Wachet Auf (Cantata 140) by J. S. Bach (1685–1750)

In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach became Cantor and Music Director at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. His statutory duties included training singers and instrumentalists from the School or the University, keeping the organs in tune, and directing the singers and instrumentalists in performances of cantatas and other liturgical music at four churches. He wasn’t required to compose music; but compose he did, initially at the almost unbelievable pace of 60 cantatas per year. His compositions, including the Magnificat and the St. John and Matthew Passions, were not greatly appreciated by the city officials; one town councillor expressed the opinion that church music should be less ”theatrical.”

From 1726, he began to look for other compositional challenges, and, because of continuing disagreements with the Town Council and University officials, for other employment opportunities. By 1729, Bach was producing almost no new sacred cantatas. He took on the directorship of the Collegium Musicum which presented weekly concerts at a coffee house in Leipzig and focussed more and more on secular vocal, chamber and keyboard music.

When Johann Heinichen, capellmeister at the court in nearby Dresden and formerly director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, died in July of 1729, Bach must have hoped that this would be an opportunity to escape from the vexations and limitations of his position in Leipzig. The musical establishment at the court in Dresden was the most substantial in Germany and he was known to them since his first visit in 1717 and respected as a virtuoso keyboard player and composer. Unfortunately, Italian opera was very popular in Dresden and Bach had virtually no experience in this genre of music. The post went to Johann Adolph Hasse, who had spent several years in Naples and was primarily known as an opera composer.

This must have been a great disappointment for Bach but when Hasse’s first Dresden opera Cleofide opened on September 13th, 1731, Bach was in attendance and he apparently enjoyed the show. Forkel, his first biographer, wrote that Bach frequently travelled to the Dresden opera and often took his son Wilhelm Friedemann ”to hear the lovely Dresden ditties.”

It has long been known that Bach’s cantata Wachet Auf was performed on November 25th, 1731; it is a cantata for the 27th Sunday after Trinity, which exists only when Easter is exceptionally early, and the first such date during Bach’s tenure at Leipzig was in 1731. So Bach must have felt compelled to write yet another sacred cantata; but this was not a token effort: Cantata 140 is one of the most popular of the more than 200 cantatas that have come down to us. One wonders why, at a time when Bach had essentially given up writing church cantatas, he produced such a charming work. Perhaps Hasse’s opera inspired him to try his hand at adding ”operatic” elements to the cantata to be performed in Leipzig just two months later.

Movements 4 and 6 in particular have an operatic flavour. Movement 4 begins with twelve measures of a sensuous Italianate melody in the strings, with a simple bass accompaniment, but no hint of counterpoint or harmonization. To Bach’s audience in St. Thomas’s Church, it would sound like dance music. But after one measure of the repetition, the tenors unexpectedly enter with the long notes of the austere Lutheran hymn that is the basis of the cantata. The congregation would recognize this hymn and immediately appreciate that Bach was contrasting the sacred and the profane. This movement is so familiar to us now that it may be difficult to grasp how startling it must have been in 1731. In 1748, Bach was asked to provide a set of organ transcriptions of chorale movements for publication and he chose this movement to be the first selection in the set.

Movement 6 of the cantata is essentially a love duet for bass and soprano, with a lively oboe accompaniment. The text is from the Song of Songs, which, in the Christian tradition, is interpreted metaphorically: the bass is Jesus and the soprano is the human soul. Stripped of the metaphoric gloss, this movement would not be out of place in a passionate Italian opera.

Bach never had the opportunity to write a full-scale opera, though several of his secular cantatas come close. So, instead of writing Baroque operas in Dresden which, like dozens of such works by Handel, would be essentially unusable today, Bach busied himself in Leipzig composing such masterpieces as the B minor Mass, the Goldberg Variations, the Musical Offering, and The Art of Fugue. Despite continued efforts to secure another position, Bach was unsuccessful and he died in Leipzig.