Bachtoberfest!

Welcome to the 2026-2027 season of Princeton Pro Musica!

Over our fifteen seasons together, we’ve often returned to the music of J.S. Bach. Like many music-lovers and musicians, I’ve always held a special place in my heart for his music. This afternoon, we’re celebrating Bachtoberfest, so I turned to some of his most festive, exuberant music.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why I find myself returning again and again to Bach, but I suspect it has something to do with how engaging the music is—bodily, mentally, spiritually. My earliest entanglements with Bach’s music left me painfully aware of the gulf between its technical sophistication and my technical ineptitude, as my fingers fumbled across my piano keyboard and cello fingerboard. But even then, the reward outweighed the effort. The complexity of Bach’s music can frustrate, but it does not alienate. We naturally revel in the heightened sense of execution the music demands, whether we’re performing it or listening to it. In this way, the challenging nature of the music is the aesthetic experience. To see a Bach score on paper is to be overwhelmed by black ink; to hear a Bach score in the hands of experts is to stand in awe of the capabilities of the human mind and body.

Heard in this way, as sheer sound, Bach’s music is deeply satisfying. But it’s not just technical tour de force. Beneath the ink-speckled surfaces exists a body of work with a fascinating ability to transmit and grapple with multiple meanings. Even in his purely instrumental music, Bach’s natural feel for musical rhetoric yields clear musical sentences and paragraphs worthy of the greatest orators. Bach’s music reconciles seemingly opposite qualities in paradoxical combinations: daunting complexity and powerful directness; abstract contrapuntal meticulousness and ornate, improvisatory spontaneity; divine grandeur and worldly struggle. Bach was routinely drawn to theological concepts that reconcile seemingly opposite qualities in paradoxical oneness: infant and king, lowest abasement and greatest glory, exultation and humility. Those with spiritual compasses trained on Bach’s particular Lutheran theology will find deep resonance in his texted sacred music. Perhaps because his initial intent was to connect directly to his congregation (many of Bach’s sacred compositions were written, purposefully, in the vernacular, using hymn tunes well known by his congregation), they still manage to broadcast on universally recognizable frequencies.

For listeners of all stripes, Bach’s compositions have the potential to conjure worlds beyond, entrancing us into aesthetic reverie while evoking within us a sense of humility. It can’t be easily digested, like a cotton-candy pop song; its layers are many, its flavors complex. Each time we return to it, we discover something new. Two hundred seventy years’ worth of musical and technological invention haven’t rendered the splendor of Bach’s creations any less brilliant.

Sometimes it’s useful to consider the composer himself when unraveling the meaning in the music. Maybe the music mirrors the man. But with Bach, it can be difficult to understand just who that man was. Since the revival of his music in the nineteenth century, the previously unknown provincial German organist and composer named Johann Sebastian Bach has been transformed by scholars, piano teachers, and album-cover designers into “Bach” – the musical genius and godfather of the western musical canon. The work overshadows the man who wrote it. But what about this man, Johann Sebastian – husband, father, teacher – who probably got ink stains on his hands, tore his breeches sliding off the organ bench, disciplined insubordinate choirboys, and surely on more than one occasion had a sick child at home (of his twenty children only ten survived to adulthood).

We would do well to consider deeply the coexistence of the individual and the universal in Bach’s music, exemplified so beautifully in the pieces on this evening’s program.

Before he got a major appointment in the court at Weimar (1708–1717), Bach had been something of a maverick, holding several positions for short periods while gaining notice as an organ virtuoso. He had lost both parents by age ten, and his provincial education did not include worldly travels. Fortunately, Bach’s brother Johann Christoph exposed him to music of French masters. In addition, Bach doggedly copied out the works of Italian masters like Corelli, Torelli, and Vivaldi.

Bach would soon put this new knowledge to good use. He landed an appointment in the court of Prince Leopold at Cöthen (1717–1723). The Prince loved music and supported a skilled group of instrumentalists for whom Bach would write a large number of secular works, including the Concerto for Two Violins we featured last year, the four dazzling orchestral suites (including the third, which we featured last year), the famous suites for solo cello and the sonatas and partitas for solo violin, and The Well-Tempered Clavier. These composition makes clear that Bach not only assimilated the French and Italian styles but put his own mark on it. It’s a staggering body of work for a handful of years.

Four years into Bach’s time at Cöthen, the Prince married his cousin, the Princess of Anhalt-Bernburg, who didn’t much like music. Fishing for a possible appointment, Bach sent a letter to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg along with a set of six concertos he had assembled, meant to display his prowess as an instrumental composer (among them, the six concerti feature instruments from all sections of the orchestra). These were pieces in the concerto grosso style, which alternates passages for a group of solo instruments with passages for a full orchestra. Concerto No. 3 is a string showcase that juxtaposes three sets of three instruments (three violins, three violas, three cellos) in a whirlwind of counterpoint. The various groupings race after one another, bows flying, in skittering dances and vigorous rumbles that perform the joy of human interaction. The Margrave never responded to Bach about the concertos, but this marvelous set bears the Brandenburg name nevertheless.

Bach eventually left Cöthen in 1723 to become the Cantor of the Thomaskirche and director of music for the town of Leipzig. Upon arrival he set out to create a “well regulated church music,” and crafted several year-long cycles of church cantatas and settings of the Passion for use in the town’s churches, whose music he was responsible for.

Bach wrote Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen after having completed his three cycles of cantatas, in 1730. Its provenance is less clear. The soprano part was presumably too difficult for a boy soprano in the church to manage, so it’s possible that it was written as a showpiece for a female soprano (perhaps Anna Magdalena Bach, a professional singer and Bach’s second wife) to sing elsewhere. Few cantatas offer such a comprehensive showcase of Bach’s imagination: a fireworks show for soprano and trumpet, a beautifully humble and tender accompanied recitative, an aria affording the soprano and cello a spotlight duet dance, a chorale fantasia, and more.

