Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  In the generation immediately prior to that of our Class of ’85, a few conspicuously musicianly composers like Alessandro Scarlatti fought against this rigidity and predictability of form and took pains to vary it and invested secco recitative with as much musical interest as possible; but they were fighting a losing battle: the recitative/aria pairing was now merely a prop on which to hang a star-based drama. Public opera had became formulaic, repetitive and, from a musico-dramatic perspective, unrecognisable. Arias henceforth provided moments for characters to step outside the unfolding drama: to reflect or give lyrical expression to a particular mood or ‘affect’, or to inhabit the expanded moment. More and more they became opportunities for vocal exhibitions of grace, charm and virtuosity; but now in sharply defined units (known to musicologists as ‘closed form’), which by their nature were less conducive to subtle gradations of feeling. Gone was the flexible pattern of weaving in and out of arioso and aria and back into recitative, the fine gradations of feeling characteristic of Monteverdi and, later, of Purcell, in which states of mind are explored before our eyes and ears. For composers obliged to concentrate all the musical interest in arias, one way round this problem was to contrive stark juxtapositions of mood: ‘My heart is grieving’ (A) … but ‘I will seek revenge’ (B) (section quicker and in a different key) … and yet (cue for da capo) ‘my heart is [still] grieving’ (return to A) or ‘grieving still more painfully’ (cue for emotionally charged embellishments of the vocal line). A structural balance mirroring various codified ‘affections’ was thus gained at the expense of tracing in music the living growth of emotion within an operatic character.

  A new formal and inventive challenge to the composer began to emerge when the instrumental contribution of the orchestra, once confined during Cavalli’s heyday (1640–60) to introductory or linking ritornelli within strophic arias, was allowed to spread across the entire aria.r Parallel to this was the gradual disappearance in Venetian heroic opera of ensemble numbers, since the main concern became not the way characters interacted, but how they expressed their emotional experience after the event. This absence of a chorus was one key factor in speeding up the process whereby music and drama became uncoupled, as market forces more and more dictated the shape of this increasingly popular form of entertainment – sublime at one moment, vulgar or preposterous the next. The initial pursuit of the ideals of music in Greek drama cherished by the early Florentine pioneers, together with respect for poetic texts and for the Aristotelian unities, was now forgotten in the transition from one-off court events to public opera governed by the rules of a commercial venture ruled by impresarios. As we saw in Chapter 1 (this page), the idea of ‘the work’ as such barely existed. It would be oversimplifying – but not greatly – to imply that what once emerged like some brilliant culinary invention, tested and then perfected in mouth-watering recipes by the master-chef Claudio Monteverdi, degenerated after his death in a matter of generations into a standardised ‘tourist’ menu.s It is salutary to tot up the number of towering seventeenth-century composers, born musical-dramatists to a man, and to weep at the missed opportunities: Monteverdi (three aborted operas), Carissimi (restricted to short biblical oratorios and cantatas), Schütz (perpetually thwarted by the non-payment of fees owing to his musicians), Charpentier (kept under by Lully) and Purcell (prey to a chauvinist Restoration culture, with its aversion to sung speech).t One is left musing on what these men might have achieved if they had been given a free rein (always supposing they had such a conception) to expand the genre and develop it, while staying true to the principles of ‘imitation’.

