Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass, which he compiled largely from earlier material near the end of his life, is a monumental setting of the Latin mass for chorus and orchestra. In the words of John Eliot Gardiner, the piece represents “a repository of human doubts and tussles of faith, and a celebration of birth and life.” It is astonishing that the composer who wrote this towering opus, and who has become revered as a translator of spiritual experience into musical form, was equally capable of writing pieces that are defined by lightness and humor. Bach’s playful side is on full display in the Chamber Music Society concert on December 9, when soprano Joélle Harvey, tenor Paul Appleby, and baritone John Moore collaborate with CMS instrumentalists to present a selection of secular cantatas.

For Joélle Harvey, the B-minor Mass was the first Bach piece she performed. “It was my freshman year at Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. I got into the top choir, and we were doing the B-minor Mass that year and touring it. That was my first experience with Bach, which is a kind of baptism by fire! I was like a very dry sponge, waiting to soak up all this information,” she told me. “I learned a lot about that style of music; when to sing out and when to lay back a little bit. Being aware of where things are harmonically is crucial—sometimes Bach’s harmonic progressions are not what you expect them to be. But the biggest lesson I learned was that it was more important to listen to other parts than to focus so much on what I was doing."

This mode of awareness and intensive listening is a continual challenge in performing Bach. “For me, Bach is a composer for whom no matter how much I feel like I’ve learned, there is still so much I don’t know,” Joélle explained. Most of his cantatas, including those featured on the concert in December, feature extraordinary solo parts for individual instruments. It makes these works particularly well suited for performance in chamber music settings, but the orchestration requires additional sensitivity and attention from the singers. “As a soprano singing Bach, I sing with the flute a lot. I played the flute in high school, so it’s always nice to come back to that,” Joélle revealed. “You have to make sure to sing within the texture of the wind instruments. After singing other styles and then coming back to Bach, I always have to remind myself to think less soloistically!"

Almost all of Bach’s vocal compositions feature texts in German. The CMS “Bach Cantatas” concert includes the only two works he wrote based on Italian-language texts, Non sa che sia dolore (He knows not what sorrow is) and Amore traditore (Treacherous love). Despite their dolorous, melodramatic titles and subject matter, these two cantatas have an airy, bouncy quality to them.

I asked Joélle about the difference between singing in Italian and singing in German. “Italian is such a lyrical language, while German is more percussive,” she told me. “Singers always have to find a middle ground between these extremes. Regardless of the language, you want the text to be intelligible, which requires a certain amount of articulation, but you want to maintain the smooth, legato lines. Then, of course, there are idiomatic things that you might want to bring out. Being aware of the sound of each language is key.”

The two German-language cantatas presented on the program are among his more humorous contributions to the genre. Bach wrote his Durchlauchtster Leopold (Most illustrious Leopold) in 1722 to celebrate the birthday of his patron, Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. The text is an ode of praise dedicated to the young prince, which Bach sets with due pomp and extravagance. Still, there is no shortage of humor in the piece, which includes a movement for solo cello, bassoon, and low voice in which the instrumentalists chatter around the singer, who repeats the name “Leopold” an almost ludicrous number of times.

The concert closes with Bach’s Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Be still, stop chattering), known colloquially as his “Coffee” Cantata. He wrote the piece in the 1730s, when a coffee craze was spreading across Europe, sweeping up young people and causing great consternation to the older generation. The story is about a conflict between a coffee-addicted daughter (Liesgen) and her pompous, controlling father (Schlendrian). Liesgen eventually outsmarts her father, and the piece ends with an ironic chorus proclaiming that drinking coffee is a perfectly natural activity. “It’s incredible to imagine the person who wrote the B-minor Mass also writing the ‘Coffee’ Cantata,” Joélle said. “The depth of emotion that is shown and felt through the B-minor Mass, through the St. Matthew and St. John Passions—it’s that level of playfulness that you reach in the ‘Coffee’ Cantata.”

For all its levity, the “Coffee” Cantata is not a lightweight work. Like any good satire, it addresses serious themes—in this case marriage, family relationships, and a burgeoning culture of consumerism, among other things. It is clear from the revisions in Bach’s manuscripts that he took great care with this piece, and musicologists like Markus Rathey and David Yearsley have recently explored the substantive nature of the cantata. Coffee houses at the time were mostly male spaces, and the then-current conversation around women drinking coffee was in part a debate about women’s role in public discourse. Musically, the cantata is no trifle; for example, Schlendrian’s consternation is mirrored in one of the most complex harpsichord parts that Bach ever wrote.

I asked Joélle if she’s a coffee drinker. “I am, I need it every day—at least some kind of caffeine, though I didn’t always drink coffee. But if my dad were telling me not to drink coffee, I’d be like, ‘What are you on about?’ It’s just a little pleasure, right? The “Coffee” Cantata is partly about not denying yourself a small pleasure that’s not doing any harm to anybody.” We agreed that reveling in this slice of Bach’s music is likewise a delight that doesn’t in any way detract from the profundity of the “serious” side of his oeuvre. “It’s hard sometimes to wrap my head around how much music he wrote,” Joélle said. “It wasn’t just creativity; there was a mathematical and scientific element to it as well. I can’t fathom how someone was able to bring those things together and create as much as he did."

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