Transcription
Hello again. The topic today is the cantata. So, the first thing to say about the cantata is that that title, “cantata,” is very sort of broad and generic. It can apply to many different types of pieces. Essentially, what it means literally is simply a vocal work. The “CA NT” is related to our English word “chant,” so a piece that is chanted, or some may have that title “cantata,” the same way that a piece that is played on an instrument, or sounded, as they they used to say in the old age, or even play the word “sound,” is a sonata. So a sonata: a generic term for an instrumental piece, and cantata: sort of a generic term for a vocal piece. However, usually when people are talking about cantatas, what they mean is the Lutheran Church cantata, and that is the type of piece that we associate most often with J.S. Bach. Lots of composers composed Lutheran Church cantatas, but by far J.S. Bach is the great, greatest master of this genre, and he composed well over 300 of these cantatas.
In order to talk about what a cantata is and have you really understand it, unfortunately, I kind of have to give you some, a lot of background and history on, first of all, the Lutheran Church, and even a little bit—I’m gonna, I’m going to be delving into the Bible for you a little bit—because these cantatas, every cantata, Lutheran Church cantata, was built upon a musical foundation called a chorale. A chorale is just a Lutheran hymn tune, and each of these chorales, in turn, were designed to sort of reinforce the message of a particular scripture reading for a particular Sunday. So the entire church service was very well coordinated: that is, the message of the scripture reading, the message of this from the pastor, and the musical message from the music director.
For example, someone like J.S. Bach, who worked for 27 years as music director at St. Thomas’s Church in the town of Leipzig, he considered his role to be more than just, well, in providing music for this service; to him, his job was akin to that of a preacher. He was just a, you see, a chill preacher, preaching the gospel through music, whereas the pastor was preaching it through his voice. Okay, so, so I’m just kind of warning you in advance: I’m probably gonna, gonna end up talking for a good 20 minutes before we even really get to specifically the musical aspects of a cantata. So let me begin with the Lutheran Church, right.
So the Lutheran Church is the first of these reformed or Protestant churches to form in the mid-Renaissance and to break away from the control of the Catholic Church. And Martin Luther, of course, was himself a Catholic priest and a monk and professor of theology at Wittenberg University, and he became kind of disgusted with the corruption of the Catholic Church. This is in the early 1500s, and he wanted to reform the Catholic Church. And of course, we hopefully are familiar with the famous nailing of the 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, 1517, just a little over 500 years ago—the event which kind of sparked the Reformation. What Luther really wanted to do was to, to open a discussion about what he saw as some of the problems with the church, and these 95 theses were basically just 95 discussion points, and the church door was basically sort of like the community bulletin board. So Luther did not intend, when he started, to break away from the Catholic Church; he just wanted to reform the Church of which he himself was a member and a clergyman. But of course, the church resisted being reformed, and they, they would have killed Luther, I’m sure, if they could have gotten their hands on him. They certainly ordered Luther to recant, to take back what he had said. He refused to do so. Fortunately for Luther, he was backed and by some powerful German princes, and what ended up happening, of course, is that Luther broke away and formed his own Lutheran Church, which was Christian but not Catholic, not under the control of the Pope. And this was the first of several Reformations. Really, the Reformation isn’t really one thing, in a sense, because we have John Calvin around the same time breaking away from the Catholic Church, and from the Calvinist Church, we have Henry the VIII in England breaking away, really for his own personal reasons, in forming the Church of England, of which Henry himself was the head rather than the Pope.
Now, getting back to Luther for a moment, Luther had some very specific ideas about the relationship between human beings and God, and these ideas were very often in conflict with the views of the Catholic Church. So one, one a very important idea to him was that the individual believer can and should have a direct relationship with God, a personal relationship with God. This is an idea that the Catholic Church was very much against; that they kind of laughed at. So, “How can you, mere mortal, have a direct personal relationship with the Almighty author of the universe? No, no, no. You have a relationship with us, the clergy; we have a relationship with God because we are ordained clergy; we are the ones who have studied theology and read the Bible; we are the ones who know Latin, and we will interpret the Bible for you and tell you what it means and tell you what you should do if you want to get into heaven. Do not try to read the Bible for yourself.” This is the position of the Catholic Church: that lay people, that non-clergy, should not be reading the Bible, because you’re just going to misunderstand it, and misunderstanding leads to error, and error leads to sin, and sin leads to hell. Therefore, just do what we tell you, and you’ll be fine. Of course, this all works very much to the advantage of the clergy; it keeps them in their position of power. But Luther wants to eliminate the middleman. In the Lutheran Church, there are no priests; there are ministers, men who have studied the Bible and will help guide you, but ultimately it’s between you and God. And this is why Luther believed, for example, the individual should read the Bible for themselves. This is the whole idea of having a family Bible; it dates directly back to Luther. Right before Luther, you know, you didn’t have a family Bible; it was, it was illegal, actually, to own a Bible in your home if you were not a member of the clergy.
