Trauermusik

He was a sensitive child, more than most; I would come across him gazing into space; when I scolded him for wasting the time God had given him, he would burst into tears.

Was it my fault? Even now, these centuries later and well into my afterlife, I feel that pain, and the shame I felt at the time.

Make no mistake, I know very well who I am, or at least who I was. False modesty? You won’t find it here, nor did you find it when I lived. I had been given a great gift, yes, but equally I had toiled, and struggled to develop it. Never a day went by when I wasn’t composing, and more—recomposing. However much Lady might wish to believe that some of my music arrived on the wings of angels, I can assure you that it did not. And truly, if it had, it wouldn’t have been very good.

I was and am and will be the greatest composer of all time. I know that now, and I knew that then, and yet did anyone around me know? Most musicians thought of me as a great organist, not as a great composer, but was even that appreciated?  How many times was I scolded by some cleric with less Latin and Greek than I—scolded  for adding a bit of improvisation between verses of the Sunday hymns? The improvisations confused the congregation, I was told. The plodding oaf who had preceded me had never done such a thing!

It was a battle, then, but a battle I did not hesitate to fight. Always, always I struggled with the buffoons who thought they could play or tweet or sing—never was I given the musicians I deserved! A handful came up to some minimal level of not-too-shudderingly-bad, but even they were too often drowned by the idiot next to them, for I tell you, the worse a musician is, the louder he plays or sings.

How often I had to protest! Never did I have an employer who understood, who knew the quality of the music I composed! You know the Goldberg Variations, of course, but does anyone know of Johann Gottlieb Goldberg? No, his only claim to any shred of musical history is that he played my variations for the Count Keyserlink, who—according to one preposterous story—actually paid me a goblet fulled with 100 louis-d’or.  

They said I had a temper; they said I was difficult. Wrong! I knew perfectly well that if I didn’t stand up for myself, no one else would, and was it right that I, the greatest composer of the time, be treated as a lackey, a servant? I had seen what had happened to several of my relatives—all fine musicians—who had struggled into and out of poverty for years. And if I was fortunate enough to do just a bit better, it wasn’t due to luck, nor entirely to my ability. It was because I demanded the high respect and treatment that I deserved.

Experience has taught me; sometimes the worst employers are the ones you like the most. Certainly that was true of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. What musician could not have been charmed by the man, a talented man who could play the violin and viola da gamba, and often did so with his court band? Yes, he knew perfectly well what he had in me, and he paid me well. But such was his love of music that it was necessary—according to him—to take his musicians along with him on his travels.

How often are the whims of the rich paid for with the tears of the poor! Search, writer, for the reason that we had to be dragged off that summer of 1720, since something was important for the Prince, and so we all went off with him. Ah, you do not know, but I can tell you: the prince was taking the waters at Carlsbad.

What do I remember of the day my life was wrenched from its orbit? The looks of the villagers, my neighbors, as I finally returned to my home, as I walked though the streets. Or rather, the interrupted looks, since everyone glanced at me, greeted me, and just as quickly looked away and hurried off. They knew: I did not.

And what of the silence that greeted me—shouldn’t that have told me that something was wrong? For the house was never noisy, but neither was it dead silent, either—what house with small children ever is? But in fact the children were with the neighbor, so that the pastor could tell me that my wife María Barbara had died.

Death, that great bastard death! I met it first when I was six; it visited and vanquished my cousin. When I was ten it took first my mother, and then, nine months later, my father. I buried nine of my children, but this death was the worst.

Yes, we had been playing soothing music for the prince and as the warm waters had lapped gently on the prince’s sensitive skin, my María Barbara had felt first the flush, then the raging fever, then the nausea. She was, they told me, dead within twenty-four hours.

Everything was upside down. Before, I had had things to do, now there was nothing to be done. The body was buried, the funeral had been held. Her clothes had been taken away, though some of her things that might have some meaning or utility had been left. The house was both empty and filled with her absence, but could I sit and weep? No, because there were the children to think of, and however much I wanted to see them, I dreaded seeing them as well. How could a crushed man be any comfort to his grieving children?

But saw them I did, and we embraced, and we went on, as before.

Well, not as before. Because the second child, Carl Phillip Emanuel, had changed. The abstractions, the looking into the distance, the unnatural quietness of the child became more pronounced. My heart was torn; gazing on my son, my heart broke. I buried my grief with work, but he? When there were lessons to be learned and music to be copied out and any number of tasks to be done—this six-year old boy was looking out the window, as if trying to see the place where his mother might be.

