Manfred Papst

Remediation of restlessness

The text of the cantata “Was frag ich nach der Welt” is about the great paradox of human existence and its overcoming: We are in the world, but have no power over our lives. The remedy is not vanity, but repentance and faith.

The world is smoke and shadow. How quickly it has disappeared! And we with it. Man is nothing but an earthworm, whether he builds palaces for himself, whether he walks in purple, velvet and silk or adorns himself with gold and silver. He may strive for fame and glory, occupy the highest offices and build himself a tower of pride that reaches to the clouds: In the end, it is all nothing.
A stale breeze is enough to blow our proud bodies into the tomb all at once. Then all the splendour with which we have made so much state disappears. Good and money prove to be vain trinkets. Already in the Old Testament, in Kohelet 1.2, we read that everything is vain. Vain, futile, meaningless: this is how Luther understands the word.
We are fools. We allow ourselves to be beguiled. We realise too late that the pleasure and joy of the world are nothing but deception. Like a mole, we have burrowed blindly into the ground and found only excrement, forgetting about heaven.
These are linguistic images of baroque power. They all come from Bach’s cantata “Was frag ich nach der Welt”. Of course, vanitas motifs have permeated our religious and philosophical history since Jeremiah and Plato. Already in ancient art, then especially since the Middle Ages, we encounter pictorial representations of vanitas – often in the form of skulls, skeletons, hourglasses, scythes. Sic transit gloria mundi: this is the general bass of human history.
It feeds on an omnipresent paradox: we are in the world as human beings, but we have no power over our lives. Death is certain, but its hour is uncertain. We are in God’s hands and equally exposed to the end with every breath. Sometimes we feel like masters of the earth. Often we act like it. But it is all lies and deception. We are thrown into life and therefore remain homeless. We are restless on the road, torn between fear and hope, between self-confidence and despondency.
But this is not the last word. At least not the last word of our valiant cantata poet Balthasar Kindermann, who was born in Zittau in 1636 as the son of a sword sweeper and later became a master of theology, poeta laureatus, and even a member of the Order of the Elbe Swan. The author of satires, dramas, rhetorical writings and poems, married to the daughter of a Swedish captain and father of six children, died in Magdeburg in 1706. Johann Sebastian Bach was 21 years old at the time. The cantata we are concerned with today was composed by the master 18 years later, at the age of 39, for the 8th Sunday after Trinity, 6 August 1724. The text of the opening and closing chorale was taken over verbatim by Kindermann; parts two to seven were revised for the composition by an unknown hand.
“Was frag ich nach der Welt” (“What do I ask about the world”): our text begins with this cheeky phrase, half exclamation and half question. It could well stand on its own, as the philosophical conclusion of an independent mind. One can imagine it pronounced in very different ways: equanimously or challengingly. But of course we are moving here in a Christian and, more closely, liturgical context, and so the six memorable words find their songlike continuation:

“What do I ask of the world
and all its treasures
if I can only delight in you,
my Jesu, I can delight in.”

Earthly and heavenly treasures
In this context, the impure rhyme “Schätzen/ergötzen” is of particular charm. It may have its specific linguistic or dialectal historical reasons and may not always have been perceived as impure, but it also seems to us today to be a sign of a tiny but nevertheless significant shift: The two terms fit together, but they are not congruent. There are earthly and heavenly treasures. What Jesus gives us is of a fundamentally different kind than what the world can offer us. Eduard Mörike, the Swabian late Romantic poet and Protestant pastor, would have enjoyed this little play of diphthongs.
The message of the double verse is made clear to us once again in the second quatrain of the first choral stanza:

“Thee only have I
for lust,
You, you are my rest:
What do I ask of the world.”

What moves us here is the one-in-one thinking of lust and tranquillity, of emphasis and contemplation: he who directs his delight and desire towards heavenly, not earthly treasures, attains not only fulfilment but also tranquillity. Spiritual passion, which shows itself in the double vocative of “you”, already carries its own overcoming. It opens up a state for the soul beyond the earthly restlessness that so dominates our hectic everyday life, but it does so without lapsing into stoic, dull equanimity. The music takes up this tension wonderfully; the intimate simplicity of the chorale movement and the sustained calm of the orchestral parts are contrasted by the flute part as an image of cheerful bustle.
The bass aria that follows deepens the statement of the opening chorale, surprisingly in seven instead of eight verses, the first three rhymed: With the metaphors of the world as smoke and shadow, central motifs of the vanitas imagination are quoted. They are widespread in German Baroque poetry, especially in the poems from the time of the Thirty Years’ War, which Kindermann experienced as a boy and which is also the high period of German hymnody. The line can be drawn from there via the pastor’s son Gottfried Benn to Bertolt Brecht, who once said: “What will remain of these cities is the wind that passed through them!

