As we hurtle towards Canada's October 17th tryst with D (for Doobie) Day, when recreational cannabis becomes notionally legal nationwide, consider the socio-cultural fallout in the not-so-distant past when another psychotropic drug – coffee – transitioned from a louche rarity to a mass-market comestible.
Just a few hundred years ago, the brew was known only as a medicinal potion in Yemen and Ethiopia. Then, in the span of a generation, it became the court beverage of the Ottomans, the toast of Paris salons, a staple of Viennese street fairs and waterfront dives in Marseilles.
In London coffee houses won fame as “penny universities,” eclectic centres of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferment. Prototypical LLC’s like the British and Dutch East India companies began as ad hoc compacts among hyper-caffeinated mercantile coffee house habitues; even Lloyd’s of London started out as a City café.
In the genteel college town of Leipzig, Germany, music featured high on the menu at Zimmerman’s Coffee House . No longer the exclusive perk of nobles and churches, by the 17th and 18th centuries Art Music – particularly of the instrumental variety – was becoming accessible to the socially mobile burghers and intelligentsia of the High Baroque.
Georg Philipp Telemann first came to Leipzig’s prestigious university to study law; he stayed on to establish the city’s Collegium Musicum, where professionals and student amateurs pioneered new forms and styles of composition. Wednesdays and Fridays, performers and audiences alike came together for free concerts (what we might now call “jam sessions”) at Zimmerman’s.
But Teleman left Leipzig to make his name in the Big Time of the nascent music industry. Turning down the post of choirmaster at the city’s iconic Thomaskirche, he moved on to establish himself in the up-and-coming worlds of music publishing and opera. So city fathers had to settle for a less lustrous cantor for their church – one Johann Sebastian Bach, who also inherited direction of the Collegium Musicum.
Bach, devout and cerebral, was by disposition no gregarious coffee house boulevardier. Indeed he went out of his way to poke gentle fun at café society in one of his few secular cantatas. But he needed to carry on with the Zimmerman soirées in order to maintain the Collegium and recruit performers for his weekly church cantatas.
So he scheduled crowd-pleasing performances of his own instrumental works and those of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, as well as published scores by such operatic luminaries as Teleman, George Frideric Handel or the Italian grand master Nicola Antonio Porpora.
These five composers headlined the bill at EMV's “Zimmerman’s Coffee House” recital, featuring a quartet of soloists from B.C.’s own Pacific Baroque Orchestra (PBO). For an added touch of verisimilitude (and to somewhat soften the sacerdotal gravitas of the Christ Church Cathedral venue), EMV even treated the audience to limitless free dark roast (courtesy of Vancouver's Wicked Café).
The concert opened with a pair of Handel sonatas (one trio, one for flute), separated by a set of C.P.E. Bach harpsichord variations on La Folia d’Espagne. PBO director Alexander Weimann, hunched and jut-jawed over the double-manual of EMV’s faux-Taskin harpsichord, brought out the full folia of Carl Philipp Emanuel’s overwrought ornamentation.
Flautist Soile Stratkauskas, served up a lighter and sweeter dollop of coffee house music in the Handel pieces. She topped off her rendering of his op. 1 no. 7 sonata with a delightful kaffee mit schlag froth of an allegro.
But the sugary froth of Handel was immediately followed by the roiling sea spume of J.S. Bach’s E minor sonata, with violinist Chloe Meyers visibly swept up in the undertow of the music. Not for nothing did an awed Beethoven declare that Johan Sebastian “shouldn’t be called ‘Bach’ [German for ‘brook’], but rather ‘Ocean’… infinite, inexhaustible…”
After surfing such a wave, the latter half of the concert inevitably seemed a bit tame by comparison. But that very domesticity was part of the charm of the two Teleman pieces on the programme, the flute-and-violin Sonata in G and the Paris Quartet “Concerto.”
These were published scores that bourgeois amateurs could buy and perform for themselves at home on affordable personal instruments – some of the first truly accessible DIY “chamber” music, decoratively tailored to middle class taste.
In between the two Telemans, PBO principal cellist Beiliang Zhu – who had been providing masterfully understated continuo all evening long – finally got to display her own virtuosity in Porpora’s flashy showpiece Cello Sonata in F major.
Whether it was the caffeine or the music, the whole recital left many in the audience too buzzed to head straight home. Seemingly half the EMV crowd poured out of the cathedral and drifted south up Burrard just in time to catch the fireworks spectacle from the bridge.
"It is the ancient law: Man, you must die!" Ecclesiasticus 14:17 Image: Wikicommons
Just a couple of days later, much the same crowd filed back into the cathedral to hear a much churchier concert with Bach more in his element as a sacred composer. In a high point of the Festival, EMV brought over the full 22 members – singers and instrumentalists – of the Swiss ensemble Gli Angeli Genève for a full evening of devotional cantatas, three by Bach and one by Teleman.
These massive works filled the hall right up to its wooden gothic vaulting, drawing all eyes up to the stained glass windows and gilt icons. As EMV artistic director Matthew White warned patrons ahead of the concert, “even if you weren’t a believer beforehand, this music will make you want to be one.”
All the more so if you tracked along with Bach’s meticulous prosody of the hymnal texts, as spelled out in the accompanying program notes. When “Christ lay in Death’s bonds,” we are told, “we should be joyful.” For, through his sacrifice, Jesus has stripped Death of “all his rights and power” so that “nothing remains but Death’s outward form." To underscore the message, the chorus lingers on the syllable "nichts" ('nothing").
The figure of Death, indeed, stalked the whole programme – unsurprisingly, perhaps, considering the provenance of these works so close on the heels of the death-dealing ordeal of Europe/s Thirty Years’ War. But all four cantatas treat Death not as a fearsome terminator; rather as a welcome liberator from the “cavern of tears that is my body.” Even the stark Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu Dir (“Out of the depths I cry, Lord, to You”) concludes with an almost giddy chorale of hope.
Seeing these cantatas in concert, I was struck by how much of the score was supported by the wind section (recorders Bart Coen and Jan Van Hoecke, oboist Emmanuel Laporte and, especially, bassoon Philippe Miqueu). All sustained by chamber organist Francis Jacob and double bass Michael Chanu providing continuo.
Impressive vocal soloists all around, but especially noteworthy – considering the sombre themes – were the more darkling timbres of countertenor Alex Potter singing alto and basso Stephan MacLeod, who conducted the whole ensemble while at the same time performing extended and soulful perorations.
Vancouver audiences can look forward to hearing Gli Angeli vocal soloists performing again, along with the full Pacific Baroque Orchestra, in the Festival’s final concert, Bach’s Trauer Ode, August 10th at UBC’s Chan Centre.