Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen

Gottlieb F. Höpli

“From individuality to loneliness”.

The cantata “Erfreut Euch, ihr Herzen” (Rejoice, all you hearts) speaks to the self-confidence of the Christian and develops the vision of modern individuality. But the loneliness of the individual in our time may also have its origins here.

I confess: it took a while for the voices that resound in this cantata to speak to me. I don’t mean the three wonderful solo parts, nor the beautiful bass aria, nor the duets between tenor and alto, nor the virtuoso solo violin playing around them, nor the radiant wind instruments – no, I mean the voices that speak to us from the text of the cantata.
For the music of the cantata goes directly to the heart of the lover and also to the “approaching organist” – that’s how Bach describes the studiosus on the organ in the Orgelbüchlein – and to us today, in large parts, quite in contrast to the cantata text. Nothing other than Bach’s music is the reason for the monthly performances in Trogen in Appenzell over the next 20 years.
Talking about this music would be much easier for me according to the motto of my teacher Emil Staiger, the master of literary-historical interpretation. Because the mediating work of the reflective interpreter consists of “grasping what grips us” (no one has described the hermeneutic circle of interpretation more succinctly!). But those who reflect on music are known to run the risk of falling into the tone of Wackenroder and Tieck’s early Romantic “Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders” (1796).
So we turn to the cantata text from an anonymous pen: a text that must be typical of this genre of sacred vocal music, significant for Bach himself, for the churchgoers in St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig on that second Easter feast day in 1724 and consequently also for us. Some of the numerous voices in this cantata text, which have already been mentioned, come from far away. They speak to each other, they speak to the faithful – and they also speak to us. It is a whole network of voices that the listener is confronted with.
The first voice, the farthest away, calls out:

“Let the sun shine,
let joy shine,
Long live Prince Leopold, eternally happy.
Oh heaven, we implore,
to see the happy time sixty times again,
“Give us, most high, what refreshes our regent.”

The reader will immediately notice that these verses do not come from the text of the cantata “Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen”. But anyone who reads the text of the opening chorus of our cantata carefully (“Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, / entweichet, ihr Schmerzen”) will immediately realise that the music fits both texts. Or should we rather say: both texts fit the music?
The text quoted here forms the conclusion of a “Serenata” that Bach composed and performed in 1718 for the 24th birthday of his Köthen employer, the music-loving Prince Leopold zu Anhalt-Köthen. There is much to be said about this form of using earlier models, the parody, as it is also known from other cantatas, both practical and fundamental. For example, that Bach wrote the St John Passion for Good Friday 1724 and, pressed for time, reworked already existing cantatas for the two following Easter days.
In this context, however, it should not go unmentioned that the joy of a birthday and the joy of the resurrection are characterised by very similar affects. In fact, affects, the art of depicting precisely defined and typified states of mind and arousing them in the audience, play a very central role in Baroque music. What’s more, Johann Sebastian Bach always comes up with more for a birthday than many composers do for an ecclesiastical festival …
The voices in the cantata “Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen” (Rejoice, Ye Hearts) are closer to our ears than the text of the court music from Köthen, holding a dialogue, a kind of argument, between hope (tenor) and fear (alto). The two affects give expression to the human ambivalence before the Easter mystery, and they are not unknown to today’s Christians either. Not in the baroque choice of words, but in the ambivalent attitude: “(…), / I believe, but help me weak, / you can make me stronger; / (…)”. For doubt – our secularised present seems to have completely forgotten this – is not the characteristic of the unbeliever, the non-interested, nor of the know-it-all, but the characteristic of the believing, searching person struggling for his faith!
Looking at the cantata as a whole, one is struck by the radiance, the ear-catching jubilation about the resurrection that resounds there. Particularly moving in the case of that millennial voice that resounds at the very end and immediately falls silent again: the third stanza from the oldest liturgical Easter hymn in the German language, “Christ ist erstanden” (Christ is risen), which goes back to an even older Latin original. The ancient Easter hymn is recalled in all three stanzas (our inner ear may hear the ancient Doric key with its whole-tone steps):

“Christ is risen from the torment all;
We should all be glad,
Christ will be our comfort.
Kyrieleis.

If he had not risen,
the world would have passed away;
since he is risen,
we praise the Father Jesus Christ.
Kyrieleis.

Hallelujah,
Hallelujah,
Hallelujah!

Let us all be glad,
Christ will be our comfort.
Kyrieleis.”

With this ancient Easter sequence, Bach, it seems to us, put a kind of additional stamp of faith under the cantata, similar to the three letters he put under many of his works: SDG – Soli Deo Gloria.
At this point, at the latest, we today are inevitably confronted with the faith content of the Easter event: the resurrection of Christ is not for lukewarm Christians and rationalists, it is “hard stuff”. Can we contemporaries at Christmas still find the birth of a baby of poor people in the far East somehow touching, the resurrection of Christ demands a completely different positional reference: Do you believe in the redemption through the sacrifice of the Son of God in the Passion, in his resurrection and his ascension? It is no coincidence that the Orthodox Church attaches a completely different, a central significance to the Easter event in the church year. The Easter Vigil in the Orthodox liturgy with its cries of resurrection and its never-ending jubilation – which I have certainly been able to celebrate twenty times so far – is an incomparable, overwhelming spiritual experience!
But we have still not come close to the core message of the cantata text. It still sounds to us as if from far away. And yet, at least at one central point, our present connects with the text much more than can be perceived at first glance.
Let us ask: In the text of this cantata, what constitutes a “true Christian”? In the tenor recitative it says:

“Looking with consolation on his Saviour
and build in himself a kingdom of heaven,
is the property of true Christians.”

