“ ‘Ich habe genug,’ Bach’s Cantata No. 82, is commonly rendered in English as ‘I am content,’ ” writes Mark Swed in Wednesday’s (7/25) Los Angeles Times. “But who, in their right mind, is currently content? Who’s not sleeping either too much or too little, with nights spent if not in escape then in angst? … The literal translation is ‘I have enough.’ Bach has something more subversive in mind: His cantata provides a manual for how to die sublimely, mapping the road to paradise…. I tried an experiment. For a couple of days, the cantata was the last music I listened to before going to bed and the first I turned to in the morning. It neither alleviated nighttime apprehension nor proved effective daytime mood enhancer. I was no more content, but the funny thing was that I greatly looked forward to those times of listening anyway…. In BWV 82, Bach radically allows us to all aspire to being angels…. Angels we’re not, yet for 25 minutes we get to feel like we are…. To the universal question of what it means to have enough when we live in a world that dangerously and self-destructively is asking for ever more, Bach is the answer.”
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