Anyway, part of this direct relationship, Luther very much believed, could involve music. Luther himself was a very gifted musician, and he thought that music could be an effective means to, to devotion of God, for individuals. And this is why he encouraged the congregational singing, singing by the congregation in the Lutheran Church. Again, this is something that was not really done in the Catholic Church; it’s done today, but back in the old days, five hundred years ago, it was not; it was mostly just the nuns or the priests or the monks. Well, even nuns, of course, couldn’t sing unless they were in a convent, because women were supposed to be silent in church. So monks in monasteries and priests in officiating, leading the mass in celebrating the mass, they would sing and chant; the congregation would not. In fact, the congregation was rather passive in the Catholic Church; they couldn’t even understand the words of the, of the service, for the most part, because they were all in Latin. This is another thing that Luther did away with; he thought that that church services should be conducted in a language which the congregation actually understands—that would be German if you are in Germany.
Okay, so one of the things that Luther had to do upon establishing this new church was to come up with a, a repertoire of hymns for people to sing in church, right? Where are we going to come up with a repertoire of hymns, you know, overnight? Well, they came from a variety of sources. In fact, a lot of these hymns, which we call chorales—so a chorale is simply a Lutheran hymn—many of these hymns, that their melodies came from, let’s say, popular songs or folk songs, melodies that already people knew and that were familiar, and all you need to do is switch out the lyrics. You take out, that, for example, if it’s a love song, well, you take out those love song, romantic lyrics, and you put in some kind of praise and worship, devotional lyrics. Some of these chorales were composed by Luther himself. In fact, one of the most famous of the Lutheran chorales, “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” was composed by Luther himself. In any case, very early on in the Lutheran Church, this was a, this was a serious undertaking by Luther and his associates to come up with music for the congregation to sing, and we call those chorales.
Now, what’s interesting about this is that we see kind of a parallel development in the early Lutheran Church as what we’ve already seen in the Catholic Church. And we talked about Catholic sacred music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and we said it all begins with the Gregorian chant. Gregorian chant is very simple; it’s monophonic; it’s easy to sing. But what composers do over time is they take those simple Gregorian chants and they use them as a foundation, as a basis for more elaborate, larger-scale, complex polyphonic compositions, multi-movement compositions like the mass, for example, that would be based ultimately on some pre-existing piece of Gregorian chant. Something very similar happens in the later Lutheran Church. We have these chorales; in the early days of a Lutheran Church, composers in the 16th century, in the 17th century, in the 18th century, take these chorales and use them as the basis for larger, more elaborate, more complex polyphonic, multi-movement compositions which are called cantatas. So a cantata is a fairly large-scale piece; it’s multi-movement; it is written for a choir, small orchestra, an organ, maybe some vocal soloists, right? But every cantata is based upon a very simple chorale tune. Now, the chorale tunes themselves, the words of these hymns, were often directly connected to some particular passage from scripture, from some particular passage in the Bible, and the whole thing was kind of coordinated so that on a particular Sunday there would be an appropriate scripture reading for that Sunday, and therefore there would be a chorale that goes with that particular scripture reading, right? So the music is reinforcing the message, and then the sermon, of course, by the pastor would also reinforce that same message. There was a lot of coordination; it was a very elaborate kind of effort—the Lutheran church service. In fact, in the book, the section of the cantata begins at 1:36 and goes on for quite a few pages, because, as I said, it’s a kind of a complex genre. But what they start is with talking about the, they’re in church service of Bach’s day. It says here in Leipzig, the town where, the North German town where Bach worked for the last 27 years of his life as music director at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. In Bach’s time, the Lutheran Church service on Sunday was the social event of the week. For how many of you is church the social event of the week? Well, it certainly was for Lutherans in Bach’s day. The service lasted for four hours; just the sermon lasted for an hour, and the musical production that went on as part of that service was very elaborate. It was not like today where you have, with, you know, an organist playing some hymns and, you know, everybody sings along, or you have a little rock band, I guess, a lot of modern churches. No, no. The music was very elaborate and complex, involving singers, instrumentalists, and involving this cantata, which was based on the correct chorale for that particular week, right? So this all, it was all very much planned out and kind of theatrical, in a way. The church service was almost sort of a theatrical production, in a sense, and this sort of in keeping with, with the Baroque idea of trying to reach the emotions and drama and theatricality; we find an element of that in the cantata.