And so I spoke roughly, harshly to the child. Only so much time was given to us by the good Lord: hadn’t we had proof of that? It was a sin to waste it.

He returned to whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. And then it was I, looking out the window, trying to find that land I used to live in, that house.

God, merciful God, when will this pain end?  

 

Lady Wisdom

“It’s funny how listening to the piece over the week has changed my understanding of it,” said Lady, a most insightful and perceptive woman.

“First, I was just focused on the music—how beautiful it was. But now, and especially after hearing it with the text, I really get what Bach is doing. Consider the long, melancholy opening—perfect for an extended musing on poverty.”

“Well, there’s no instrument more melancholic than an oboe, and especially these baroque oboes, which are a little deeper in timbre. And notice the accompaniment in the strings—that de DEE dum. All meant to suggest sighs….”

“The thing is, all of the singers don’t get it, for most of the piece. They’re going on and on about how poor they are, how all the animals and the birds have their foods provided for them, but they no. And then the chorus breaks in with this absolutely heavenly music, all about how the Father will care for his child, and then they go right on. Bach doesn’t even given them a rest—it’s like the choir had never sung anything at all. You know, that’s poverty—being so focused on your misery that you can’t see anything else, especially the things that might enrich you. Have you ever been poor, Marc?”

I stop to think.

“It depends on what you mean,” I said. “I’ve never been hungry. But I remember a time when I only had twenty bucks or so in the bank, and no property or assets beyond some books, a couple of cellos, and the clothes I wore. I was working, but only making a couple hundred dollars a week—and that doesn’t go far in Puerto Rico. I’d wake up at night and wonder: what would happen if Raf found somebody else and we broke up? How would I survive? Would I have to go back to Wisconsin, my tail between my legs, and live with my parents? Go back to nursing, which at that point I hated, just to get by? It was scary, but then, what isn’t at two in the morning?”

“Doesn’t count,” said Lady. “If there’s a plan B—however bad it might be—then you’re not really poor. Poor is when your back is against the wall and there’s no real option and you’ve been kicked so long and so hard that you’ve stopped remembering a time when you weren’t getting kicked. Oh, and you’ve almost stopped feeling the blows, though you do, of course.”

“OK—so what about you?”

“I got closer,” she said. “In high school, it was a pretty bad time for my family. We had had ups and downs, and this was one of the downs. I remember having only 25 cents in my pocket, and wondering whether I was going to go home—‘cause my mother was having a lot of problems at the time, and it wasn’t always good, being there at home. Or maybe I’d go to my aunt, which would be OK, but what about my mother? So there wasn’t much stability, and definitely not much money.”

“But…”

“Of course, I had dreams. I always knew there would be a Poet’s Passage, and I knew that we’d make it.”

“Then maybe I came closer than you, after all,” I said. “Because if there’s anything that depression is, it’s ‘poverty of spirit.’ And there were years there when I had given up hope. Hard to explain, because on the face of it, everything was OK. Even when I was at last making money, saving money, able to take real vacations—well, it doesn’t mean much if you’re having crying jags in the men’s room at work, and you can concentrate because the thought, ‘I want to die,’ keeps intruding itself in your head….”

“That’s poverty,” said Lady, who has managed to live just on the shoreline of wealth. So the money washes in, refreshing her, and then washes away, but that’s no problem because the sun is bracing and besides, the next wave will be along in a few seconds, so why worry? True, just at the moment she’s broke, but not really, since the cause of the break was a kitten who smelled a saint / sucker and followed her home, purring and wrapping itself around her legs. So now Lady has no money, but she does have a cat, though not really, since in fact she has two cats at home, both of which would eat the kitten as a snack before breakfast. Or maybe like a canapé with cocktails.

“The kitten’s name is Eugenia,” I tell Lady, as I hold the kitten and scratch its ears. “Look, I’ll show you….”

“Eugenia,” I whispered to the kitten. Her head jerked up.

“See?” I told Lady.

“No fair,” cried Lady, “you’ve got your thumb under Kitty-X’s head. No, it’s Kitty-X—that’s the name!”

Well, we’re not going to agree, so we go back to the Bach.

“As a cellist, I would kill to play that cello part,” I told Lady, in reference to the bass aria, Auf Gott steht meine zubersicht.  All of the doubt has fallen away, and the bass is singing his praises to God, who has sent the check in the mail. “You know, only God could have trumped Bach for contrapuntal music….”

