“Some of y’all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows.”

Clearly, we had strayed from our first principles. We meant to convey compassionate strength, an anti-hero's "anything goes" ethos ultimately driven by a heart of gold, a misunderstood force for good.

And we realized who we were... no, who we HAD been all along.

Oscar.

Then they got hungry.

At this point, it was unclear whether we were being ironic or honest that we're bad at military. Rather than resign after a first failure, the new PR Team decided to sell-out and meet the hardcore competition on its own terms.

In practice, this was not the bravado it seemed on paper.

We kept losing invasions, which our strategy consultants attributed to poor optics. We fired the entire PR team and brought in new management.

The idea seemed solid, they said, but perhaps it wasn't the right angle. We mixed it up.

This seemed too juvenile, so we went for a grown-up version of the concept.

This seemed insufficiently aggressive, so we iterated on the concept.

Our first bid to strike fear into the hearts of our invaders.

“You will be visited by three spirits”

The three spirits:

The final hour is not an interloping “dark shadow,” but a guest whom the speaker calls. The German captures the Lutheran framework while it also reaches beyond it.

These words circulate in the opening measures, so “dark hovering” VS “warm beckoning” create very different aesthetic outcomes.

This also captures what I admire about Bach’s spiritual expression. His tone-painting restores the spiritual heart preserved within church doctrine to immediate human experience. Gardiner’s “Music in the Castle of Heaven” has a great passage on how this shows up in this cantata.

The soprano aria has an oboe line that feels ruminative in a way that fits the libretto’s reflections on mortality. You get the sense of a woman who understands her own natural death is autumnal — a late inevitability that moves naturally toward its conclusion.

The first chorus manipulates your sense of the passage of time. It staggers several vocal lines — including two (!) sopranos — so it feels quite fast & swirling. Yet tapping out the rhythm from the start & following the bassline reveals a stable, regular foundation. A lot of anchored movement.

The music was written for performance in the Weimar Himmelsburg, the court chapel in the Weimar city castle. The church itself has since burned down, but you can get a sense of it from paintings made before its destruction. The organ’s on the top floor with a loft for an invisible choir.

Interestingly, touching the cover irritates my fingers same as some 19th c. books printed when bookmakers were experimenting with materials. Not as bad as my late 1800s copy of Dante that swells my hands & is untouchable; it lives in a plastic bag.

This copy shows signs of its age, and it was probably stored too long in a humid space. Some mildewing on its cover, rust from the binding staples. Hard lines in the dirt on the cover suggest this guy was under a stack for quite some time.

Interior is crisp and clean. The covers did their work.

A new Bach cantata arrived — BWV 31, “Der Himmel lacht, die Erde jubilieret.”

Another older Breitkopf & Härtel edition, this one perhaps quite old. The printed date is 1931, so it could be 7 years shy of its centennial.

Excellent packaging for this old fellow from a care-minded bookseller.

The second song, a tenor aria, captures a lot of what’s strong in this one — flutes & strings with a rhythmic skip that feels light. Gardiner’s take on it, as always, feels nuanced and clear.

youtu.be/4sP5LEqRsFI?...

New cantata arrived — “Erhöhtes Fleisch und Blut,” BWV 173.

An older Breitkopf & Härtel edition, no doubt storied. Publication details are scant, but I have another B&H edition in the same style marked “Printed in GDR.” Assuming they’re part of the same run, this puts the print date before ‘89.