Last Sunday (Sep. 25, 2022) was the Bach Collegium Japan’s 151st subscription concert, featuring Cantatas BWV 47, 8, and 130. Maestro Suzuki introduced these as “Fall Cantatas” for the sake of his Japanese audience. Last Spring I drew attention to the parallel between the fleetingness of spring’s flowers and human life in Bach’s pre-Lenten cantatas. Given the overpowering sense of seasonality in Japan’s aesthetic consciousness, it’s not surprising that we see the theme come around again in autumn. As with the falling cherry blossoms, the fluttering down of dead leaves invites us to contemplate our mortality.
Two of the featured cantatas were written for the “Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity” (that’s this Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022). If that label is now incomprehensible to most Westerners (loyal partisans of the Great Tradition aside), how much more is it meaningless in Japan? Nonetheless, though Japan has no native liturgical calendar, the progression of the seasons functions in a similarly symbolic fashion, mirroring the march of the soul through the seasons of life, death, and rebirth.
The first line of BWV 8 puts the question plainly enough: “Dearest God, when will I die?” Just add autumn leaves and the recipe for Japanese poetry is complete. The “Navigate” essay in the BCJ program, by Hiroko Kato, also tagged these pieces as going with “Autumn”:
September is a time when you can really feel “high in the sky.” There are many fine days, so you can enjoy the clear skies and fresh air. Harvest time arrives in October. The trees bear fruit, the fields turn golden, and mushrooms appear in the forest. Mushroom picking is one of the fun things to do on weekends in Germany.
I (along with many other folks from temperate regions) have been repeatedly informed by locals of the uniqueness of Japan’s four seasons. Climate aside, seasons are certainly ubiquitous in Japanese discourse and poetry – to the point of parody. Fall is no exception.
When I was learning Japanese from the series by Assimil, one of the lessons featured a man in his garden composing hackneyed verse:
もう、そろそろ夏がおわりますね。
秋の足音が聞こえるみたいですね。
イワシ雲が浮かんでいるそらや夕焼けを見ると
この世がむなしくなります。
枯葉が落ちるの見ていると悲しくなります。全く「秋の日のビオリンの溜息」のしのようですあな。
夏の終わりの日暮れの太陽の光が、
庭の柿の木の葉に輝いているのをみると、
もう、秋になってしまったのかとおもいます。
人の命なんて、儚いものですね。Summer is already at its end.
It seems we can hear fall’s footsteps approaching.
Seeing the mackerel sky in the gloaming
shows this world/life (この世) is at an end.
Seeing the falling leaves brings sadness (悲し).Indeed, it’s like “the long sobs of the violins of autumn.”
Seeing the glittering leaves of the persimmon tree
in the twilight of the summer sun,
I think to myself, is fall already upon us?
Human life is but a fleeting (儚い) thing.
(Vince Guaraldi plays “Autumn Leaves” (1957), walking through the circle of 5ths)
Paying homage to my curriculum’s French origin, the quote in the middle comes not from the Japanese canon at all, but Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson de l’automne”: “les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne…” The actual words here are Bin Ueda’s (上田敏) translation, from his landmark “Sound of the Waves” (海潮音, 1905), a still-popular anthology of Symbolist poetry.
The long sobs Of violins Of autumn Wound my heart With a monotonous Languor. All breathless And pale, when The hour sounds, I remember The old days And I cry; And I go In the ill wind That carries me Here, there, Like the Dead leaf. (source)
There may be a connection with the violin-boom going on in Japan at the time. But otherwise Ueda’s choice of texts is far from random, nor their popularity. Symbolism as an artistic credo and Japanese aesthetics go well together: not nature, but what nature evokes; not bare ideas, but evocative concatenations of significance. No wonder the Japanese writer and literary critic promoted this French movement to his Occidentalist friends, already hidebound in their Victorian formalism.
However conventional, the contemplation of dead leaves is a quintessentially, stereotypically Japanese thing to do. So much so that my textbook has to tone down the Far East Orientalism with a bit of self-deprecating humor. The above dialogue continues with a couple of women talking:
あら、あなたのご主人はロマンチィックな方ですね。いつもこんな風ですか。
いいえ。酔っ払った時だけです。お酒を飲んでいないときは現実的な人ですよ。そうでなければ、どうやって冷凍食品を売る商売ができますか。
My! Your husband is such a romantic! Is he always like this?
No. Only when he’s drunk. When sober, he’s quite a practical man. How else could he be a frozen-food salesman?
Bach and the Violins of Autumn
This adopted “Symbolism,” merged with a Japanese aesthetic, marries incredibly well with Bach’s music. For what are his church cantatas but fantasia of musical and literary figures — symbols?
Contrary to common opinion, the haiku is not the national poem of Japan, but the waka, the most famous of which are memorized by schoolchildren. The form is ancient, canonized by the eighth-century Manioshu or “Ten Thousand Leaves,” the foundational work of Japanese literature. The central kanji for manioshu (葉) is multivalent, meaning tree leaves, leaves (of paper), and also “word” — not unlike λογοϛ (Logos). So these “leaves,” here in this season, and their falling, have both literary and religious significance.
Collections of waka are usually arranged by season. In them the sights, sounds, and objects of the season become expressions of the poet’s inner life. One Autumn waka found in the Eikyu-hyakushu, for example, reads:
Scarlet leaves
By the midnight storm
Are spread around the grounds:
Oh, keep them in your mind, and
Clear them not this morning!
In consonance with Buddhist practice, this is the outward manifestation of an inward truth. Human lives (leaves) come to an end, they fall, they are forgotten. Here the poet wishes the dead not to be forgotten, swept away.
With this in mind, we can turn back to Bach’s BWV 8, “Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?” The cantata tells not of the passage of a season, but of human life. The first movement is a catalog of mortality, with the characteristic pizzicato strings tick-tocking away. The violin “sobs” of Verlaine have been replaced by plucking violin heartbeats.
Dearest God, when shall I die?
My time marches on unceasing…
(the Sons of Adam) for a short while
are poor and wretched on earth
and then themselves become earth.
Like leaves, once-bright source of a plant’s vitality, that fall and decay into the earth, so does human life return to its material source. The tenor aria continues:
What makes you so alarmed, my spirit,
if my last hour strikes?
My body every day inclines to the earth
and there must become my resting place,
where so many thousands are carried. (trans. Brown)
Those thousands are not only human bodies, but also, as in the beloved waka tradition, the autumn leaves. They are the leaves of the Manioshu spread across the valley, fallen in bright color from their peak to dissolve, like a corpse into the ground. The Japanese image is complete.
These connections are not direct, of course — for such would be too crude and gauche. But they are hinted at, in tone, in general aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps that is one reason Bach is so beloved here: his music (and the words it interprets) have many, many layers of allusion and significance.
Learning to love Bach must be a lot like learning to love Japanese poetry. It’s superficially beautiful to begin with; after you begin to study nothing is as it seems, and sense is lost; then with a deeper understanding an inexhaustible universe of meaning-charged “figures” is revealed. Bach, too, now adds to the pile his own “violins of autumn.”
The conversation between two Japanese women reminds me of the Japanese expression « wet fallen leaves » (nureochiba) used by women to describe their retired husbands who get underfoot at home.