Okay, so a cantata is a multi-movement piece, that is a Lutheran Church cantata, usually between four and seven movements. The one that is used as an example in your book, it happens to be cantata number 140, and it’s a seven-movement cantata. Only three of the movements, I believe, are in your listening guide: the first movement, the fourth movement, and the seventh movement. But each of these movements is based upon the same chorale melody, and I’m going to play this chorale melody for you on the piano in just a moment. Um, so this, this cantata number 140 has a title as well; it’s known as “Wachet auf,” which is just German for “Wake up.” And this is not to awake people who might be sleeping in church; it has to do with a particular parable that Jesus told his disciples, I believe in the book of Matthew, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. So I’m going to explain a little bit about this parable, because this parable provides the basis for the text of the chorale, and that, that chorale, in turn, is the basis for the cantata, and the point of that cantata is sort of to dramatize what is being described in that parable, in that text.
Okay, so some of you might be familiar with this parable already. Jesus, of course, spoke in parables very often to his disciples to try and make them understand what was happening, and one of his better-known parables was that of the wise and foolish virgins. Now, the term “virgin” doesn’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing that it means to us today; what it basically means is “bride-to-be.” So when you hear me say “wise and foolish virgins,” you think, “Why, is it foolish brides-to-be, expectant brides?” Now, this, this parable I’m about to talk about doesn’t really make any sense either unless you understand what Jewish wedding rituals were like in the time of Christ. We all have our own different wedding rituals in our own culture, different cultures around the world. Well, 2000 years ago, this is what weddings were like, let’s say, in Judea, in, in modern-day Israel. It was kind of an, it was kind of a romantic, staged elopement, in a sense. Let’s say you had the bride over here, the bride-to-be, and it’s the night before her wedding; she lives with her family in the house that she grew up in, and then you have the groom and his family over here, across town, right? What would happen is, in the middle of the night, the groom and his family and the wedding guests would proceed in a sort of a candlelight procession to the house of the bride, and they would knock on the door. The bride would be awakened in the middle of the night; actually, she was, you know, she’s all ready to go, obviously, and she would emerge from the house, and the entire party would walk back to the groom’s house, and there the wedding celebration would take place, and from that point on, of course, the bride would live in the groom’s house; she was now part of the groom’s family. So this is sort of an elaborate ritual symbolizing the transition of the bride from her old family to her new family; it probably had its roots and some kind of, maybe in elopements or whatnot, but it’s all done in the middle of the night. And Jesus, in telling this parable to his disciples, is trying to make them understand it; so he’s trying to compare the situation that they are in, or that we Christians are in, to the situation that a Jewish bride-to-be finds herself in. So in this parable, it goes something like this: Christ says, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened unto ten, ten virgins; five were wise, five were foolish. And on the night of the wedding, they all went to sleep, expecting the bridegroom to arrive, but five of them were wise because they had oil for their lamps, and five were foolish because they had lamps but no oil.” Remember, they have to walk across town in the middle of the night; you need oil in your lamp; it’s not enough to have a lamp; you gotta have oil in the lamp. So they all go to bed, and at midnight a cry is heard: there’s a knock on the door; the groom has arrived; we have to go. The foolish virgins say to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, because we don’t have any,” and the wise virgins say, “No, no, no; there might not be enough for you and for us. So you go to the place in town where they sell oil; buy some oil for yourselves.” So they go off to buy oil, and the wise virgins follow the groom back to his house. By the time the foolish virgins have gotten their oil and make their way to the groom’s house, the door is shut; they cannot get into the wedding feast. Right? Therefore, Jesus says, “Be ready, for you know neither the day nor the hour when the Son of Man comes,” sort of like that expression that, you know, “coming like a thief in the night,” you don’t know when the Second Coming is going to happen, basically, is what they’re talking about. Remember, they, the early days of the Christian Church, Christians believed the Second Coming was imminent; it was going to happen soon, maybe within our lifetime. So we have to be ready. So this has been a message for a long time in Christian teaching: you don’t know when the Second Coming is; you have to be continuously ready, like those brides-to-be waiting for that knock on the door in the middle of the night. Not enough to have a lamp; gotta have oil in your lamp.