Right, I keep forgetting.

“It’s music in which each instrument—or group of instruments—is given a complete distinct, though very much related, line. I mean, the aria starts out with the violins presenting the theme, and the rest of the orchestra going plunk / plunk / plunk as an accompaniment. But then all of a sudden the celli are doing the theme, and the violins are going plunk / plunk /plunk. Then Bach starts ripping the heme apart, and then all of the voices are speaking, but instead of being at a maddening musical cocktail party, it all makes glorious sense. No one line dominates, and the sum is always bigger than the whole. And that’s why you can listen to this music forever. There’s always something new that you’ve never heard before, and then you’re smacking you forehead and wondering why you’d never happened on it….”

“There’s something so joyful about that aria, though maybe joyful isn’t the word.”

“It’s a quality only Bach has, I think,” I told her. “It’s a kind of jubilation based on very great faith and very great understanding. And it’s very difficult to name it. ‘Jubilation’ implies a sense of victory, but that would imply that something or someone has been defeated, and there’s no gloating. The same holds true for the word ‘exultation.’ There’s the sense that a long, confused struggle has finally been won, and joy and awe have prevailed, but with deep humility, and deeper understanding. Does that make any sense?”

“The word is rapturous, I think,” said Lady, “from the Latin raptus, whence the term for the birds of prey, the raptors. Because I can only think that Bach, in those moments has been seized by the Holy Spirit. I imagine him there in his church, struggling and toiling, the wheels and gears of his mind spinning until he reaches the pinnacle of distraction and abstraction, and then--so high has he reached--he stumbles and falls into the abyss. There he is falling, falling, and the the celestial eagle of the Holy Spirit swoops and seizes him. Whoosh! In a second he is soaring over the verdant, soft hills of Thuringia; he is seeing the world as only the angels can see it. For a brief moment, he occupies the moment we all aspire to: He soars between the world and the heavens, and can see both. But at last, he is returned, and finds himself again in his church. He rubs his eyes, and wonders: was it real? Had he been dreaming? And then, his eyes fall on the music, and he knows. It was real.”

Damn! Why, if I am writing this, does Lady get all the best lines?  

          

The Cantatas, Somewhat Explained

“It’s beautiful, but kind of strange,” said Lady, after we had finished listening to the cantata. “I mean, a lot of it doesn’t have any melody to it, it just sort of stumbles along….”

“Well, those would be the recitatives, which are texts meant to carry on the story. And the story here is poverty and uncertainty.”

“Know that one,” she said.

In fact we both did. We met just after I had lost my job in a corporate reshuffling; seeking relief from the heat of the San Juan summer, I had fled to her café, The Poet’s Passage. The coffee—and the air conditioning—was great, but that was the least of it. Even now, as I look around me, a man is playing a guitar on the stage where the poetry slam is held every Tuesday night. That takes place in the Sala Poética, which occupies half the space of the adjoining gift shop. The mother of the twins of an itinerant poet is on a couch nearby; the poet is off being poetic, the twins, strangely, never cry. So either the poetry is remarkably lulling, or the mother is drugging her children. At any rate, she never buys anything, but who would think of asking her to? Leave that to Starbucks!

This is not, as I have variously pointed to her, a particularly sustainable business model, but Lady is a poet, as well as the painter of brightly-colored casitas—decorative plaster houses—and also, but not incidentally, a business woman. So all of that means that she can tell me—after I had told her that she was wasting half of her selling space by having the Sala Poética—“but then it wouldn’t be the Poet’s Passage.”

She was right; I was wrong.

So yes, she has known poverty. She never went to the university because she had to work to help her brothers, one of whom went to Harvard. Then she married a Frenchman, carrying on the family tradition of marrying a foreigner and converting him into a Puerto Rican. Then they struggled to open the casita business, and at one point were eating Chef Boyardee from a can for dinner.

“That’s hitting pretty low for a Frenchman,” she reported.

No, there was never a lot of money, but there were plenty of dreams, one of which was to buy a building to house the café and the gift shop, and eventually a museum of poetry (that one is still a dream). So the building came, and then their child, Naïa turned up, and so if there wasn’t a lot of money, well…was that all that important?

