Prelude in Bm (BWV 544) J.S. Bach (1685-1750)
Fugue in Bm
Scholars say that the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) — in terms of percentage of the population that perished — was the deadliest in European history. It was a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. Some of that was religious ideology. Meanwhile, some kings and princes liked the idea of not having the Pope meddle in their governance, and not having to pay tribute to Rome. (Although aligning with the Papacy had its worldly benefits.) The Thirty Years War concluded with an uneasy truce signed in 1648 (from exhaustion?) but the underlying tensions between Catholics and Protestants hadn’t really been resolved.
Martin Rinkert (1586-1649) — a Lutheran pastor in Eilenburg — wrote the words to “Now Thank We All our God” during the Thirty Years War. He had to bury 50 souls a day (including his wife) — 4400 funerals in a single year — either direct casualties of the war or from the famine and disease that accompanied it.
So a young Bach (1685-1750) would have heard tales from older folks who had survived the Thirty Years War, and the possibility of another war must have hung over the populace. Meanwhile, Poland was solidly Catholic, but the Queen of Poland, Christiane Eberhardine der Starke (1671–1727), was a staunch Protestant. The distance from Leipzig (Bach’s home base) and the Polish border was only 300 miles. Queen Christiane became something of an icon, a hero, to the Protestants, for her Defiant Steadfastness? Hope that Protestants and Catholics could get along? Protestant preachers liked to portray her as a miserable Protestant martyr, isolated as a virtual prisoner in her lonely castle. Whatever the reasons, among the Protestants in proto-Germany (Germany became the current modern state in 1871), Queen Christiane was something of an icon admired much like Lady Diana was an icon in our day.
So when Queen Christiane died (age 55), the grief and dismay throughout Protestant proto-Germany was great. In a day before mass media, towns would hold their own separate memorial services, including Leipzig. Bach, although regarded as the finest organist in Germany, was too busy as the Music Director for the four churches in Leipzig to do regular Sunday organ playing — he had organists working for him. But for this memorial service, scholars are sure that Bach himself played, wrote a cantata for the occasion, as well as a grand Prelude and Fugue (this morning’s prelude & postlude): the Prelude opened the service, and the Fugue concluded it. It’s in B minor — in those days, B minor was described as bizarre, listless and melancholy. (In his St. Matthew’s Passion, the lament that Peter sings after denying Christ three times is also in B minor.) I think this piece expresses the grief and fear of living in such uncertain and warmongering times — something to which we can sadly relate. Yet — as with Bach’s music in general, I think it still has that quality of “God is in His Heaven — all will be OK.”
Queen Christiane’s marriage to Augustus II was extremely unhappy — far beyond Protestant vs. Catholic. Augustus II converted to Catholicism simply because it was a requirement for him to become king of Poland. He was also notoriously unfaithful — flaunting his mistresses to Christiane. Augustus didn’t even attend Christiane’s funeral.
It would seem that the fugue is based on a Slovakian folk song “Nebudem sa Zénit Este” (“I do not want to marry, yet”) a song about unhappy marriage. I’ll briefly play the beginning part of the folk song before launching into the fugue so you can judge for yourself. (Bach’s great great grandfather was Slovakian.)
“Nebudem sa Zénit” Slovakian
http://www.fiseisky.de/fiseisky/public_html/html/cd_publikationen/inhalte/inhalt_abf005_cd.htm
Bach himself worked on a ‘family’ tree of his ancestry, tracing it back to ‘Veit Bach’ (1550 – 1619), who hailed from Slovakia, whence he was expelled as a Protestant by the Counter Reformation and emigrated to Germany. Veit would be Bach’s great-great-grandfather.
https://hudba.zoznam.sk/akordy/piesen/nebudem-sa-zenit-este/