J.S. Bach — The Ultimate Aries
Bach's epic walk across Germany determined his destiny
When you are twenty-years-old and bursting with awareness of your own destiny, the chance to learn from the world’s most important role model is irresistible. Such was Johann Sebastian Bach’s compulsion to connect with Dietrich Hansen Buxtehude, then Germany’s leading organist and composer. The ostensible reason for the visit was to hear an ambitious pair of cantatas (now lost) that the Danish-born master composed in honor of the late King of Germany Leopold I, and the crowning of his elder son Joseph I.
Bach’s first church job in Arnstadt provided him barely enough money on which to live. Transportation north to the border near Denmark was a non-starter. Two years into the job, his request for a one-month sabbatical shocked the town council while giving them no room to meaningfully object. Further, Bach offered them a one month return date that in his mind was never binding—despite the important Advent and Christmas services ahead in December. No matter that it was October and Lübeck the Imperial “city of seven towers” was nearly 270 miles away. Undaunted, this ambitious Aries had the fire in his belly and his bones walking for ten days in the deepening winter of 1705. He hiked on Germany’s Old Salt Route used for trade since medieval times.
Bach stayed with the master for nearly four months studying and performing. The walk back to Arnstadt, now burdened by full satchels of handmade copies of Buxtehude’s manuscripts, returned just in time for Ash Wednesday, February 17. Buxtehude’s unique autonomy as a church musician had already become the career model for Aries Georg Philipp Telemann and Pisces George Frideric Handel visiting him in 1703. Bach’s visit and his dedicated productivity as a copyist preserved Buxtehude’s music for posterity. Soon to be twenty-one, Bach now possessed all the skills and historical knowledge needed as a career composer to establish the foundation of Western music—as unlikely as that goal must have occurred to him.
His mentor’s death in 1707 coincided with Bach’s departure from the Arnstadt church he found so limiting. His big personality and unapologetic nature racked up too many offenses to stay. The elders and congregation were not pleased by the “strange sounds” and protracted length of his new music. Jealous of his time, Bach refused to train children entering the boys’ choir. Adding offenses to his failure to apologize for the long absence in 1706, was the organ loft courtship of Maria Barbara, his second cousin and future wife. Bach’s choice of advancement at any cost personified the force of nature that is Aries.
Aries, the infant of the Zodiac, boldly declares, “I AM! Pay attention to me.” Aries individuals are self-confident, often blunt, but the cardinal nature of this fire sign requires engagement with other people. They can be courageous and energetic, but to the point of ruthlessness when badly aspected in the chart. Astrologer Timothy Troy claimed to perceive a “force field” emanating from the foreheads of many Aries natives—he counselled me to beware of butting up with the ram as they are ruled by aggressive Mars.
By the Gregorian calendar, established 1700 in Protestant Germany, Bach was born March 31, 1685. However, the old Julian calendar recorded his birth as March 21 on the cusp of Pisces. The change actually happened in 1582, by dictate of the Catholic church, because inaccuracies in the Julian calendar had caused the spring equinox to drift by an accumulated ten days. The length of days was adjusted, and leap years were established. Most important for the church, the date of Easter is calculated from the spring equinox. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon following the equinox. The Zodiac wheel begins with the Spring Equinox, thus the position of the Sun in Aries is exalted. Each planet is exalted in the sign with which its energy resonates most. Let’s take a moment here to clarify some common and vague conversations about being “born on the cusp.”
Given that a horoscope is calculated from the most precise birth time available, it is extremely rare to be born on the exact minute of this transition—it’s one side or the other. Furthermore, the inner planets—Mercury, Venus, (between Earth and the Sun) and sometimes nearby Mars—are often likely to array in ways near the sun sign that can tip the behavioral balance in favor of one sign or the other. However, the proof of the question is simpler still when observing the native’s evident characteristics. I offer that Bach hardly resembles a Pisces at all and quite plainly personifies Aries despite both his Mercury (in detriment and in fall) and Venus (exalted) occurring in the spiritually cumulative sign of Pisces. In fact, Bach is the ultimate Aries.
Bach is believed to have Aries rising thereby outwardly reinforcing his Aries Sun self. His Moon hovers near innovative Aquarius, a sign associated with intellect despite contentions that the moon is in a very late degree of Pisces. Importantly Bach’s action-oriented Mars is clearly in the fire sign Sagittarius, forecasting the expansive public nature of his work and the grandeur associated with liturgical celebration [e.g., Beethoven and Messiaen, see December]. Bach humbly signed his work “SDG” for Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone.
The mythology of Aries arises from Chrysomallos, the tireless winged ram with golden fleece, who saved Phrixus, son of the goddess Nephele, from a murderous intermarital vendetta. Riding between the wings on the animal’s back, the young Phrixus was carried from Thebes across the known world to Colchis and the safety of King Aeétus. Longing to possess Chrysomallos, the ruler offers Phrixus his daughter in marriage. According to Philip Wilkinson (Myths & Legends, DK, 2019), Phrixus instead sacrifices the winged ram to Ares (Mars), the god of war. The priests of Ares hang its golden fleece from the branches of a sacred tree in a great garden protected by a sleepless dragon. Thus, the backstory is set for Jason, the Argonauts, and their epic journey.