The important thing was to have the café, and to stroll through it, wearing—as she almost always does—her long dress, and with her curly hair falling over her right eye. She greets everybody, since strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. So she’s met a lot people, like Pablo Neruda (after whom she named the annoying Dominican parrot that lives in the ornate Victorian cage—did I mention lost retail space?—next door). OK—so she met him and Borges and Derek Walcott, but it was hardly the famous people that mattered the most. Lady knows, it’s not the money; it’s the people in your life that enrich you.

“Bach struggled all of his life, too,” I told her. “And this cantata was written after a particularly bad time, in 1723. Bach’s first wife had died three years earlier, leaving him with at least four children. Then his employer—engaged in fighting a war somewhere—cut his salary. So Bach had settled in Leipzig, where he would die. He remarried, and had thirteen more children, seven of whom died before adulthood.”

“Wow,” said Lady, “if anything happened to Naïa…”

“Death was all around, in those days. It was a constant presence. If you weren’t grieving for somebody, your neighbor or friend was. In fact, death had entered Bach’s life at age nine, when his mother died. Less than a year later, his father died. Then, almost half of his children died. Has anyone written a history of grief? I wonder what Bach would think of us, as we go through our prolonged mourning. Would he think we were indulgent? Spoiled? Did he face death so much and so often that he became inured to it? Did he just shrug and go on?”

“Don’t think you can just shrug and go on after the loss of a child or mother,” said Lady.

“Well, probably not. But maybe it was better to have death so much in your life. Nowadays, when we experience a death of someone close to us, it completely knocks us off our base. But for Bach, it was part of his life. And you know, there’s a special richness in mourning. It’s a bitch, but you feel somehow—and quite paradoxically—more connected with life.”

“I still miss my mother,” said Lady; her mother died on Christmas day over a decade ago, but some pain never fully goes away.

“I miss mine, too,” I said. “Anyway, the cantata is not about death, but about poverty, and trusting in God for him to provide.”

“Tell me again what these cantata things are about,” said Lady.

“They’re curious,” I tell her. “Look, I’ve spent a lot of time going to concerts, and I’ve heard numerous performances of Bach, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a performance of any of the  cantatas. I definitely, as a cellist, have played one. But they contain some of Bach’s greatest writing, and if he had written nothing else in his life, he’d still be considered a great composer….”

“Right, but what are they?”

“Well, they’re works for chorus and orchestra meant to be performed during a church service. And they’re based on texts, which are based on the time of the liturgical year.”

“Marc?”

“I know, I had to look it up. But basically, the liturgical year is about certain seasons, with their correspondent Feast days or holy days. It starts with Advent, which is the period of waiting for the birth Christ. So that goes until Christmastide, which lasts until his baptism, and don’t—please—ask me when that is. Then there’s Lent, which is the forty days before Holy Thursday. Then there’s the Easter Triduum, a fancy way of saying the three days from Good Friday to Easter. Easter, by the way, extends all the way for seven more weeks until Pentecost. That’s when—I see that look on your face—the Holy Spirit descends on us, after Jesus ascends into Heaven is his resurrected body.”

“Wow, it’s complicated.”

“For us, yes. But maybe for people in Bach’s time, no. They were steeped in this stuff, it was part of the fabric of their lives, a constant presence. We go to the beach, most of us, during Holy Week, but they would have been fasting—to some degree—all throughout Lent, and Easter would have been a time of real jubilation. Anyway, you had all these periods of time, centered on Jesus’ life and death, and then you had the space in between, which was called ordinary time.”

“Because it was ordinary, not special?”

“Not really. It was because you used ordinals to count the Sundays. That’s why I told you it was the fifteenth Sunday after Advent, yesterday. Anyway, the point is that the texts used in the service, as well as in Bach’s music, change depending on the time of year. Part of yesterday’s text was from Mathew, that old chestnut ‘no man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one and love the other; of else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ And we all know how awful mammon is.”

“Dreadful,” said Lady, “that’s always the first question I ask, when I meet someone, and I totally encourage you to do the same. Get right up to their face and ask, ‘are you serving mammon?’ Surprising the number of people who are, and even admit to it…”

Of course she has no idea of what mammon is—it’s covetousness, by the way—but she has tremendous bluff, and isn’t that more important?

