BWV 29

Vespers, as it comes to us from the Divine Office, is not so much an isolated service as a link in an endless chain. Imagine a great rope of prayer stretching across centuries, each knot tied to the one before, each one leading on to the next. In such a vision, no single evening stands out—it is the constancy itself that matters.

Our own custom of Bach Vespers is different. We do not meet every day; we fall silent in summer; we return, fresh, each autumn. Tonight, therefore carries the character of a beginning. We feel that slight thrill of return—the lamps lit again, the music awakened, the prayers rising once more.

To greet this new season, we take up a cantata unlike the rest. Bach did not compose BWV 29 for Christmas or Easter, but for the swearing-in of Leipzig’s Town Council. And yet, in his hands, even a civic ceremony is transfigured. What he gave them was not a mere flourish of trumpets and timpani (though there are plenty of those!), but a work of praise, of gratitude, of blessing. One can hardly imagine a more fitting sound for our own beginning tonight.

Consider the three notes that resound in this music: celebration, humility, blessing. The first is obvious enough—there is grandeur here, the kind of music that makes one sit up straighter and breathe more deeply. But celebration on its own easily becomes vanity, a peacock display. It needs humility: the acknowledgment that what is good and beautiful is never of our making alone. And humility, too, would falter if it did not lead to blessing—a request that what we now enjoy might be granted again, and even enlarged, in the time to come. These three belong together, like harmony in three parts. Remove one, and the song collapses.

So, we celebrate this evening—not only Bach’s notes on the page, but the fact that they are made alive in this place, by these voices and instruments, before your listening ears. We confess our humility as well, for no one of us could accomplish such a thing. It is the joined labor of many, and something more: the breath of the divine that animates mere sound into music. And we receive blessing—the sense that in gathering, singing, and hearing, we are touched by something larger than ourselves.

If you think of it this way, you see that tonight is not just a beginning. Despite the months that have passed since our last gathering, this Vespers remains another link in the chain of human expression and divine presence. And if for a moment we glimpse that larger pattern, then we have more than a performance, and more than a prayer: we have a hint of what it means to be truly human, and to join our small voices to the greater song.