Musical interpretation of Jacob‘s death and burial in Johann Kuhnau‘s Biblical Sonata

Abstract

For his final sonata in the series of “Musikalische Vorstellung einiger biblischer Historien” (Musical Representation of Several Biblical Stories), popularly known as Biblical Sonatas, titled “Jacobs Tod und Begräbniß” (Jacob’s Death and Burial), Johann Kuhnau chose the story that concludes and, in a way, sums up the Book of Genesis (Gen. 49‒50). This episode opens the new chapter in the Old Testament, which describes how Israel has grown and transformed from just one family into the nation of twelve tribes, founded by the sons of Jacob. The new stage in the genesis of the Jewish nation and this particular episode represented in Kuhnau’s sonata are related to the series of Biblical Sonatas in two ways. First, the idea of Jacob’s death and an inevitable end of all bodily existence is represented here metaphorically as the conclusion of a musical work – the entire series of sonatas. Second, the composer employs some recognisable means of musical expression (and so-called “rhetorical figures”), which he had already used in his earlier sonatas, and musical fragments to sum up the method of rhetorical composition applied to the whole series and to create the new narrative at the same time.