Mahan Esfahani - Bach: Notebooks for Anna Magdalena

The presence in this collection of keyboard and vocal works of a sacred character has a meaning deeper than the frequently glib description of such music as minor and even imperfect corollaries to what is often imperfectly described as 'personal devotion'. These arias and chorales (nine in total, if one includes the setting of Jesus, meine Zuversicht from the 1722 manuscript) are overwhelmingly concerned with themes of contentment (both spiritual and domestic) and with the inner peace felt by a soul on it's arrival in the presence of a benevolent God. As the unknown author of the text for Gedenke doch, mein Geist, zurücke (track 36) states without any hint of despair: 'Inscribe these words on my heart and breast: / Be mindful that you must die.' Seeing as the attributions for these pieces to J S Bach are fairly airtight, it is not difficult to imagine such pieces as embodying musical and literary messages to one's partner in marriage. Whilst the works in Anna Magdalena's notebook are slight and of seemingly little value compared to the great suites and variations and virtuoso fantasies and fugues, they nonetheless manifest the entire spirit of a civilization whose values we would do well to understand with the same energy with which we master Bach's considerable demands on our technical and expressive abilities. Moreover, each of these works is a precious artefact surviving from a woman of whom so little is known that we lack even a representation of her very physical likeness. To know her, and to know the man who was Johann Sebastian Bach, we could do worse than to try our hands and voices at the music they considered worthy enough to accompany their innermost thoughts and actions and which filled the four corners of their living spaces.