It is often said that Bach didn't do opera. True, perhaps - but his Coffee Cantata "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht" is nothing else than a chamber opera, especially when the dramatic possibilities are brought out as skillfully as in this superb performance by the Netherlands Bach Society. And don't tell me that Bach didn't have humor!
Bach was also apparently a coffee enthusiast - so much so that he wrote a composition about the beverage. The Coffee Cantata was written circa 1735 for a musical ensemble called The Collegium Musicum based in Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig - since 1723, the regular
performance venue for the best amateur music ensemble of the city, of which Bach acted as leader from 1729 on. The whole cantata seems very much to have been written with the local audience in mind. The culture of drinking coffee
spread over Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
first to the noble elite and then to the middle classes. Coffee houses
sprang up everywhere. In Leipzig, there were more than ten.
Coffee is strongly linked with the Netherlands. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company set up its own coffee plantations in Java, as an alternative to importing coffee from Yemen. This meant that the Dutch were the main suppliers of coffee to Europe at the time Bach wrote his cantata.
In Bach’s day, drinking coffee was not without controversy. The effects of the beverage were unknown as yet and the (male) protectors of morality feared that it would make women not only too headstrong, but also induce an erotic mood in them. Sexual innuendo is never far away in this cantata.
The protagonist is a young vivacious woman named Liesgen who loves coffee. Her killjoy father is, of course, dead set against his daughter having any kind of caffeinated fun. So he tries to ban her from the drink. Liesgen bitterly complains:
Father sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day,
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee,
in my anguish I will turn into
a shriveled-up roast goat.
Ah! How sweet coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
milder than muscatel wine.
Coffee, I have to have coffee,
and, if someone wants to pamper me,
ah, then bring me coffee as a gift!
She is prepared to give up parties and fashionable clothing in order to
sustain her coffee-drinking habit, but when her father says she will
never get a husband, she appears to give in. “Ah, a husband!”, she
swoons. But actually, of course, she makes sure that she gets both - daughter and father reconcile when he agrees to have a guaranteed three cups of coffee a day written into her marriage contract.
Do watch this wonderful performance! It was recorded at Radio Kootwijk at De Hoge Veluwe, a national park in the central part of the Netherlands. Performers of the Netherlands Bach Society are:
Shunske Sato, violin and direction;
Lucie Chartin, soprano;
Jan-Willem Schaafsma, tenor;
Mattijs van de Woerd, bass; and
Marc Pantus, theater concept, direction and design.
German libretto at Wikisource.