  But that is only part of the story. The other is that of the mutant forms – those variants of the genre that became the outlets for irrepressible musico-dramatic impulses. While these only rarely achieved widespread recognition or influence at the time and are not part of the mainstream, to dig them out of the archives is one of the most rewarding activities of a twenty-first-century musician. As we shall see, the first thing that strikes one about them is the extraordinary economy of means: the best instances of mid-seventeenth-century music-drama, so different from the opulence and extravagance of the later Baroque and of opera in general, are characterised by their compression and intensity of expression, often calling for very few notes and a precise placement of a dissonance to project a particular ‘conceit’. The majority of these ‘deviants’ have nothing to do with the opera-theatre, either courtly or public. They did not need the frame of a proscenium arch and the width of an orchestral pit to ensure that the action being presented was separate and different from that of ‘real’ ordinary life. Mostly they belonged in churches and chapels (especially in the Catholic south – as the last gasp in the dominance of religious music before it became totally swamped by secular forms), and as a result managed to sidestep the commercial distortions that leading singers brought with them. So-called spiritual ‘madrigals’ and dialogues in recitative style, such as those that Giovanni Francesco Anerio composed for the Oratory of Filippo Neri in Rome, constituted what he called a ‘winter theatre of the Gospels and Holy Scriptures, with the laudi of all the saints’.15 By providing a poetic paraphrase of biblical verses sung in Italian, Anerio’s music reached out to a large congregation, a means of critical exposition similar to the sermon, and punctuating the liturgical calendar in ways that are curiously prophetic of Bach’s Lutheran cantata cycles.

  Another antidote to the secular opera during Carnival was the sequence of five Latin oratorios performed annually in Rome on the five Fridays of Lent – soon to become receptacles for the creative theatrical imaginings of Giacomo Carissimi. Only two years after Venice had opened the first of its celebrated public theatres for the performance of opera, an itinerant French musician reported from Rome that in the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso he heard two musical settings of biblical stories in which ‘the voices would sing a story from the Old Testament in the form of a spiritual play, such as that of Susanna, Judith and Holofernes, or David and Goliath. Each singer represented a character of the story and expressed the force of the words … the singers imitated perfectly the different characters whom the Evangelist mentioned. I could not praise enough that recitative music; one must have heard it on the spot to judge well its merits.’16 The enchanting historiae Carissimi later composed on themes suitable for Lenten meditation, such as Jonah and the Whale, Jephtha and his Daughter, and the parable of Dives and Lazarus, were confined to non-liturgical performance before an exclusive club of Roman aristocrats and foreign dignitaries in San Marcello or at the German College where Carissimi was maestro di musica. In essence these were miniature sacred operas, with solo and choral music of picaresque charm, vivid drama (the storm scenes in Jonas and the battle scenes in Judicium extremum), or wringing pathos (the final chorus of Jephte).u

  The only composer to persist in writing a quantity of Latin oratorios in the style of Carissimi was his French pupil, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, equally committed to using musical rhetoric and dramatic means to arouse religious belief in the listener. Charpentier’s thirty-six surviving works, called variously dialogi, cantica and histoires sacrées (never oratorios), were composed not for Oratory meetings but for use in the main Jesuit church in Paris, known as l’église de l’opéra. Such success as they enjoyed in France in the second half of the seventeenth century owed more to a temporary enthusiasm for music and the arts in general and to all things Italian in particular than to any lasting response to the intrinsic beauty of Charpentier’s music. His lustrous vocal writing is typical of the French Baroque in its meshing of recitative (more varied in pitch than that of Carissimi, and features the use of wide intervals and rhythmic patterns), expressive ariosi and (more rarely) airs constructed either out of simple dance measures or as rondeaux – in which the main ‘affect’ is clearly defined, then elaborated upon in episodes before returning to clinch the message or mood.v

