Anti-Melancholicus is the title of a book by August Pfeiffer that Bach jotted down, to remember it, on the title page of Notebook for Anna Magdalena.
For Luther, melancholy was food for the devil. The echo of this thought in the construction itself of these three Cantatas is enlightening.
As perceived by Bach, music was not the vector of aesthetic pleasure, but a spiritual delectation. It springs more from a conception of music whose oldest sources are to be discovered in the cultural and magical usage of music (its capacity to transform), as imagined by the Pythagoreans who gave it the function of leading the soul and inculcating it with an ethos, a way of being.
May this Anti-Melancholicus, to borrow an image from Edgar Morin, be like an island upon which to seek fresh provisions in this ocean of uncertainty.
Ensemble Alia Mens
