Bach’s Cantatas - A Treasure Trove for Trumpet

While a fair number of monumental works written by J. S. Bach are among the typical Baroque canon, at least among the reach of the enthusiastic readers of this blog, specific works among the catalog of cantatas tend to be lesser known and subsequently not as frequently programmed. Most attentive audience members are at least familiar with the larger pieces such as the Mass in B Minor, Magnificat, and Christmas Oratorio, which, of course, are outstanding works of art that also happen to have wonderful (and delightfully challenging!) trumpet parts. But the cantatas, perhaps because Bach wrote around 300 during his lifetime, are sometimes overlooked.

As a doctoral student, the world of historical performance was all very new to me, having spent my formative years studying modern trumpet and spending much of my time exploring Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, along with a few short excerpts by Bach. Naively, I thought that was all Bach wrote for my instrument since those three pieces I mentioned contained the only excerpts I needed to learn for orchestral auditions. Little did I know there were more than SIXTY pieces employing the trumpet, or groups of trumpets, within the figurative treasure trove of the cantatas! I still remember how far my eyes widened (and how far my jaw dropped) as I looked at the collection of Bach’s cantata trumpet parts. I had no idea there were so many incredibly virtuosic and symbolically meaningful pieces written for my instrument and I knew I was getting drawn even further down the path that has ended up being my life’s work.

Let me back up a bit though, in case you’re reading this and wondering what exactly is a cantata. Taken from the Italian, it translates as “sung”, it is a piece that includes at least one singer and often more than one, as well as accompanying instruments, at the very least a continuo group, and often including obbligato (obligatory or indispensable) instrumental solo parts. Cantatas used within the liturgy of a church service were sacred cantatas, but there were often pieces written for other special occasions such as local dignitaries’ birthdays or weddings, known as secular cantatas. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a set of six cantatas written to be part of six different days of the liturgical calendar, telling the story of the Nativity.

“Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen”/“Shout for Joy to God in all lands”, (also known as Cantata 51 or by the catalog number BWV 51, with the initials BWV signifying Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or translated as “Bach Works Catalog”) is an example of one of Bach’s cantatas for a solo voice, in this case soprano, which includes an obbligato trumpet along with the usual complement of strings and continuo. Interestingly enough, this is the only cantata for soprano and trumpet within Bach’s extensive catalog, instead preferring to include trumpet for the bass voice cantatas since he tended to use the bass as the voice of God — and what better instrument to help set the stage for such heavenly royalty than the trumpet?

My preparation process for this piece is similar to all pieces with voices: text, text, text! Even though the trumpet doesn’t speak the words as clearly as a singer, the text often provides not only a narrative inspiration in terms of telling a story based on the text, but is an essential guide to shaping phrases. I’ll often sing the text in my head when playing so I can match as closely as possible all of the nuances and variety of articulation and inflection present in speech. In BWV 51 it often feels like an exuberant and effervescent conversation between the soprano and the trumpet, which we hope will be a truly joyful beginning of a new season, in many ways, for Portland Baroque Orchestra.

—Kris Kwapis