A Coffee Cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach!
The “Coffee Cantata” is the nickname of a cantata BWV 211, “Schwegt stille, plaudert nicht ( Kaffee Kantate)”, written by Bach around 1732 as an answer to the coffee craze that was sweeping Leipzig in the 1730s. The name translates into English as “Be quiet, do not chat” (Coffee Cantata).
Lighthearted and short, the piece remains a popular performance choice because for being extremely funny, and most of all about coffee! Bach wrote the Coffee Cantata at Zimmerman’s Coffee House in Leipzig, a fashionable social establishment back then.
It is known that Bach, the pre-eminent Lutheran composer loved food and coffee.
In Germany, coffee was not accepted in the home until the second half of the 18th century. This was due to a mixture of factors: a long standing fondness for local beer, a general distrust of things considered “un-German”, as well as ongoing prohibition and taxes, specifically directed against coffee. So to understand the cantata, one must understand the times in which Johann lived and what he must have felt in a coffee-hating society as a lover of the aromatic bean juice.
Bach wrote about twenty such “secular” cantatas, mostly to be performed as comic pieces or masques. It’s the closest he came to writing comic operettas. The libretto he chose was a satirical poem by Christian Friedrich Henrici, who went by the name “Picander” when writing social satire. The cantata as written is scored for soprano, tenor and bass, accompanied by transverse flute, 2 violins, 1 viola, and continuo, but it has also been transcribed into a standard 4-part choral format .
The story concerns a willful daughter named Lieschen who is addicted to coffee. Her father, Schlendrian, a good German, is perplexed that his dear daughter drinks the hated coffee! He insists she stops; she insists she needs the coffee buzz.
What’s a father to do? Well, in the cantata he makes a threat: no husband until she gives up the java bean! In Bach’s Germany, the father found the husband and arranged a marriage. And no maiden wanted to become an old maid! Thus Lieschen agrees to forego coffee for a husband. But while daddy goes searching, Lieschen makes it clear she will not marry any man that would refuse her coffee.
“Ah, how sweet coffee tastes – lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel” says Liseschen!