Vanity on earth
Smoke and shadow are joined by ashes, dust and bones in Baroque poetry, for example in Andreas Gryphius’ 1643 sonnet “Es ist alles eitel”, which I quote here as a masterpiece pars pro toto:

“You see, wherever you look, only vanity on earth.
What this man builds today, that man will tear down tomorrow;
Where cities stand now, there will be a meadow,
Where a shepherd’s child will play with the flocks.

What blossoms splendidly now shall soon be trampled underfoot.
What now throbs and defies will be ashes and bones tomorrow.
Nothing is eternal, no ore, no marble stone.
Now happiness laughs at us, soon complaints thunder.

The glory of high deeds must vanish like a dream.
Shall then the game of time, the light man pass?
Alas! What is all this that we think delicious?

as a vile trifle, as a shadow, dust, and wind,
as a flower of the meadow that cannot be found again.
Nor will any man contemplate what is eternal.”

Two decades later, Balthasar Kindermann was still living in this imaginary world. But the poeta minor does not stop at the world as smoke and shadow, but opposes it with a better, a heavenly life:

“But when everything falls and breaks
Jesus remains my confidence,
in whom my soul clings.
Therefore, what do I ask of the world!”

In the third part of the cantata, this thought is again further unfolded. Here we find the apt caricature of the “lofty people” and especially of the man with his pompousness, his striving for office, his tower of pride, which is supposed to reach up to the clouds. Of course, this is reminiscent of the Tower of Babel and of human notions of omnipotence, to which the Old Testament God reacted with the punishment of confusion of language. We are all reminded of the epochal painting by Pieter Brueghel from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, painted in 1563, a symbol of the hubris not only of our modern times.
Did Kindermann know it? We do not know. But we trust that there is more to works of art than their creators know – and that they sometimes enter into a spiritual conversation with each other. Our cantata in particular shows us this. In Aria No. 2, which speaks of the world as smoke and shadows, Bach congenially traces the unsteadiness, the fleeing and wavering of these elements; and in Aria 4, which is about the “beguiled world”, the “false appearance” is virtually mocked in the trill of the traverse flute. Then, when counting the mammon, we even hear the jingling of coins in an increasing cadence. Whether the composer was aware of this or not, the text led him to this fascinating interpretation.

Sliding things
In the tenor recitative, we come across another remarkable formulation. The ambitious one, we hear,

“seeks only high things
and does not even think
how soon they slip away.”

“Things glide”: that’s what it says without any addition. We do not know whence and whither they glide. Kindermann himself wrote it that way, not his unnamed editor. The phrase is irritating because it seems so modern. “Things glide”: This could almost be a programmatic sentence of classical modernism with its basic feeling of existential uncertainty, comparable to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s metaphor of concepts decaying in people’s mouths like musty mushrooms. But this experience obviously existed three centuries earlier. What a figure of speech!
However, I do not want to claim that the text of Bach’s 94th Cantata is a masterpiece. It also has its weaknesses. Like many cantata texts, it tends to be somewhat clichéd. After the powerful exposition in the tenor’s recitative, there is some liturgical word-beating; time and time again, what we already know is hammered into us: The believer banishes vain trumpery from his breast. Jesus alone keeps his heart glorious “before others”, gives it true honour, snatches it from vanity. The phrase “before others” itself contains a moment of arrogance. This is not a phrase that fits the commandment of Christian humility. A Christian man should not exalt himself above others. Otherwise, he too will be caught up in vanity.
The world is infatuated. So says the alto aria. And it captures the word in all its double meaning. We hear a graceful female voice. She complains about the false appearance of the evil world, she confesses to Jesus alone. Nevertheless, a subtle contradiction arises in the tension between text and music – here and then again in the delicious soprano aria no. 7. There is something iridescent about the chaste confessions of the female singers. They lament the beguiled world and at the same time celebrate it in its sensual euphony. Here we hear not the voices of disembodied angels, but those who increase the beauty of the world by praising it.