  But what lifts Charpentier’s histoires sacrées above the work of all his contemporaries with t
he exception of Purcell (see below) is the prominent and dramatic role he gives to the chorus. As in the Passions of Bach that lie a generation ahead, at one moment he requires his chorus to function as the crowd and to intervene directly in the action, and at another to stand outside it: either to provide a release of tension or to point the moral. Also like Bach to come, Charpentier is totally at home in writing free, florid counterpoint for his chorus often in as many as eight parts and with concerto-like subdivisions between soli and tutti, and then in building up overlapping layers of sound with rich dissonant harmonies. A telling instance of this from Extremum Dei judicium points directly to Mozart (the finale of Act I of his La clemenza di Tito, where the horrified crowd watches as Rome’s Capitol goes up in flames) and even to Berlioz. This occurs just before the Chorus of the Damned sings the despairing line ‘It would have been better had we never been born!’ There is an ironic similarity to the phrase ‘It would have been better to have left nothing at all’, the scathing Italophobic criticism of Charpentier’s music ‘which the public and time have declared pitiable’.17 Sadly, it confirms that the diversity of invention which Charpentier himself considered to be ‘the highest goal of music’ and the creative imagination he expended on bringing Old Testament figures like Joshua, Esther, Judith, Saul and Jonathan to life, failed to reach out beyond the closeted preserve of his patroness, the Duchesse de Guise, and her guests. Perhaps he drew a wry satisfaction in presenting to the assembled law lords of the French Parlement his Judicium Salamonis in 1702. Its subject matter – Solomon’s ruling in the quarrel between two harlots each claiming to be the mother of a single living child – was ‘singularly, almost mischievously, appropriate’, given as it was before an institution shorn of any political clout and confined to purely judicial affairs.18

  Despite Germany having been reduced to a battleground for a third of a century, its lasting fascination for all things Italian provided more fertile soil for the grafting on of these shoots of music-drama than France or anywhere else in Europe. As we saw earlier, Heinrich Schütz, having twice spent time in Italy, was by far the best placed among German musicians to bring this about, even if he had no opportunity at the Dresden Court to stage operas. On his second trip to Venice in 1628–9, Schütz sought out Monteverdi so that he might experience at first hand how the expressive vocabulary of music had been expanded to the point at which ‘music had reached its final perfection.’w He immersed himself, he told the Saxon Elector, ‘in a singular manner of composition, namely how a comedy of all kinds of voices can be translated into declamatory style and brought to the stage and enacted in song’. The important thing here is the huge development that had come about since Schütz’s first visit fifteen years earlier: due to Monteverdi’s impact ‘the style of musical composition has somewhat changed … and the old laws have been to some extent abandoned in the attempt to charm the ears of today with new titillations.’19 A chance to escape for a while from the demoralising war-torn atmosphere of Dresden came four years later, when he was hired to supervise music for the marriage of Crown Prince Christian of Denmark to the Elector’s daughter in Copenhagen – an opportunity to put into practice the new theatrical style he had learnt in Italy, techniques that ‘to the best of my knowledge are still completely unknown in Germany’.x

  Schütz, in common with Monteverdi, Charpentier and Purcell, was quick to scent any musical opportunities for dramatic treatment of scenes from the Scriptures. He himself described the process of musical composition as the ‘art of translating the text into music’ – and this may be one key to our unlocking Bach’s purpose in following the same process and his future treatment of it. Schütz’s early Psalms of David (1618) are full of arresting examples of his imaginative response to the rhythmic sounds and accentuations of the German vernacular, similar to what Monteverdi was doing at around the same time.y Time after time he found music overwhelming in the pathos of its rich harmonic vocabulary, and still more in the force of its rhetoric, the intensity of its syllabic reiteration and rhythmic potency. There is little more poignant in all seventeenth-century music than Schütz’s setting of the verse ich bin so müde von Seufzen (‘I am weary with my groaning’) from Psalm 6 (Ach Herr, straf mich nicht), expressing the stiff and painful movement of someone in the throes of grief; or the heartbreak he finds in the repeated bricht mir mein Herz (from Ist nicht Ephraim), from which he extracts the maximum feeling by the smallest figural means. But if I had to choose a single instance of Schütz’s flair for the unexpected, it would be the extended use of unmeasured choral recitation (falso bordone) in his setting of Psalm 84, where at a given signal it is as though the entire congregation sinks to its knees to whisper this most solemn prayer: Herr, Gott Zebaoth, höre mein Gebet, vernimm es, Gott Jakobs, Sela (‘O Lord, God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O God of Jacob. Selah’). Although this belongs to a psalm-setting and is in no sense an opera, it anticipates by almost 200 years the mood of collective remorse and the suppressed, muttered homophony of the Prisoners’ Chorus in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.