“Well, my first question is usually, ‘do you despise the devil and all his works,’ but yours works just as well. Anyway, someone chose that text, and stuck Bach with having to do something about it for twenty minutes or so. So the first thing Bach did every Monday morning was sit down and choose his related texts. That done, he could start writing his music. And the writing was both composing and writing, since he had to take a piece of paper, put the music staves on it, and copy out, note by note, the entire 20-minute piece. Think of it, at the end of the week he—and probably his wife and kids—would have filled hundreds of sheets of paper, since it was part by part. One part for the first violin, one for the second violin, one for the viola, one for the cello, one for the bass. Just the orchestra would mean probably fifteen parts. Then you had all of the chorus, then you had the harpsichord and the basso continuo, and lastly, you had the complete score. By the time he or rather they had done all this, it was Friday night, and time to give the music to the soloists and rehearse with them. Saturday was spent rehearsing with the complete orchestra. Sunday was the service, of course, and the next day? Back at it!”

“What a grind,” said Lady. “Didn’t he get tired of it?”

“Who knows? There are over 200 cantatas, though some of them are secular, but he must have done three or more cycles. Sadly, we’ve probably lost about half of what Bach wrote.”

“How can you lose a Bach manuscript? I wouldn’t!”

“Now you wouldn’t. But remember, Bach was respected mostly as an organist in his time. True, among composers he was always revered, but it wasn’t until a hundred years after his death that the general public knew of him as a composer. So you have a hundred years of fires and termites and misplaced boxes and, at times, somebody reaching for the first piece of paper to wrap up their garbage. Terrible, but there it is.”

“Still don’t get it. What about his kids? Didn’t they know what they had?”

So I tell her about the box next to my chair in the library, in which we had put most of my mother’s poetry. Is it any good, that poetry? Well, I think so, but what do I know? All I can say is that it’s there, awaiting the time that I can look at it, with it’s numerous corrections scrawled by hand in the margin. As time went on, the scrawls turned to chicken scratchings, but even (or perhaps especially) indecipherable, they still wrench my heart when I see them. So I’ve done what Bach’s children most likely did, which is to say nothing. And since several of Bach’s children became composers themselves—Carl Philippe Emmanuel was at one time ranked as high or higher than Mozart—well, they were busy composing, instead of preserving their father’s legacy. So of course they weren’t particularly focused on the old man’s work; they were doing their own work. Anyway, as much as it hurts to think of what is lost, consider what we have! The complete work of Bach, by the way, is available for 220 bucks and comes as a flash drive. Oh, and it takes up 32 gigabytes.

“In a way, we’re lucky that—however many works we lost—at least Bach lived until age 65, which meant that he was fairly long in the tooth for the times. Look, Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn all died in their thirties. What music would they have written? How would they have evolved? And for the other composers of the time—Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann—how would having more time with these giants have affected them? Anyway, getting back to Bach, we still have a lot of music, even if you only consider the choral music. Look at the Bach Stiftung.” 

“What’s that?”

“Well, in English it’s called the J. S. Bach Foundation, but I like ‘Stiftung’ better. Cool word to say.”

“So what do they do?”

“Well, they’re located in this little town in Switzerland, and they’re going to play and record the entire vocal music of Bach—cantatas, motets, the passions and the B minor mass. One concert a month, and guess how long it will take them to work their way through all of the vocal music?”

“No idea”

“Twenty five years, or a quarter of a century. That’s 300 concerts, by the way….”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, an amazing project, and really crack musicians.”

She kisses me and disappears into the kitchen.

Time to make the quiches!

        

    

Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity

“It’s the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity,” I say to Lady, brilliancing by her absence (sorry, gotta be Puerto Rican to get that), and however stupid it may be to say it, does it matter? She loves me, she’s one of three sisters I’ve picked up along the way, and anyway she’s not here, so it doesn’t really matter.

“Of course I’m here, and what’s the deal with the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity?

“I’m still trying to figure that out, since I wasn’t raised Catholic or Lutheran but a sort of Presbyterian, except that it was the Midwestern version, which meant that the hearty, slightly sour rye bread and beer got tamed down to Wonder Bread and milk.”

“Marc?”

“Oh you know, John Knox, who cooked up the whole thing, was a merry Scottish soul who decided that we had no free will, couldn’t do a damn thing on our own, that it had all been written down for us, every last action we take. So bingo, we’re just  chess pieces being moved by the celestial hand. Oh, and get ready, because about 99% of us are foreordained to go to Hell, and there’s nothing we can do about it, since instead of having life coaches, we have life tracks, which we can’t get off of.”

“Hah! I was going to have a Perrier, but now I’m going to have a beer. See! I fixed that!”

“An excellent idea, especially since it’s the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, though still before noon, but sorry, God ordained that you would change your mind about that too.”

