Cantata Text Booklet for the Holy Days
2 Hidden by Sight
O Seelenparadies, das Gottes Geist durchwehet,
der bei der Schöpfung blies....
O paradise of the soul, through which God’s spirit blows,
which blew at the Creation....
— Salomo Franck, in J.S. Bach, Cantata 172
In paradise the late winter snows fall
As silences behind sacred chorales, theology
Breaking away, wanting self-containment,
Wanting more than incomplete enclosure.
It is the sound unheard that compels most constantly:
Can be divined but not quite understood: can be sung but not
Quite said. It dwells in the human counterpoint:
Unpromising fugal themes repeated almost improbably
Until the whole seems apparent just as
It starts to shift again, modulating beyond
The nexus of integrity, to come, yet once again,
Upon the complications of disintegration—
In each flake of falling snow, differing in
The white obscuration that congregates to come
To its place from places unseen.
This cantata dates from 1714. Bach was the concertmaster of the court orchestra of Weimar. He was 29, and had resided in Weimar since 1708. His son, Carl Philip Emmanuel, was born in the spring of 1714, the third child to survive and the fifth of seven born, three of whom died in infancy, of Bach’s 1710 marriage to Maria Barbara Bach. Telemann, who was a friend, was the godfather.
Bach was unfavourably let go from Weimar in 1717, after a decade’s service. So do not despair if you, too, are in the quality of his company if the ordinary in charge dismiss you.
But then, as the word Weimar means a holy swamp, perhaps Bach’s desire eventually to leave it is à propos. The Enlightenment, with Goethe, Schiller, and Liszt came to Weimar later. Later still, the Bauhaus movement with Kandinsky, Klee, and Gropius. It is also the city that was the place of origin of the Weimar Republic, and the locus of the first of the Nazi concentration camps, Buchenwald, and the Kristallnacht destruction of the Jewish synagogue.
The cantata’s libretto is by Salomo Franck, a frequent collaborator. Franck, in addition to being the court poet, had traditional familial links to the ducal court of Weimar. He also worked as a lawyer, which on the surface appears to be an inconsistency of purpose.
The text employs the 23rd verse of the gospel (John 14:23-31,the first part of the Farewell Discourse) in a recitative for vox Christi. It is preceded by the opening movement, a large-scale chorus for festive orchestra inclusive of three trumpets and timpani. It is replete with resounding adoration of the divine. The ensuring aria implores the Trinity to enter the trifling refuge of our hearts. Bach, however, leaves aside our insignificance in favour of the greatness of God, painted in a brilliant glory of sounding brass and drums. The strings are silent. It is a magnificent representation of the wonder that each human heart would welcome.
Paradise of the soul. It is here that Bach and I meet again at the same crossroads as we first did, over twenty-five years ago, I the better for his music.
I began studying the Bach cantatas in 1997, and the poem, Cantata Text Booklet for the Holy Days, was begun in Vancouver in the summer of 1998, and worked on successively until 2012 in that city as well as in Montréal, St. Stephen, and Edmonton. It appears in the middle of Caravaggio’s Dagger‘s concluding taxonomy, between a poem prompted by the scene in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where the knight asks the alleged witch about to be burnt at the stake to summon Satan, and a scene, set in the east part of divided and still bullet-riddled Berlin, in which the widow of a Nazi officer who was one of Hitler’s chauffeurs complains about her constrained situation.
Seelenparadies. Not only is this word deeply beautiful, but also the text recalls the eternal Spirit of God moving everlastingly through His creation, and now, at Pentecost, returning to humankind as its Comforter, as of a powerful wind. It is this simile of the wind that Bach brings forth in music of incomparable calm and welcome, with its perdurable rising and falling motif of unison high strings, the windblown fluctuation of the voice of the tenor, and the upward striving in the bass. It is one of the greatest of all Bach’s arias, for it will return one to the place nameless and numberless when creation was perfect and pure.
The antipodes of knowledge seek one another,
Carrying upon and between them the ceaseless burden
Of the fire-wrought soul half-wrung from sacraments.