  But it is not so much the particular felicity of word-setting, however inspired, that is so original in these works: it is the ability to turn sacred texts into convincing mini-dramas. We do not find it in Schütz’s proto-cantatas, nor in the austere late Passions, nor even in the haunting Auferstehungshistorie (Resurrection History) (1623). The biblical texts that inspired him were the same ones that stimulated Carissimi (and perhaps still more Charpentier) as well as painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt – the grief of David over the death of his son Absalom, the encounter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the garden, the conversion of St Paul. These miniatures survive in the form of Schütz’s biblical scenas and dialogues, giving us a precious glimpse not just of his exceptional theatrical flair but also of the irrepressible vitality of mutant opera, which jumped formal tracks.

  Direct speech is all that concerns Schütz when treating the subject of St Paul’s conversion, Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich (SWV 415). Implied, however, in this quite stupendous work – a ‘sacred symphony’ lasting less than five minutes – is an imaginary mise en scène: of Paul on the road to Damascus, ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord … Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ It was a masterstroke by Schütz to confine his setting to the sixteen words of the invisible Jesus that ring in Paul’s ears. He marshals his ensemble of six soloists (or favoriti), two obbligato violins, two four-part choirs with optional instrumental reinforcement not just to depict the scene with pictorial effects, nor to fill in the textual gaps by means of apt rhetorical figures, but to create a compelling psychodrama compressed into eighty bars of music. The result is an astonishing portrayal, every bit as striking in its way as Caravaggio’s altar painting of the same subject in Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo. But where Caravaggio captures the bolt-out-of-the-blue moment – the blinding light from heaven which fells Saul like a poleaxe – and savours the physical threat to him from the raised foreleg of his colossal horse, he gives nothing away about Saul’s state of mind (in fact Saul has his back to the viewer and his eyes are closed). Schütz’s main concern, by contrast, is to probe the psychological turmoil caused by the apparition and the personal transformation from Saul into Paul.

  True to past practice when setting Christ’s words, Schütz employs his voices in pairs. They emerge from mysterious depths as a barely audible mutter in a four-fold repetition of Saul’s name, separated by rests, before transferring to the next terraced pair, each climbing through the space of an octave before evaporating in a wordless violin extension (or is it a symbol of the divine incandescence which blinds Saul?). What began as a quiet reproach, the voice of conscience, now grows into an accusation, the monosyllable punched out and tossed between the two halves of the double choir – to encircle and disorient the now-enfeebled Saul before the Was verfolgst du mich is
sped up in dizzying contracted rhythmic patterns and terraced echoes. Schütz’s purpose is to make sure that the listener gets caught up in the process and becomes equally disoriented. In performance (especially in a church with a long reverberation and with the musical forces deployed spatially) it can amount to an aural bombardment with a disturbing resemblance to the amplified noises of the torture chamber directed at the target from all sides, in all pitches and volumes.

  Playing on the listener’s expectations, Schütz sets up a regular-seeming alternation of the Saul appellations and the two halves of the main Spruch, only to dash them by bringing back his big guns before the phrase has quite finished.20 The torsional pressure – on Saul and the listener – now begins to increase as one of the tenors detaches himself from the rest (still chanting Was verfolgst du mich) and starts bawling out Saul’s name in long emphatic notes – three times and at rising pitches, hoisting the whole ensemble upwards. From this climax, with all fourteen voices baying at full volume, the music gradually subsides to a whisper, leaving the protagonist and the listener all at sea, having witnessed what seems like the authentic voice of God. What Schütz did here made it possible for future composers to make a single word stand out with sudden monumental significance, so that a hundred years later Bach could break in on Pilate’s questioning with a savage shout of ‘Barrabas!’ and a hundred years after that Verdi ‘could disturb a tense pool of silence in his Requiem by dropping into it his muttered “Mors … mors … mors” ’.21 Neither of these works can truthfully be claimed as an ‘opera’.