Once he was well-settled into the gig in Leipzig, several cantata cycles and Passion settings behind him, Bach initiated a process of polishing his cantata cycles and expanding his “well regulated church music” to include some Mass settings and oratorios for Christmas, Easter, and Ascension. The cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, incompatible with the passionate pious individualism of the poetry in many of Bach’s sacred works, lay on the horizon. Yet the overworked church and civic musician remained indefatigable in his commitment to the broader Lutheran project. He drew from a large body of pre-existing works and repurposed, refined, and refashioned them, his more experienced composer’s quill now a conduit of ever more keen, fluid, distilled musical ideas.

He composed the first two movements of the B Minor mass—Kyrie and Gloria—in 1733, to send to the Catholic Court at Dresden as a synthesis of his mastery of different styles and abilities in sacred music. The opening Kyrie is truly the work of a master of pacing and rhetoric. It commences arrestingly, with towering tutti bloc chords for the five voice parts and orchestra—a curtain raising declamation worthy of what would ultimately become his magnum opus, a work well over two hours in duration. The massive fugal movement it unfolds without haste, mixing a pervasive pleading quality with a formidable sense of inevitably and forward momentum. The orchestra lays out the principal fugue subject—a loping, yearning idea that outlines a scalar ascent that tries to grasp the fifth scale degree but fails, finding that perch only after a poignant sighing gesture mid-phrase.

The Gloria in Excelsis is a marvelous essay showcasing his ability to marry orchestral splendor to vigorous choral writing. In great contrast to the inexorable, expansive pace of the Kyrie, the Gloria gallops out of the gate in a quick 3/8 meter, resplendent with the brassy timbre of trumpets, energized by arpeggios and leaps, each barline feeling as though it’s clearing a slightly higher hurdle than the one prior. The music gestures “to the highest” (in excelsis). Then, one hundred bars in, at “and on earth, peace” (et in terra pax), the music slows and smooths out. Here, unhurriedly, Bach passes an elegant melodic idea from one vocal part to the next, and pairs it with gentle roulades of unfurling sixteenth notes. Gradually, he summons the splendor of the opening of the Gloria, and the movement comes to a grand close.

Bach divides the various lines of the Gloria in Excelsis hymn into a series of movements and treats each with an individual touch. We’ll sample two of them this afternoon. He sets the hymn’s acclamations—“we praise thee, we bless thee, we adore thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory”—as a highly decorous duet mezzo and violin, and a fully contrapuntal movement for chorus (which we’ll save for another day). He sets the next section of the hymn—“Lord God, King of Heaven, Lord God omnipotent”—as a soprano-tenor duet, with flute solo accompaniment. As ever, Bach’s music reconciles opposites and plays with paradox. Rather than portray regality and omnipotence with brass and bombast, Bach pulls from some of the softest sounds available to the orchestra—wooden flute, muted violins, pizzicato cellos and basses—to remind us that the King of Kings began as a humble infant. The resulting light-as-air movement is at once effervescent and elegant.

The hymn continues with a foreshadowing of the Agnus Dei: “who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” Here Bach continues the music without a break, brings the chorus back in long, arcing contrapuntal lines surrounded by the flutes and pulsating strings. Then, to depict the partnership inherent in “you are seated at the right hand of the Father,” Bach crafts a duet, here between alto soloist and the oboe d’amore, accompanied gently by strings. The Gloria hymn closes, in the Cum Sancto Spiritu, as it began: with the full chorus and full orchestra gymnastically tumbling through arpeggios and fanfares.

The last two movements of the B Minor mass, which he wrote in the final years of his life, give us Bach making his strongest case for mercy and peace with his most essential music. In the three-part texture of the Agnus Dei, a beautiful yet disjointed violin melody unfolds around a suppliant alto solo and above the cellos and basses, who make gentle footfalls on each beat as if trying to avoid the gnarled dissonances peppered throughout. The music deftly portrays the ups and downs of worldly existence and the pangs of our sinful missteps, while reminding us that, though he was an absolute wizard with counterpoint, Bach is one of music’s most effective melodists. And, likewise, though Bach had by this point proven in spades his abilities with counterpoint, to set the last three words, dona nobis pacem (and bring to a close a two-hour Mass setting), he uses just two humble musical ideas. They intertwine in various guises among the voices, working out their harmonic implications in a variety of keys. The full orchestra merely doubles the voice parts until about two-thirds of the way through, when the trumpets overcome the worldly gravity of the low instruments and soar upward. At first the move is almost imperceptible, but gradually the three trumpets sublimate completely and crown the entire movement with independent counterpoint high above the corporation below.

This final minute of music, one of the most sublime in the entire repertoire, encapsulates Bach’s life’s endeavor: to pursue perfection in the earthly realm to reflect one beyond. Bach tried his best to write secular music of the highest art and sacred music worthy of the glory of God, but of course he was just a human being, in spite of his otherworldly gifts. How fortunate we are that that disparity and distance seemed to light the fire ever burning within him. Over the course of his career, he attempted not just a “well regulated church music,” but a well-regulated music that systematically explored the art’s many facets. Human, divine, refined, colossal, individual, corporate: Bach’s music constantly commingles these strata, and in the commotion our relationships to each other and to the world around us are revealed. As we consider where we’ve been, and what we’ve done, and where we’re going, Bach’s music provides the perfect soundtrack for reflection, revelation, and aspiration.