k And who would not be put off and unnerved if your first taste of opera was the bloodcurdling story of two locally famous Hamburg pirates? This was Keiser’s double-decker opera Störtebecker und Jödge Michaels given on consecutive evenings in 1701. Two more of Keiser’s double-deckers, one based on the story of Ulysses, the other on the legend of Orpheus, and Der Sieg der fruchtbaren Pomona, followed in 1702, as well as Mattheson’s interminably dull Der edelmüthige Porsenna. Keiser’s offerings for 1703 included a Roman costume drama centring on the sex-versus-raisons d’état dilemma of the Emperor Claudius in which Italian-texted arias were incorporated for the first time in a Hamburg opera. There was also a biblical drama featuring the ‘wisdom triumphing over life’ of Solomon, in which eight of the arias were by G. C. Schürmann. Taken together, these ‘operas’ were probably typical of the current heterogeneous mixture of styles and languages given as part of a single evening’s theatrical entertainment. It is revealing that Keiser, as head of one of the first commercial opera-theatres to depend primarily on public support to remain solvent, admitted that he felt obliged to open its doors to hillbilly and low-life characters coming on stage – though never, he says defensively, giving in to den mauvais goût des Parterre (Avertissement to his opera La fedeltà coronata (1706)).
l This is connected to what Curtis Price refers to as ‘the dubious evolutionary history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English music drama’ and the questionable ‘assumption that opera in the Italian style is the apex of music-drama and that those hybrids which mix song and speech are necessarily inferior’ (Henry Purcell and the London Stage (1984), pp. 3 57, 3). Gary Tomlinson has done his best to warn against the tendency of musicologists to endorse ‘universalizing views of operatic history’. He, in contrast, perceives its ‘shifting, shimmering metaphysics’ and suggests that ‘The effects of operatic singing constitute one subspecies within a huge family of human experiences brought about by heightened utterance … Though we habitually conceive it as a unitary progress, operatic history might rather be rethought as a set of diverse manifestations, differing at fundamental levels of cultural formation, of the older, deeper and broader impulse to voice an ordering of the world that includes invisible terrains’ (Metaphysical Song (1999), pp. 157, 5, 4, 5).
m This is not to imply that the Italian poet Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) was indifferent to depicting human passion in his opera librettos. He saw them as ‘the necessary winds by which one navigates through the sea of life’, agreeing with Descartes (Les Passions de l’âme) that all the passions are ‘good in themselves’ and that ‘we have nothing to avoid but their evil use or excesses.’
n The German theologian Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel (1696–1759) maintained that the musical sounds ‘that give me pleasure in an opera can also do the same in church, except that it has a different object … if our church music today were a little more theatrical it would be more beneficial than the stilted compositions that are ordinarily used in churches’ (Zufällige Gedancken von der Kirchenmusic (1721); see Bach’s Changing World (2006) pp. 236–8). This was by no means a universally accepted view.
o The epic, whether drawn from mythology or ancient history, was an outlet for the expression of controversial ideas or reflections on contemporary life. Simon Towneley Worsthorne identified it as ‘an early subterfuge; even Tasso’s Aminta [set by Monteverdi for the Parma festivities of 1628] clothed in pastoral guise members of the court of Mantua [just as in Monteverdi’s Il ballo delle ingrate performed there in 1608 with its poignant topical references to the flinty scorn of the court ladies towards their suitors]. The mind was quick to catch an allusion; symbols and images were readily understood and appreciated, a whole world lay readily at hand’ (Venetian Opera in the Seventeenth Century (1954), pp. 151–2).
p Two of the better known instances can be found in his Lamento della ninfa and the final Poppea/Nero duet (if it is indeed by him). See the article on ‘The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament’ by Ellen Rosand (MQ, Vol. 65 (1979), pp. 346–59).
q ‘The opening of this work should be grave, with alterations of tempo in appropriate places as I have indicated in the singers’ and players’ parts, so that the text is matched by as much feeling as possible’ (Rigatti, Messa e salmi (1640)).
r Gracefully proportioned A-B-A structures were to grow lopsided in the 1720s and 1730s as the music of the A section expanded and the first stanza came to be repeated eight times, in contrast to the B section, which was heard only the once.
s The spread of opera-theatres – first within Italy, from Palermo in the south to Milan in the north, in the second half of the seventeenth century, and then right across Europe – was not unlike the chains of pizza houses that opened from St Petersburg to Manchester during the 1980s (thirty years after they had started in America), not always with native Italians as resident dough-masters.
t England in the late seventeenth century was not the fertile ground for opera that many had hoped, mostly because, as one contemporary put it, ‘our English Genius will not Relish that Perpetual singing’ (a correspondent in the Gentleman’s Journal (1691/2) – sometimes attributed to John Dryden).
u The contrast with Italian vernacular oratorio could hardly be greater. Hugely popular all over Italy in the second half of the century, one oratorio was normally performed every Sunday all through the winter season. Dispensing with a narrator and often with biblical words, they display a vapid and sentimental response to the Scriptures, in stark contrast with the imaginative verve and devotional fervour of early-seventeenth-century Italian church music and with the Latin oratorios of Carissimi.