“To build in oneself a kingdom of heaven”: now that is truly a Reformation statement, almost a pietistic one! We do not find it anywhere else, neither with the Catholics nor with the Orthodox, nor in any other world religion: the individual is, I myself am, quite alone in the position to “build” a “kingdom of heaven” in myself! Without spiritual or worldly permission, without priestly mediation, without princely decree of grace! This detachment of the individual from the manifold horizontal and vertical ties of the medieval world will have tremendous consequences. Here begins a process of emancipation, loosening and detachment, finally the cutting of ties, which then did not even stop at man’s bond with God – and nothing else meant “religio”. A process that will go on and on in the course of time. It leads directly to the Enlightenment, defined by Kant in 1784 as “man’s exit from his self-inflicted immaturity”, and to the imperative “Have the courage to use your own intellect”.
This no longer requires a personalised God; since Kant, all that is needed is the consciousness of “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me” – because the enlightened person can assume that this consciousness is also present in his neighbour. As is well known, the enlightened optimism of living in the best of all worlds suffered a lasting blow after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, as we know from Voltaire’s “Candide”.
The developmental thread of individualisation could be continued right up to the present day. Of course, that would go beyond the scope of this reflection. Only this much: individualisation also means isolation, even loneliness. The loneliness of modern man is no longer just a dominant theme of today’s art and literature, but now also preoccupies sociologists and even urban planners. The latter have to gear urban living space, urban space, more and more to the dominant species of singles.
Returning to the beginning of the cantata, our now sharpened hearing quickly allows us to see what separates us from the spirit of the cantata today:
The verses “Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, / entweichet, ihr Schmerzen, (…)” would certainly be conceivable in today’s secularised world and even a hundred years ago – but no longer as a jubilation about the Saviour’s victory over hardship and death, about the comfort that he thus provides us, but rather, for example, in an advertising slogan about the effect of a painkiller from the 1920s. The pharmaceutical industry has long since overtaken the healing effect of faith! So the following lines, which speak of the Saviour and his spiritual kingdom, would have to be re-phrased, for example to the name of a prominent drug, perhaps even a psychopharmaceutical! I will be forgiven if I refrain from this attempt.
It is true that modern man has not completely severed his ties to the afterlife. It may even be said that the longing for such a connection has rather grown again. But the starting point is now the individual life plan, which wants to determine for itself in which forms and rites this connection should take place – “bottom up” instead of “top down”, as it is called today. A visible example of this are the often extremely embarrassing, self-made rites that people come up with when they don’t want to completely do without the services offered by the churches when they tie the knot for life. Instead of Johann Sebastian Bach and the organ, well-intentioned words of friendship, guitar and drums and a musical quality that is often quite subterranean are then used. i think – this is my personal opinion – that our national churches and their staff today allow themselves to be offered too much in this respect!
Let’s talk one last time about the kingdom of heaven, which man can, indeed should, build in himself. Since Immanuel Kant at the latest, however, this has also meant that man himself is responsible if he does not manage to create paradisiacal conditions within himself. And this has not become any easier since navel-gazing and looking into the abysses of the human soul have made such enormous progress in the last century …
A word about the abysses of the soul: The Greek Pindar’s pedagogical call to man, “Become who you are”, has already become Nietzsche’s ominous “How to become what you are” – it is the subtitle of the torn late work “Ecce homo”, which the philosopher and despiser of Christianity wrote shortly before his collapse: “Ecce homo” – the exclamation of Pontius Pilate at the sight of Jesus Christ, shortly before he allowed the Passion of Christ, which he could not stop, to run its course.
But the passion was followed by the resurrection. No one will want to claim that in a present full of fears, passions and obsessions, people do not long for some kind of redemption. But of the two dialogue partners in the cantata “Rejoice, Ye Hearts”, fear and hope, fear clearly reigns supreme today. The media are also largely responsible for this – to the extent that, as a rule, only bad news is good news for the newspaper man. Therefore, the media are the worst possible bearers of good news and certainly not simple representations of reality. “Rejoice, you hearts, / escape, you pains” would only be headline-grabbing for them if it were a state of emergency for one day, for example on the day of a royal wedding like this 29 April 2011, the “Royal Wedding”. The media, not only today, but ever since they have existed, have been at the service of the baroque affect of fear, depicting it in all possible states and wanting to arouse it in their audience as dramatically as possible. In this way, they resemble the Fama from the Köthen Birthday Serenata to a tee.
But this may now be the legitimate occasion to abandon this un-Easterly train of thought and return from the serenata to the cantata! Even today, Johann Sebastian Bach’s wonderful music can give us hope, even a piece of the “kingdom of heaven within ourselves”.

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).