“So now I’ll have the Perrier!”

“That too was written.”

“Dammit, Marc, somehow this feels like all those arguments with my brothers, when I was a kid, that deteriorated down to ‘did not / did too, did not / did too.’ Really, what sort of a God would do this? Put us all on the conveyor belt for seventy years and then throw us into Hell for all time? That’s crazy!”

 “Is it any crazier than saying that God loves us all, and that Hell is merely the absence of God’s presence in our lives here on earth, and that we’ll all go to Heaven after death? At least, I presume we will, because we’ve abolished Hell, and nobody is certain about purgatory or limbo, or whatever we’re now not calling it. So that means I’ll be stuck up there with Hitler out there mowing his cloud every Saturday morning as I’m nursing my hangover, the next cloud over. Won’t that be nice?”

“Hitler is not in Heaven, Marc!”

“So where is he?”

“I don’t know, but not in Heaven,” said Lady, shifting to poetic certainty from Aristotelian logic. “Anyway, why are you cooking up this religion, and what’s the fifteenth Sunday after whatever-it-was got to do with it?”

“Trinity, and I don’t know why I’m concocting a new religion. Although I have to say, with few exceptions, none of the religions I’ve bumped into have been particularly likeable. But I’m drawn to religion, even as I am repelled by it. It fascinates me. And maybe it was reading about ISIS that made me want to start my own religion….”

“Those people are evil,” said Lady, with the same certainty she had about Hitler.

“And the Crusaders who invaded the Holy Land? Were they evil too?”

“Very likely…”

“Well, they didn’t think so, nor do the ISIS people, who have now come to believe that some guy named Baghdadi has just become the eighth Caliph, and that completely changes the game, because now we have a caliphate, which is a territory ruled by a theology, and there are absolutely no nations, no borders. So throw out that idea that ruled Western civilization for half a millennium or more! Oh, and since we now have a caliphate, the rules get changed, and we gotta play hard by the Koran and go right back to all the really nasty stuff, which is why gay people are getting thrown off roofs, and anybody not believing in the Caliph—including the Shiites, of whom there are maybe 200 million or so in the world—has to be slaughtered. OK—except for the women; they get to be sex slaves.”

“But aren’t the Shiites Muslim, too?”

“Wrong kind. Bam—gotta go!”

“Sick.”

“But fascinating. There are people who are highly educated, deeply intelligent, and they will tell you that they are absolutely certain that the little sliver of bread they ate and the slug of cheap wine they drank became the actual flesh and blood of Christ. Nope—not a metaphor, but the real flesh and blood of a guy who died 2000 years ago, which if true, would definitely call for a inspection from the USDA….”

Lady’s poetic mind freezes at the idea.

“So shouldn’t we just try to lead good lives, and hope for the best?”

“Who could dispute that? But there’s so much good that religion gives us…”

“Like?”

Well, consider the man who wrote the cantata Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz? Yup, J. S. Bach, and if he didn’t sail into heaven, I’m gonna have some serious stuff to say to St. Peter.”

“So what does warum digms tnqwo whatever-it-was mean?

“Let’s listen, and you’ll see.”

And so we do, following along with the text, as you can too….

1. CORO E RECITATIVO ALTO

Chorus

Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz?

     Why are you sorrowed, my heart?

Bekümmerst dich und trägest Schmerz

     Do you worry and bear pain

nur um das zeitliche Gut?

     only because of worldly goods?

Alto

Ach, ich bin arm,

     Alas, I am poor,

mich drücken schwere Sorgen.

     heavy sorrows weigh upon me.

Vom Abend bis zum Morgen

     From evening unto morning

währt meine liebe Not.

     persist my precious needs.

Daß Gott erbarm!

     That God might have mercy!

Wer wird mich noch erlösen

     Who else can redeem me

vom Leibe dieser bösen und argen Welt?

     from the body of this evil and arrant world?

Wie elend ist's um mich bestellt!

     How sordid is what is placed around me!

Ach! wär ich doch nur tot!

     Alas! were I but simply dead!

Chorus

Vertrau du deinem Herren Gott,

     Trust in your Lord God

der alle Ding erschaffen hat.

     who has created all things.

