once founded by Alfred Escher and financed entire tunnels through the Alps at a ridiculously low price. Would it therefore be justified – a thought experiment – to dedicate a cantata to someone like Ermotti when he one day steps down with honour from one of the most important offices in the Swiss Confederation and the financial industry?

Or would it rather be a modern Tiktok video cantata – performed by the global Taylor Swift in a Helvetic duet with Nemo. What kind of code of praise would come out of it? What kind of Insta- or Youtube-ready production? Cantatas in their brevity and flavour are perfect for fast social media. The librettist of Swiss Business Class, Martin Suter, would certainly be available as a lyricist. What a parody of the parade ground that would be!

After this economic digression, back to Bach’s real secular cantata:

We have just heard the end with countless “Kortte lebe, Kortte blühe”. I don’t know about you, but the opening chorus actually makes you want to praise, whereas this final chorus is so full of praise that it almost hurts: exaggerated, inappropriate, even ingratiating, blown by trumpets.

Just shoddy! None of this is really quiet! Trumpets are great for any kind of praise. The choirs frame a paean par excellence in two parts:

• First a kind of general treatise on honour, happiness, gratitude and, above all, the diligence of hard work and intensive study, which are praised highly and excessively.
• And then, in the second part, the special transfer to Kortte, the new professor, with the conclusion we have just heard: “Kortte live, Kortte flourish!“

The first bass recitative (4) begins with a general statement: “My laurel shall henceforth adorn only such crowns/In which an ever-exciting blood/A undaunted heart and undaunted courage/To all labour can be felt”. The thankful alto aria (7) begins with: “Etch this memory/Into the hardest marble!”, before it then turns to Kortte himself.

The final chorus ends with: “Whom my laurel supports/He who sits in my bosom/He who through me rises ever higher/He who inclines hearts to Himself/Must stand honoured in blessing for countless years/And indeed the envious multitudes/But not the enemies see”, after all the solo voices praise the “never enough praised Kortte” in the second recitative (8).

This is praise at its finest. Great God, aren’t we just praising you, you might ask yourself in a sacred setting! But as I said, it is a secular cantata.

We need to look for a moment at the morphology of praise and its hatred in order to understand the scope of praise: As with love & hate, as with life & death and other linguistic conceptual pairs, praise also has its antagonist: blame. Praise and blame! Whereby we would rather love, live, praise and above all be praised than hate, die, blame or be blamed.

But unlike many linguistic antagonists – such as proof of love & tirade of hate, attitude to life & fear of death – there are compound nouns for praise, but not for blame. Censure is basically a solitaire. I would even go so far as to say that praise has to do the work of censure: precisely when the praise is excessive.

Then it has something of a reprimanding finger pointing. Then we have arrived at the core of the adulation – the exaggerated, embarrassing, unbearable and constantly repeated praise – as in our cantata. The adulation is often actually a hidden “adulation of blame”.

Only, ladies and gentlemen:

When analysed from a communication science perspective, praise depends on whether you are the sender, the recipient or the audience. These are different stakeholder groups.

If you do it right, if you do it subtly enough, then the person receiving the praise will not see it as exaggerated, but as appropriate and deserved. The powerful trumpets of praise then reach the recipient’s ears like sweet, flattering flute notes, to which he is entitled from his point of view.

The sender, the copywriter, on the other hand, has two options:

• Either he can place his criticism, his rebuke, nicely packaged in linguistic garlands and thus convey his opinion to the audience between the lines and tones.
• Or he really believes it all and offers himself: “Yes, yes, you noble friends, see how I am connected to Kortten.” If you have friends like that, you no longer need enemies.

This mixture of well-deserved or poisoned praise, exaggerated self-praise, believed or critical adulation and thus actual censure can be observed on various occasions when one finds oneself at the vanity fairs.

Only the broadcaster knows the mixture, the recipe for praise. The audience decides how it tastes. This is where the menu of praise travels from the ear to the brain. The audience is the true recipient of the praise. You could almost say: the praised person is not really needed!

The recipient is only a means to an end – Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian communication scientist, called this “the medium is the message”. The person being praised becomes the medium, today often the social medium.

