A New Year Provided a Chance for Old Inspiration
As the weary, woeful year of 2024 gave way to fresh starts and a clean calendar for 2025, a series of insights and connections raised an old, inspiring message worth restoring for the season. In fact, the imperative “Shout with Joy!” might be both helpful and hopeful, along with the glorious music associated with it.
That music, first performed in 1730, reflected the pious soul of Johann Sebastian Bach in its most exultant and celebratory mood. The German word jauchzet means “rejoice, arise, be jubilant or shout out with joy” and it is invoked in two of the great master’s most beloved compositions.
His beloved cantata, Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen, BWV 51, uses a soaring soprano voice, a solo trumpet and a small orchestra to rouse both musicians and listeners to “Shout out praise for God in all lands!/ All the creatures on heaven and earth/must celebrate his Glory!”
A few years later, Bach used the word “jauchzet” once again, in what became the sublime opening of his monumental Christmas Oratorio, “Jauchzet Frohlocket, auf, Preiset die Tage,” again inspiring humanity to “Rejoice, exult, praise these days/Glorify what the Almighty has done today.”
The Christmas Oratorio has never quite achieved the worldwide, holiday season popularity of Messiah by Handel (who, by the way, was born in the same year as Bach—1685) or, for that matter of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. But by the same token, it’s still an easily available alternative, or at least a supplement, to all the other favorites of late December, including the ubiquitous offerings about Christmas weather and the enchanted mission of Santa.
This year, with the world at war on at least three continents (don’t ignore the slaughter in Sudan!), I wanted to indulge myself in an inspiring recent recording of one of Bach’s seasonal masterpieces, and so turned to a 2005 recording of Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen (Cantata 51) as performed by the superb Bach Collegium Japan and the internationally acclaimed conductor Masaaki Suzuki.
I mention the details here because they are important and, in a real sense, inspiring. People speak of music as an international language, and to see the worldwide prominence of the Bach Collegium Japan, just two generations after Hiroshima, not to mention Pearl Harbor, constitutes a miracle. My late father, and my late father-in-law, both wore the uniform of the United States in battling Japan and Germany (Navy and Army, respectively) and here I am, savoring a masterful Tokyo-based performance of music by one of the greatest Germans who ever lived, featuring a British soprano (Carolyn Sampson) of truly angelic voice. This is globalism in its best sense and a true example of following the injunction to “Shout out praise to God in all lands.”
And to make the idea of cross-cultural collaboration even sweeter and more noteworthy, the recording company that produced the epochal set of Masaaki Suzuki performing all 200+ of Bach’s surviving cantatas is Swedish—the artistically outstanding and technologically expert BIS Records AB.
This is not to say that a few minutes, or even several hours, of glorious music can obscure or overcome all the bloody follies and dangers that persist around the world. But even with the ongoing horrors that plague every nation, and the tensions that characterize relations between them all, it’s worth expressing gratitude at how far we’ve come. In the same year that a handful of heroic centenarians commemorate their survival of the monstrous attack on Pearl Harbor, we count on the Japanese nation (that we occupied and reformed after the war) and the united Germany (that we also occupied and remade in our own image) as two of our most essential allies, economically and strategically.
Nearly three hundred years ago, Bach devoted his genius to eloquently expressing his gratitude for the struggling, incurably fractured, and often benighted world in which he lived, and raised 21 children. His music should make us more ready to praise the creator, acknowledging our far greater ability to cross cultures and join voices in offering the same gratitude. The year 2025 won’t likely provide messianic deliverance or a solution to the manifold challenges we face, but it should provide opportunities, occasionally, to “shout with joy” in praise of possibilities in every land.