Wolf: Christmas Cantatas – Willens

Names accumulate around Bach like iron filings around a magnet, and every so often somebody goes looking in the discard pile and turns up something that deserves better than a footnote. Ernst Wilhelm Wolf is one of these. He spent his working life in Weimar, decades before Goethe’s presence there made the town a byword for German cultural aspiration, though in fact the two men knew each other; Wolf set some of the poet’s texts, and moved in the same circles as Herder. Frederick the Great wanted him. CPE Bach counted him a friend, corresponded with him, and when Emanuel died in Hamburg it was Wolf whom colleagues urged to apply for the vacant post of civic music director. He said no. A quiet, settled life in the Thuringian provinces evidently suited him better than the treadmill of a free imperial city’s Kirchenmusik obligations. Who, hearing these four cantatas, could blame him?

The three shorter works here, “Willkommen, du sehnlich erbetener Tag,” “Seid böse, ihr Völker,” and “Auf, jauchzet, ihr Christen,” share a family resemblance so close you could almost mistake them for movements of one larger piece. Each opens with a chorus built mostly on chordal, homophonic textures, the choir singing as a block rather than spinning independent lines, and each closes with a plain chorale, the congregation’s own voice reasserting itself after the artifice of the arias and recitatives in between. This was standard operating procedure for German church music of the 1760s and 70s, the age after Bach when nobody wanted to write another Bach cantata. What you hear instead is something closer to the galant idiom of CPE Bach filtered through provincial Lutheran practicality. Wolf’s harmonic language stays polite, even decorous. But listen to the way he inflects a suspension, or lets a tenor line droop chromatically at a word like “Schmerz.” There’s real feeling under the good manners.

The fourth cantata, “Willkommen, du schönster der Tage,” is the disc’s reason for existing. It’s longer, more ambitious, structurally freer than its companions, and it suggests a composer capable of more than provincial Christmas Day utility music. Whether it quite earns comparison with Homilius, whose sacred output has been getting the attention it deserves these past two decades, I’m not sure. But it’s a genuine discovery, not merely a historical curiosity.

The performances do this repertoire real credit. Michael Alexander Willens leads the Kölner Akademie with the light touch this music needs: textures kept transparent, tempos unforced, none of the driven, over-articulated HIP mannerism that can make eighteenth-century sacred music sound like it’s being interrogated rather than played. Beate Mordal’s soprano has a clean, silvery focus, ideal for this repertoire’s high-lying, ornamented lines. Georg Poplutz sings with the kind of unforced lyric tenor that never pushes for effect, a virtue rarer than it should be. Matthias Vieweg brings gravity without turning ponderous, his lower register warm rather than woolly. Ensemble singing throughout has that blend-without-blur quality German choirs of this size do so naturally.

Is this an essential disc? Depends what you mean by essential. Nobody’s musical life is incomplete without Ernst Wilhelm Wolf. But CPO has done us a favor here, and Willens and his forces make the strongest possible case for music that could easily sound merely dutiful in less sympathetic hands. Recommended to anyone curious about what happened to the German cantata after Bach stopped writing them.