Okay, so this was the message of the scripture reading from that particular Sunday, and that was therefore that you would choose the chorale which has a text which reinforces, which is related to that scripture reading. And if you’re J.S. Bach, you take that particular chorale and you compose a cantata based on that chorale; you rehearse it and you perform it in church on that particular Sunday, and then you start all over again and do the same thing next Sunday. Bach, by the way, had to compose a new cantata basically every week for five years when he first got this job as music director at St. Thomas’s church; he had to compose a new cantata every week for five years. Eventually, he had about, over 300 of them composed, and he started reusing them; I guess he figured he paid his dues by then. So this particular cantata, “Wachet auf,” “Wake up,” or “Awake,” a voice is calling; each of the different movements of the cantata are trying to reinforce this message, and each of the different movements contain embedded within them the chorale, and I’m about to play for you now. The basic chorale melody is here for you on page 137, and if even if you can’t read music, if you have page 137 of the ninth brief edition, you can follow along, I think, because you can at least see where the notes go up and down, and you can see the different phrases. So remember, a phrase is like a musical sentence; they labeled each of the nine phrases in here, right? And by the way, at the end of each phrase, you see this thing that looks like a kind of like an eye; that’s what we call a fermata; it’s basically a marker to tell you when the phrase is ending and then the next phrase begins. Okay, so we have nine phrases; the first three phrases repeat; we hear each of those phrases twice, but with a different set of words the second time through, and then we move on to the other six phrases, much of, most of which are shorter. Now that gives us an A section and a B section; the A section is the first three phrases which repeat with different words, and then the second, the, the B section, we have six phrases which do not repeat. By the way, notice how phrase three, the last phrase of the A section, is echoed exactly in phrase nine, which is the last phrase of the B section; they have the same exact notes but different words. And again, you don’t even need to be able to read music to tell this; just point to where phrase three is and point to phrase nine, and you can see that the notes are all identical, all exactly the same. So the form of this chorale happens to be binary form: we have an A section, then a B section; the A section repeats; the B section does not; but the last phrases of each section have the exact same notes. So there’s sort of some continuity as well as some variety in there. Okay, here are the chorale phrases themselves; I’m just going to play them on the piano so that later when we hear them embedded within the different movements of the cantata, hopefully they will be somewhat familiar and recognizable to you. By the way, I know I’m giving a lot of information in this lecture; it’s just kind of unavoidable. You might want to watch it more than once, along with reading the book, so that it all kind of sinks in. Anyway, here is the chorale which Bach—J.S. Bach did not compose this chorale; it had probably been around since before he was even born, possibly—but he used it as the basis for his much larger, more elaborate, complex cantata. All right, here is phrase one of the chorale. Phrase two. Phrase three. Now we go back and repeat phrase one, but with different words. Phrase two. Phrase three. Moving on to the B section. Phrase four. Phrase five, which has the same notes as phrase four, different words. Phrase six. Phrase seven. Phrase eight. Phrase nine, which is the same as phrase three but with different words, and the chorale ends. Notice that entire chorale took me a minute to play through. The chorale itself: very simple, very short. The cantata is a big, elaborate composition. Again, the chorale is just the basis; the cantata is the larger, more complex. This particular cantata is 25 minutes long, so it’s an awful lot that, that Bach has to create out of very little, right? He’s given this very simple melody to work from and has to create a big, elaborate, multi-movement work for chorus and orchestra and vocal soloists, and he has to do it and rehearse it and perform it all within a week, and he has to do the same thing week after week after week.
