March 24, 2009: Give us this day our cuppa joe

The Albany Consort celebrated the 324th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach (three days late but not even a pfennig short) as today's Noontime Concerts™ event at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco.  The feature of the offering was the BWV secular cantata "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht" (once freely translated by a poet friend of mine as "All right, you guys, shut up;  and listen to me!"), known more familiarly as the "Coffee Cantata."  The plot (yes, there is one) by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici) concerns an overly-assertive ("Er brummt ja wie ein Zeidelbär"/"he's growling like a honey bear") father, Herr Schlendrian, who cannot abide by his daughter Liegen's coffee fix:

If I am not allowed to drink
my three cups of coffee a day,
then to my pain
I'll get to be like a dried out goat roast [verdorrtes Ziegenbrätchen].

When ranting and raging do not have any effect, Schlendrian threatens a variety of deprivations of luxury items;  but coffee trumps them all.  Only when he threatens that she will never get a husband does he make any progress.  She relents;  but, when Schlendrian goes out in search of a husband for her, she secretly circulates the word:

Let no suitor come to my house
unless he has personally promised me,
and will also add it to the marriage contract,
that I may be allowed to cook coffee
whenever I like.

Like all of the sacred cantatas the work then ends with a chorale (of sorts):

Cats never give up chasing mice,
and girls always remain coffee fiends [Coffeeschwestern].
Mother like drinking coffee,
Grandma drank it too,
so who can blame our daughters?

True to the spirit of the music, soprano Christa Pfeiffer brought her coffee mug (alas, not of period design) as a prop, making the whole offering an opportunity to experience Bach at his most humorous.  The humor can also be found in Picander's text.  Almost the entire text (including recitative passages) consists of rhymed couplets;  but the rhyming lines are not always adjacent.  So Picander plays with the listener's expectations by sometimes deliberately delaying the appearance of a rhyming line.  (None of this is evident in the translation provided for this performance.)

By way of an overture to this cantata, the instrumentalists performed the BWV 1057 harpsichord concerto in F major, which is basically a reworking of the  fourth Brandenburg concerto (BWV 1049, also in F major).  Director Jonathan Salzedo conducted from the harpsichord keyboard from which he served as soloist.  There were still the two recorders from the Brandenburg concerto, but the harpsichord offered an alternative approach to the Brandenburg's violin solo.  This made for about an hour of relatively unfamiliar but delightful Bach, which seemed like an excellent way to celebrate his birthday.