Other notes - Graupner

This year’s collaboration between Emmanuel Music and Chapel choir falls in the same month that we reflect on 100 years of the Lindsey Chapel, and so it seemed fitting to turn to a cantata that expounds upon “lovely dwelling places” of God. While all God’s dwelling places are, of course, lovely, I think we can all agree that Lindsey Chapel is one of the loveliest.

Christoph Graupner is perhaps most famous as the Leipzig authorities’ second choice for the position of Thomaskantor in 1723 (Telemann was first, and Bach third). Graupner leveraged the job offer to get a significant raise at his current gig as Kapellmeister at the court in Darmstadt, where he stayed for the remainder of his career.

In contrast to Bach’s intense burst of cantata composition in his first years at Leipzig, Graupner composed cantatas regularly over 50 years in his post at Darmstadt, largely working at a slightly more manageable pace of one every other Sunday. This resulted in a remarkable catalog of over 1400 sacred works, nearly all which have survived in his own manuscripts, and almost none of which are ever regularly performed. This is quite possibly this cantata’s second ever public performance.  

Graupner’s cantatas from 1718 onwards were largely written to texts by Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, a Lutheran preacher who was also his brother-in-law. “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” was written for December 30, 1742, the Sunday after Christmas. The Gospel reading for that morning (Luke 2: 33-40) told part of the story of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem, including a reference to the prophetess Anna, who “never left the Temple, but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying”. Lichtenburg took this as a cue to think through the nature of God’s “dwelling places” on earth: alongside reminding the listeners of God’s continual presence with them, in places and in hearts, his text is marked by a characteristically Protestant anxiety about potentially idolatrous notions of sacred space, and an almost obsessive return in successive movements to the dangers of hypocrisy in worship. His poetry is direct and concise, at times dense in biblical allusions (e.g. the bass recitative, no. 4).

The form of the text will be familiar from Bach cantatas: an opening biblical quotation sung by choir; a chorale at the end; and recitatives and arias offering various functions (exhortation, consolation, encouragement) in between. But Graupner’s musical treatment is quite different from Bach; although Graupner’s early musical education was in the older church style, including strict counterpoint (he was a pupil at the Thomasschule), his style changed with the times. Thus, the opening chorus is simple and light in a manner that might remind us of Handel or Haydn rather than Bach or Schütz. Graupner’s artful, fluid vocal writing in the two arias is testament to his experience in the operatic world, where the young composer cut his teeth, first in Leipzig, then Hamburg (1705-9). Both arias here follow a Graupnerian mold, in that the orchestral forces have their own character and ideas, separate from the vocal lines. There are nevertheless little snatches of imitation and other playful interactions between soloist and instruments.

While Bach generally favored finishing his cantatas with simple four-part chorales, the instruments doubling the voices, Graupner typically went for highly decorated instrumental accompaniments, often with virtuosic violin parts; as Friedrich Noack wrote (Christoph Graupner als Kirchenkomponist, 1926), this is essentially chamber music, written for small forces (often one per part) to perform in a small court chapel. The chorale that floats through busy strings today is a stanza from Paul Gerhardt’s “Zeuch ein zu deinen Thoren,” a prayer to the Holy Spirit to “Enter into your gates,” that is, to come into the Temple - the believer's heart.

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