Okay, the first movement of this chorale—there’s a listening guide here for you—the first movement is actually the most confusing, in a way, and it’s deliberately confusing because Bach is trying to dramatize this scene, for it’s, what is the scene? Well, it’s the middle of the night, and you’re being woken up because you’re supposed to go across town to your wedding, all right? And there are, there are watchmen on the, on the walls calling out, “It’s midnight; wake up; take up your lamps; it’s time for the wedding,” you know? It’s again, it’s a parable; it’s a, it’s a, it’s a metaphor; it’s not really just about a wedding; it’s about the Second Coming. Imagine the pandemonium, the chaos if the Second Coming were to appear. If you think the whole COVID-19 thing is bad, imagine if Christ came back—the mad scramble that would ensue for toilet paper and, well, maybe not toilet paper, but for oil for your lamps, certainly. So there is sort of this chaotic atmosphere taking place, and it’s actually kind of hard to pick out the chorale melody itself. I’m going to bang it out for you on the piano as we listen, all right? But there’s a lot going on in here; you can follow it over here on page 139. Okay, but the word—it says, “Awake! The voice of Watchmen calls from high on the tower. Awake, you city of Jerusalem! Midnight is this very hour. They call to us with bright voices: ‘Where are you, wise virgins? Tick-tock! The bridegroom comes! Arise! Take up your lamps! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Prepare yourselves for the wedding; you must go forth to meet him.’” Okay, now let’s listen to this and hear how Bach dramatizes this scene. Notice there’s a feeling of expectation; something is in the air; something wonderful but solemn, in a sentence as well. What you’re gonna listen for is that the high voices singing the chorale melody. Here it is; this is phrase one. Phrase two. Phrase three. Now I go back to the beginning. I notice how when I played that chorale, the notes were stretched out; it was the same chorale melody; it’s just the notes were stretched out. We’ve seen that before; remember in organo… Anyway, coming up on phrase one again, but with different, different words this time. And again, listen for the high voices; they’re going to be singing the chorale melody that I’m playing on the piano. Phrase two. Phrase three. Now we’ll go on to the B section, and the B section; now we’re going to hear the other six phrases of the chorale. There’s phrase four. Phrase five, coming up; phrase six; same notes, different… Phrase seven, coming up… Phrase eight.
60. Lost count. Here comes the next phrase. [Music] Spray six. Phrase seven coming up. Here it is. [Music] [Applause] Raise eight. Here it comes. [Music] Phrase nine, the last chorale phrase we got here. [Music] So now we've heard all the phrases, so it's basically just a concluding section to bring us to the end. They got me out throughout this move this feeling of like energy and activity. It's a little confusing, a little bit frenzied at times. [Music] Thinking of what it would be like at the moment that we have heard that the Second Coming is upon us. Okay, next section, next movement of this cantata. We're gonna skip over a few movements actually; we're going to get to the fourth movement. By the way, the different movements of the cantata would be distributed, would be spread out throughout that four-hour-long Lutheran church service. They wouldn't just be performed one at a time, I mean, one after another in a row. So they're spread out in this elaborate kind of theatrical Sunday service. This this movement here is the fourth movement, and now we have a very different mood. Actually, the mood here is, you know, we've been alerted that the bridegroom is here; we've been we've been admonished to take up our lamps and follow him; we've been woken up in the middle of the night by the watchman on the tower, etc. Now is the processional, the midnight processional back to the home of the groom. And this this has a much more restrained, solemn, quiet kind of atmosphere to it, sort of a hushed feeling of expectation. After all, this is taking place in the middle of the night, and also has the feeling of a wedding processional. It's deliberately meant to sound like it's like something you would hear played as we're walking down the aisle, except in this case we're not walking down the aisle; we're walking from the home of the bride to the home of the groom. Of course, it's symbolic; it's really we are going from Earth to heaven; we are following Christ into heaven because the second coming has is coming. We are among the wise virgins; we have chosen wisely; we have oil in our lamps; we were ready to go when Christ arrived; therefore, happy us, we are following him. And that's that's what the words are saying here. Says here these were that you are gonna hear, of course, in German: "Zion, here's the watchman singing for joy; her very heart is singing; she rises quickly and takes her limb; she wakes and rises hastily; from heaven comes her friend, resplendent, sturdy and grace mighty a truth; her light shines bright; her star ascends; now come you're worthy crown, Lord Jesus God's own son; Hosanna; we