Aria "Warum betrübst du dich"

Description

A sacred song in F minor whose text asks why the soul grieves and bows down to the earth, urging a troubled heart to trust in God. It was entered in the notebook kept for Anna Magdalena Bach in 1725, where songs sung at home are written down as a melody over a bass line. As with other songs there, it is uncertain whether Bach himself was the composer.

It is in F minor and 4/4, about a minute and ten seconds long with 131 notes, small in scale like the other songs in the notebook. The right hand takes the vocal line and the left hand the bass, a thin, nearly two-part texture with no thick chords. In a calm minor-key walk, the melody moves forward note by note as if carrying the words.

It is rated beginner, and with so few notes it can be taken up early in learning to read music. The range runs from F2 to G5, so it fits on a 61-key keyboard. The task is to treat the sparse texture as leaving nowhere to hide: hold the melody's long notes to their full length and join them as if singing. Slow the playback, use the hand colours to see how the two lines combine, and decide where phrases end by following the breaks in the text.

Baroque-era arias marked by singing, lyrical melodic lines — a form used both in vocal music and as themes for keyboard variations.