2. RECITATIVO BASSO

Ich bin veracht',

     I am despised,

der Herr hat mich zum Leiden

am Tage seines Zorns gemacht;

     the Lord has made me to suffer

     on the day of his wrath;

der Vorrat, hauszuhalten,

     the researves, to maintain a house

ist ziemlich klein;

     are rather slim;

man schenkt mir vor den Wein der Freuden

     instead of the wine of joy, one pours me

den bittern Kelch der Tränen ein.

     the bitter chalice of tears.

Wie kann ich nun mein Amt mit Ruh verwalten,

     How can I now manage my charge in peace

wenn Seufzer meine Speise und Tränen das Getränke sein?

     when sighing is my food and tears my drink?

3. CORO E RECITATIVO SOPRANO ED ALTO

Chorus

Er kann und will dich lassen nicht.

     He cannot and will not leave you.

Er weiß gar wohl, was dir gebricht,

     He knows quite well, what you lack,

Himmel und Erd ist sein!

     Heaven and earth are his!

Soprano

Ach, wie?

     But how?

Gott sorget freilich vor das Vieh,

     God cares of course for the cattle,

er gibt den Vögeln seine Speise,

     he provides the bird its food,

er sättiget die jungen Raben,

     he satiates the young ravens,

nur ich, ich weiß nicht, auf was Weise

     only I, I know not, by what means

ich armes Kind

     I, a mere child,

mein bißchen Brot soll haben;

     shall have my bite of bread;

wo ist jemand, der sich zu meiner Rettung findt?

     where is there anyone to be found to save me?

Chorus

Dein Vater und dein Herre Gott,

     Your Father and your Lord God

der dir beisteht in aller Not.

     who stands by you in every need.

Alto

Ich bin verlassen,

     I am forsaken,

es scheint,

     it appears

als wollte mich auch Gott bei meiner Armut hassen,

     as though even God will despise me in my poverty,

da er's doch immer gut mit mir gemeint.

     while he did always mean good for me.

Ach Sorgen,

     Alas worries

werdet ihr denn alle Morgen

und alle Tage wieder neu?

     are you to be renewed then

     every morning and every day?

So klag ich immerfort;

     So I lament constantly;

ach! Armut, hartes Wort,

     Alas! poverty, harsh word,

wer steht mir denn in meinem Kummer bei?

     who then stands beside me in my distress?

Chorus

Dein Vater und dein Herre Gott,

     Your Father and your Lord God

der steht dir bei in aller Not.

     who stands by you in every need.

4. RECITATIVO TENORE

Ach süßer Trost! Wenn Gott mich nicht verlassen

     Oh sweet comfort! If God does not forsake me

und nicht versäumen will,

     nor will not neglect,

so kann ich in der Still

     then I can, in quiet

und in Geduld mich fassen.

     and in patience compose myself.

Die Welt mag immerhin mich hassen,

     The world may continue to hate me,

so werf ich meine Sorgen

     so I cast my worries

mit Freuden auf den Herrn,

     with joy upon the Lord,

und hilft er heute nicht,

     and if he not help today

so hilft er mir doch morgen.

     then he will help me still tomorrow.

Nun leg ich herzlich gern

     Now I, with earnest gladness, lay

die Sorgen unters Kissen

     these worries under the pillow

und mag nichts mehr als dies

zu meinem Troste wissen:

     and want nothing more than

     to recognize this as my solace:

5. ARIA BASSO

Auf Gott steht meine Zuversicht,

     On God is placed my confidence

mein Glaube läßt ihn walten.

     my faith lets him prevail.

Nun kann mich keine Sorge nagen,

     Now no worries can gnaw at me,

nun kann mich auch kein Armut plagen.

     now no poverty can plague me.

Auch mitten in dem größten Leide

     Even midst the greatest suffering

bleibt er mein Vater, meine Freude,

     he remains my Father, my joy,

er will mich wunderlich erhalten.

     he will wondrously preserve me.

6. RECITATIVO ALTO

Ei nun!

     Well then!

So will ich auch recht sanfte ruhn.

     So will I also right gently rest.

Euch, Sorgen, sei der Scheidebrief gegeben!

     You, worries, are issued the severance papers!

Nun kann ich wie im Himmel leben.

     Now can I live as in heaven.

7. CORALE

Weil du mein Gott und Vater bist,

     Since you are my God and Father

dein Kind wirst du verlassen nicht,

     you will not abandon your child,

du väterliches Herz!

     you fatherly heart!

Ich bin ein armer Erdenkloß,

     I am a mere clod of dirt

auf Erden weiß ich keinen Trost.

     on earth I know no solace.