Remediation in faith
The world, repeatedly seen by the cantata poet as a person, as it were as a seductive but also corruptible “Frau Welt”, as we know her from the cathedral at Worms, is distressed. She sees herself unjustly exposed to contempt. But for this sorrow she should now be ashamed. For Jesus has done her so much good that it would only be right and just if she were to suffer without complaint for his sake. In the horizon of salvation history, she has no claims to make, for her suffering only takes place in time. Redemption, however, has its place in eternity, which is not simply an extension of time, but a category sui generis. The believer has to answer to it; if the world mocks and disregards him for it, he need not worry. He knows that it is only a delusion. In the tenor aria no. 6, the drastic image of yellow excrement appears, which the burrowing mole finds “in the grounds” while he forgets about heaven. This phrase evokes not only earth, ashes and dust, but also the reasons of reason, which are not those of faith. The mole man digs in the wrong place. The soprano aria that follows has an almost anaemic, detached effect:

“Es halt es mit der blinden Welt,
who holds nothing on his soul,
I am disgusted with the earth.”

“Repentance and faith” are recommended here as a remedy; in love for Jesus alone lie riches and bliss. Of course, here too the sensual beauty of the music counters the doctrine of renunciation.
The final chorale once again takes up two authentic eight-line stanzas by Kindermann, bracketed by the verse “Was frag ich nach der Welt”. “In the Hui it must disappear”, it says. This formulation baffles us today. “In the Hui”: was this modern and casual phrase actually already common in 1664? We are surprised to hear it. But it is indeed an old word; the industrious brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have found plenty of evidence for it, not least in the Zurich Bible.
The text of Bach’s 94th cantata is heterogeneous. It is composed of song verses by Balthasar Kindermann and additions by an unknown later arranger. Certainly we may assume that the composer, as Wolfgang Hildesheimer recorded in his late lecture “Der ferne Bach”, “regarded the texts for his cantatas as something given and not as something to be judged”. Yet the words may be patchwork: The cantata is of one piece. Here, once again, the miracle occurs that we so often encounter in Bach: the transformation of time-dependent material into timeless art. The composer combines depth of thought, mathematical precision and sensual richness. He is a genius of polyphonic invention, but also a genius of translating religious ideas into pure sound.
The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once formulated a memorable definition of music. He described it as an “arithmetical exercise of the soul, whereby the soul is not aware that it is counting”. Bach could not be better characterised. In him, crystalline clarity and baroque fullness of life are combined. Bach knew the secrets of numbers and the architecture of heavenly arithmetic as well as the abysses of life, suffering and faith. He shaped them in the millennium work of the “Mat- thäuspassion”. “An apparition of God: clear, yet inexplicable”: that’s what the good Zelter called him in a letter to Goethe. But he was also a lively everyday man. A husband and family man who strove for happiness and knew comfort, even though he had to watch several of his children die, a church musician involved in a thousand duties and hardships. As a letter-writer, he was usually long-winded and formal, but at times he was a man of bearish humour.

“To have as if one had not”.
We started from the vanitas mundi. It shaped Johann Sebastian Bach’s thinking and composing. But it did not make him unfaithful to the beauty, diversity and dignity of creation. In contrast to the statement in Aria No. 7, Bach was not disgusted by the world, but celebrated it in the Ernst Bloch sense of the word as the pre-shine of the eternal in his music. As a deeply religious man, he also understood that wisdom which we know from the Bible as later from Theodor Fontane’s novel “Der Stechlin”: Whoever wants to live happily in the face of the finiteness of life must strive for something paradoxical: for a “having as if one had not”. After a loving, reverent participation in the fullness of creation – in full knowledge of its and one’s own transience, perhaps even futility, and thus without any attitude of entitlement. That is why Bach’s music is still alive before us today. It embraces heaven and earth. In the final chorale it is said:

“What do I ask of the world!
My Jesus is my life,
my treasure, my possession,
To whom I surrender
My whole kingdom of heaven
And whatever else pleases me.
Therefore I say again:
What do I ask of the world!”

“My whole kingdom of heaven / and whatever else pleases me”: This is a phrase as confusing as it is gratifying: for it shows that the kingdom of heaven is not closed to earthly life. There is also room for “whatever else pleases me”. It is not about renunciation, but about fulfilment.
“What do I ask of the world” – the question moves and shakes, but it also liberates us, especially since we have learned to understand the hereafter also as an inner treasure. In the unprecedented acceleration of our lives, nothing is more necessary than reflection and retreat. On this path, we may even come to affirm ourselves and the world in its transience, without going astray in our faith. This is what Johann Peter Hebel did in his Alemannic Apocalypse. Even if we are only dust in eternity: Faith, love, hope remain with us always. They are our best part. Especially as mortals, we may praise the beauty of the world – both this world and the world beyond – in full voice.

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