all followed to the joyful hall and share in the Lord's Supper." Okay, so that's the this is the the scene that Bach is trying to dramatize in this movement. One thing, by the way, I'm going to talk a little bit about the musical form. The movement that you just listened to and this one are in what we call ritornello form. We've already learned about ritornello form in in connection to the concerto, but the concerto is not the only place where you find ritornello form. Remember, ritornello form is just when we have a melody which returns every once in a while, and in between the returns of the ritornello we have some different stuff. In this case, the different stuff that we have in between each appearance of the ritornello are each of the different phrases of the chorale melody. And there's kind of an interesting mix going on because the one thing Bach composed, the ritornello melody that you're about to hear, he did not compose the chorale melody. Remember, he was sort of given that to work from, yet he has to make them the two of them blend together somehow, and it's just it's ingenious how he does it. So we hear ritornello phrase one, Richard L o, phrase two, Richard L o, phrase three, etc. Okay, so this is the fourth movement, the middle movement of the Bach cantata. You can easily imagine, I think, a wedding processional or the dignified, stately pace as we are walking to the groom's house. Now this time the different phrases of the chorale melody are a little bit easier to pick out; the textures thinned out a little bit, and it's going to be the tenors and the choir singing the different phrases. So here's phrase one coming up, sung in a sort of a hushed way. [Music] Phrase two. Phrase three. And then go back to the beginning because we have to repeat that A section. So we're at the very beginning again; we're hearing the richer mellow, and then we're going to hear those three phrases repeated, but with different words, basically the next three lines in your listening guide. [Music] Freeze what. [Music] Phrase two. [Music] Three. [Music] And the Richard hello carries on, and now we're going to be heading into the B section, and we'll hear the other six phrases of the chorale. This is the same exact melody that we heard in the previous movement, but notice how the mood is so different. Hey, here comes phrase four. [Music] And phrase five. Phrase six. Now we have a little bit more ritornello, and then we'll hear the last three phrases, 7, 8 & 9. [Music] There's phrase seven. Phrase eight. Phrase nine. [Music] And the Richard Elam continues to the end. [Music] And I'm gonna pause for a sec, talk about the last movement. So again, we're only playing three out of the seven movements, but the next one that's included in your book is the final movement, the seventh movement, which is basically just the chorale. This time there's there's really nothing added except that Bach has taken that original chorale melody and harmonized it for choir. There's no ritornello; there's nothing else that's added to it. And it's really kind of ingenious what Bach does over the over the seven movements of this cantata, and as he often did in his cantatas, is he allowed the chorale to sort of gradually be revealed. In the first movement, notice it was harder to pick out, and you probably wouldn't have picked it out at all if I wasn't playing it on the piano for you. By the time you get to the fourth movement, it's a little bit clearer; it's it's more obvious the chorale melody. By the time we get to the last movement, it's nothing but chorale. So the chorale kind of gradually emerges. Also keep in mind, of course, that the congregation in Bach's day was so intimately familiar with these chorales. You might be hearing this chorale for the very first time, but for Bach's audience, congregation, people that he was composing for, they had grown up with these chorales, singing them, hearing them in church every Sunday for their entire lives. And so these chorales and very deep attachments to them, and they had very specific attachments to certain passages in Scripture, certain times of the year even. So this is all very very deeply meaningful, embedded in that Lutheran culture. And so even if a chorale tune was was kind of hidden within a larger more complex polyphonic work in Bach's day, the audience, the listener would have recognized it immediately because it was something that that they had just grown up with, and they were very attached to. Okay, but here in this last movement that the chorale is just sort of put out there, harmonized and accompanied by the orchestra. And so follow along on page 142. This is the final movement, the seventh movement of Bach's chorale number 140, Bach cantata number 140. Phrase one. [Music] Three. Back to the beginning for a used one again. [Music] Praise to raise three. [Music] Moving on to the B section. Phrase four. [Music] Raise five. [Music] 3/6. [Music] [Applause] There we are. Okay. The one will probably be the final lecture of the baroque era is going to be about the oratorio. We'll also have a little bit more in that lecture about George Frideric Handel; he's probably the best-known composer of oratorios. So we'll see you then. Take care.