At Bach Ties the Knot, German soprano Dorothee Mields explores the Baroque master's wedding music
Early Music Vancouver program with Pacific Baroque Orchestra includes a “Fictive Wedding Cantata” that the artist painstakingly compiled from the composer’s lesser-known works
Dorothee Mields. Photo by Harald Hoffmann
Early Music Vancouver presents Dorothy Mields & the PBO: Bach Ties the Knot on February 15 at 3 pm at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH WROTE some of the world’s most cherished wedding music—pieces that still mark marital celebrations centuries later. But German soprano Dorothee Mields points out we don’t know many details about the private life that inspired those odes to love—only that weddings would have taken a central role.
“One thing that is known is that there were some really wild, wonderful wedding parties in the family,” says the critically adored, soft-spoken early-music interpreter over Zoom from northwest Germany. “All the Bach family were musicians and composers, and in Bach's youth, there were always wedding gatherings, family gatherings—and then, of course, when such a bunch of composers and musicians come together, a lot of music happens.”
That’s inspired Mields as she’s dug into Bach’s wedding-related music, including his yearning Cantata BWV 202 “Weichet nur”—one of only two of such pieces the composer wrote for a soprano. Known for her deeply expressive performances, Mields will perform it here, with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, at Early Music Vancouver’s Valentine’s weekend show Bach Ties the Knot.
Mields counts herself among those who believe Bach wrote the song for his second wife, Anna Magdalena, who was also a German soprano—or at least she inspired the song whose poetic lyrics tie the budding of spring to wedded bliss. “I think he had Magdalena very much on his mind,” Mields says of the woman who would go on to have 13 of Bach’s children. “The soprano and violin are really intertwined, and sometimes I feel it's like they’re playing hide and seek in a green labyrinth. So the whole idea of budding spring and life springing into life: it's so beautiful in this cantata, especially in the opening.”
Searching for more marital music for her singular crystalline yet luminous voice, Mields has also gathered Bach’s arias and other movements to create a “Fictive Wedding Cantata” for the concert.
“I had this idea where I thought, ‘Okay, let’s put a different wedding cantata together—let's get to know some unknown compositions of Bach,’” relates Mields, who began the intricate reworking of the composer’s music back during pandemic downtime. She would start with the text, looking for interrelated themes, and then moved on to keys. “Sometimes I transposed a recitative to make it fit to the next area. But apart from that, I would never dare meddle with these compositions, because they are so divine all of the time,” she relates.
Still, reworking material was something Bach did all the time, she points out, making it feel a little more natural to do so herself.
“Especially when he started in Leipzig as St. Thomas’s Cantor,” she says of Bach’s posting in 1723, when he would go on to create an astounding collection of cantatas and wrote iconic works like Magnificat, St. John Passion, and St. Matthew Passion. “He was a very, very busy man all of a sudden, writing cantatas every week—every Sunday there was a new one. So sometimes when he was super busy, he just borrowed from his own oeuvre and put together a new piece. Or maybe also because he liked the idea of one composition so very much, he just used it again.”
Preparing for this concert, as she does for all others, involves a lot of intensive study—the work of the mind before she moves to her heart for the performance, as the artist explains it.
“At home, I think, okay, how is this structured and how do I want to phrase it?’ I take out the text and speak just the text and forget about the music for a while—to really get to know how would a really good actor speak this? How would you work with the timing of the text? And then I put it back to the music,” she says of her process. “But then when we start rehearsing and I go on stage, I tried really to get rid of all those things, just because the more you really, really open yourself up and work with your instincts and connect yourself and with all your fellow musicians, the instinct works so much quicker than the brain, really.”
And so Mields will bring heart and soul to the meticulously researched music she sings here. But the fact that it’s Valentine’s weekend barely registers with the artist, whose violinist boyfriend, she reports, will join her at the concert here.
“I think Valentine's is as big here in Germany as it is over there with you guys—there might be some chocolate, some flowers,” the early-music star says, and then reveals with a laugh: “I'm extremely unromantic concerning that! I’m so practical with my boyfriend: he’s not at all into Valentine’s Day. We are very funny unromantic people concerning that. But I put all of that into my music!” 
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