Even on this side of social media, I advise every recipient to either resist adulation in the form of commissioned biographies, commemorative publications, acceptance speeches, farewell parties or other platforms for personal vanity or to incorporate genuine social correction mechanisms. This in turn requires human greatness and one thing above all: lack of vanity!

When it comes to the question of vanity, we have finally arrived in the world of business. Unfortunately, my code of honour forbids me from naming examples from my professional activities, but the masters of creation in particular are often not immune to recognising the haughtiness in praise. They hear the praise, but they don’t recognise the horseshit!

There is a reason for this: at their core, the men at the top are often lonely, have no one to reflect with and do not tend to self-reflect sui generis precisely because of their leadership strength, which has made them bosses. This is not to be understood as a criticism, but merely an observation on my part from years of experience.

Now almost every “business cortège” will disagree with me and tell me that they have old, genuine, true friends who will tell them what they think “dütsch und dütlich”. At the annual hike, the weekly sauna, the officers’ club, the cigar lounge or the ski weekend without women.

That may even be true, but most old, genuine, true friends don’t even know how the great friend as Chief Executive Officer operates in his working environment because they come from his private environment. They only know the private friend and not the professional chief, whose great work they know from the media.

Please don’t get me wrong: I have met many “big boys” who are grounded – through family, friends and colleagues – but there are no eulogising cantatas or LinkedIn, Instagram or Tiktok accounts fuelled by corporate influencers and their content creators.

I would like to focus explicitly on social media because they are becoming increasingly important for society and certainly have the potential for social interaction.

LinkedIn&Co accounts are the true eulogists of the modern digital working world. In this world, there are hardly any defeats, only victories. And if there has been a defeat, it is turned back into a victory. These are funny paraphrases, parodies.

A new form of digital libtards has emerged here, who develop personnel or people branding strategies for so-called CEO positioning in return for money – and thus they are for sale and dependent. The content is rarely creative, but often very primitive!

Here we see old white men in even whiter sneakers and white tight T-shirts in their sons’ trousers giving speeches on stage – applauded by young employees, people in a relationship of dependency, which is called a nice employment contract.

Maximum exaggeration is the tool of the trade for influencers, who, to make matters worse, all take credit for their digital crowns and allow themselves to be adorned by Likes & Co. And that’s the worst of it: the prompter wants to get out of the scenery and onto the stage.

In social media, there is a danger of mutual and exaggerated praise without exposing oneself to socially critical discourse. Social media are not real media and influencers are not real journalists.

The media criticise constructively, social media stylise obsessively and, as can be seen very clearly in the USA at the moment, like to tweet an “X” for a “U”. There are dangers lurking for our democracies and values.

Finally, back to Bach and the “worldly art of formulation” of our librettist and thus to text and music and moving image. As I said at the beginning, the librettist is not known, but Heinrich Gottlieb Schellhafer – a student of Kortte’s – is thought to be.

This encourages me to create a final parody of my own – all in the subjunctive:

I imagine this, purely fictitiously, in today’s ChatGPT copy&paste student generation. Students would have been commissioned by the new head of education in St. Gallen, Bettina Surber – on the advice of the cantonal influencer for a cool new idea for location communication – to write a text on the appointment of a new HSG professor. Naturally, Rudolf Lutz would be asked to rewrite the cantata and explain it via his “Lutzogram”.

The cantata under the hashtag “Hatate” would be premiered in the epochal Square of the HSG, this sacred academic temple and new marketplace of vanities in Eastern Switzerland. And yes, on the rooftops at the top of the Rosenberg there would be enough space for drums and trumpets that could be heard all the way down to the cathedral in the city below – all broadcast to the world via social media. What a parody that would be!

Unfortunately, social media with its cantata-like short videos is the future of digital adulation, the toolbox for digital parody. We have to be careful. Artificial intelligence would not help us here, because it could only plagiarise, parody and copy, but never conceive or compose something new.

That is the big difference to Bach, who – as in this cantata 207 – occasionally made use of his great human intelligence in earlier works and rewrote something. Let us forgive the great composer for this and attribute it to his pronounced natural gift for composing great music.

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