On Bach's Farm

Bach’s Germany was an agrarian society. Just beyond Leipzig’s city walls, farmers worked the land to grow crops that sustained its citizens. Some of Bach’s music explicitly engages with farming. Its rustic oomph and repetitive motifs call to mind the manual toil of digging. John Eliot Gardiner even described the texture of one Bach cantata as “warm topsoil, fertile and well irrigated”. Yet devotional writings of Bach’s time make it clear that farming was something not just done out on the fields. Instead all Lutherans were to be farmers of sorts: they were to plough the “soil” of their hearts so to receive the Word of God and bring it to fruition.

The notion that scripture was a type of seed pervaded eighteenth-century thought, and Bach was intimate with this kind of corporeal agricultural. In this episode, violinist and member of Chineke!, Mark Seow explores how the cultivation of Lutheran hearts as if they were farmland urge us to rehear much-loved moments of Bach, including movements from his Christmas Oratorio and the St Matthew Passion.