Bach’s ambition took him from Arnstadt to Mühlhausen for one year, then to the court of Duke Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar where he remained as organist and concertmaster until 1717—composing mostly cantatas and organ music. Bach then took a better position as Kapellmeister (music director) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen where he was able to focus on composing instrumental music such as concertos, orchestral suites, and sonatas until 1723. But, his waning years in that court were unsettled. After 14 years of marriage, Maria Barbara suddenly died in 1720; the following year Bach married Anna Magdalena.
Bach’s final job as St. Thomas Church’s Kapellmeister in Leipzig, was distinguished by an amazing stream of cantatas, masses, and oratorios that flowed until his death in 1750. But in reality, he took the job out of desperation. Bach ultimately fathered 20 children, only half of which survived to become adults. His first child was born in 1708, and his last in 1742. He would sire thirteen children with Anna Magdalena.
Leipzig was hardly a city where fashion was set, and Bach’s popularity had long been in decline. The church fathers were not very musically sophisticated, and their preferred candidates for the position refused the low salary offer. At age forty Bach was the city’s third choice to run both of its main churches; their new composer was more tolerated than appreciated. Even so, three new cantatas each month were expected, totaling some 300, of which about 200 survived! Elsewhere Bach’s ingenious counterpoint was falling out of style with a public enamored of brighter, lighter, and more emotionally volatile music.
Carl Philipp Emanuel, or CPE, his second surviving son and fifth child would eventually eclipse Bach as exemplar of the emerging new “sensitive” style. This Pisces boy was ten when his father’s Easter Oratorio first appeared as a birthday cantata composed for a friend in 1725. I contend that this unique work, so unlike the sprawling and popular Christmas Oratorio, or the great and portentous passions, had a formative effect on the budding composer.
The willfully challenging but utterly rewarding Easter Oratorio didn’t receive its Los Angeles premiere until April 16, 2022! In almost any other major city such a recent Bach premiere would likely be an obscure piece recently brought to the light of new scholarship. But this lively 40-minute masterwork has been languishing in plain sight since the LA Phil first performed Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1946, first introducing the master’s choral music to Angelenos almost 200 years after his death.
Bach was so fond of the oratorio, he revised it four times while in Leipzig. In 1727 he took charge of the secular ensemble Collegium musicum founded in 1701 by Telemann based at the large popular coffeehouse Café Zimmerman and employing upwards of sixty musicians. Since 1723, Bach had been drawing on the ensemble’s ample resources for his secular cantatas. Up until his death from a stroke after eye surgery that blinded him, Bach regularly adapted the oratorio’s original 1725 score and individual parts to the skills of available musical soloists—first in 1738, then over a three-year period 1743-46, and lastly in 1749 as his eyesight was failing.
The issue of changing fashion and CPE’s trendsetting talent may shed some light on the oddities of the Easter Oratorio at a time when many other of works were also being revised by his aging father. Bright sonorities, sprung rhythms, emotional contrasts, turbulence, and theatricality were valued by the “sensitive style.” Most of these characteristics can be found in this oratorio.
True to its origins as a cantata, elaborate choruses open and close the work following a scintillating instrumental sinfonia stylistically akin to the 1721 Brandenburg Concertos alive with carefree panache. Each of the vocal soloists is given spare texts and contrasting moods. The story of the empty tomb, the meeting on the roadway, and the resurrection resemble framed vignettes. The emotions are palpable and involving but stylized. Flutes (recorders), oboes, and trumpets—instruments favored by the “sensitive style”—are given prominence and high degrees of difficulty. The singers must bring intelligence and empathy to tap Bach’s elusive emotions in these scenes.
Why is the Easter Oratorio so little performed and how, for all these decades, could it have been completely overlooked in Los Angeles? Perhaps the virtuoso necessities of its vocal and instrumental soloists, chorus, and orchestra, were too daunting or too expensive to rehearse for such a compact work to be undertaken in Los Angeles. And what about companion music to fill out a program?
In Bach’s time many hours of music were performed at Eastertide. The Saint Matthew Passion can take more than four hours with an embedded sermon. The Saint John Passion, roughly half as long, was composed during Bach’s transition from Cöthen to Leipzig. The Easter Oratorio was first revised as a fast-paced companion to the lugubrious latter passion, which is now tainted by the anti-Semitism of its text reflecting the era in Germany.
Unlike the Christmas Oratorio, the work never developed an international performance tradition, yet the dazzling and fiery final chorus signaling the resurrection, excerpted here, should inspire audiences to demand Bach’s pivotal work to be performed more often. This 2022 Los Angeles premiere was performed by the Jacaranda Chamber Ensemble, vocal soloists, and members of the 2025 Grammy-nominated choral ensemble Tonality—under the direction of Jacaranda Music Director Mark Alan Hilt.