v In this Charpentier clearly avoids the dramatically stultifying effect of Italian da capo arias, since in his treatment ‘the dramatic meaning of the text lies precisely in its singleness of thought, and since that thought is stated in its purest affective form in the opening sentence, the recurrence of the sentence can only intensify the dramatic power of the text’ (H. Wiley Hitchcock, ‘The Latin Oratorios of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’, MQ, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan. 1955), p. 50).
w This comes from Schütz’s preface to his Symphoniae sacrae II (1647), but Monteverdi in fact makes no such claims in the preface to his eighth book of madrigals (1638), though Schütz had stated that he did so. ‘Schütz may have been privy to some earlier version of it which, perhaps out of modesty, his Italian mentor decided eventually not to publish’ (Basil Smallman, Schütz (2000), p. 116).
x Following in the footsteps of Albrecht Dürer, who had been lured at the end of the fifteenth century to develop his draughtsmanship in Italy, German-born musicians from Heinrich Schütz on were drawn to Italy, with Venice and Rome as the twin magnetic poles. It mattered not one jot to musicians of their degree of curiosity that they could be accused of supping with the Devil. The physical risks in travelling across the Alps, particularly once war had broken out in 1618, were immense; but to the intrepid the artistic rewards evidently justified the perils faced. Those that made it to Italy and back besides Schütz (1628–9), included Kaspar Förster (1633–6), Johann Caspar Kerll (before 1656), Christoph Bernhard (1657) and Johann Philipp Krieger (1673–5). One of the most talented, Johann Rosenmüller, having been held on suspicion of homosexuality, escaped from prison, travelling to Venice – which he liked so much he stayed for the next twenty-four years. What these seventeenth-century German composers learnt and assimilated during their time in Italy is still in the early process of re-evaluation, dependent on the fragmentary and scattered works that have survived and then, crucially, tested in live performance. All were formative in propagating new musical cultivars.
y We still need to account for the exceptional effect Schütz’s German-language music seems to have on listeners past or present. Thrasybulos Georgiades analysed the intimate symbiotic relationship between the music and the rhythms of the written or spoken German word – the remarkably close links between the natural accentuation of German words (semantic in origin) and their actual me
aning, which is so much more personal than Latin for example. ‘Here the [musical] stress … is nothing other than the emphasis [or ictus] given to the syllable that carries the meaning … [By this means] it [i.e., the musical stress] conveys the meaning’ (Musik und Sprache (1954), p. 55).
z Eric van Tassel suggests that ‘at a time when sectarian fervour had lost many lives, one may imagine the [Anglican] church tolerating, even encouraging in the choir stalls an emotional directness that would have been impolitic in the pulpit.’ This may partly account for the hectic, self-conscious tone of some of Purcell’s verse anthems. ‘There seems so much to say, so little time or room in which to say it: the hearer is exhorted and seduced and swept along on a rising current of musical events more varied and perhaps more energetic and colourful than in the church music of any other era’ (Michael Burden (ed.), The Purcell Companion (1995), pp. 101, 169, 174).
aa As Imogen Holst wrote ‘there was no need for Purcell to go through Peri’s laborious process of deciding when the recitative needed a new bass to support it. The experimental stage was over.’ She observed that ‘His tunes were not meant to be coupled lovingly to lines that were already brimful of their own verbal music. He needed verses that could be torn in shreds and tossed into the air.’ That is, of course, exactly what he did with Nahum Tate’s doggerel, so we can see that ‘the characters in Dido and Aeneas talked in harmony because it was their native language, with the rise and fall of their voices clearly expressing their feelings … Recitative such as this can slip easily in and out of the arias without destroying the scene.’ No wonder that Gustav Holst, according to his daughter, had his ‘great awakening … on hearing the recitatives in Purcell’s Dido’. Holst the composer once asked how Purcell ‘managed straight away to write the only really musical idiom of the English language we have yet had?’ (Imogen Holst, Tune (1962), pp. 100, 103, 104, 157).
bb Mary Chan has shown that the text was used in the 1650s as Royalist, anti-Puritan propaganda with David associated with the future Charles II, then in exile, and possibly Cromwell as Saul and Charles I as Samuel’s ghost. But then, with an almost Shostakovichlike ambiguity for political allegiance or sympathy, the tables are turned during the 1670s, the anti-Puritan propaganda now directed against the Catholics in general, with Saul standing in one instance for Louis XIV but more usually for James, Duke of York, once he had been outed as a Catholic (Mary Chan, ‘The Witch of Endor and Seventeenth-Century Propaganda’, Musica Disciplina, Vol. 34 (1980), pp. 205–14).
cc Basil Smallman suggests that, in choosing this paraphrase of Samuel so often set to music during the seventeenth century, Purcell may have been aware of the ‘special tradition that evolved through presenting the scene of Saul and the Witch of Endor, perhaps even with stage action and costume’, though it seems doubtful whether Purcell would have required scenery, costumes and staging in Westminster Abbey on this occasion. Smallman traces this back to versions by John Hilton the younger and Robert Ramsay given at Trinity College Cambridge during the 1630s, witnessed by Andrew Marvell and later transferred to London, ‘gaining considerable popularity’ (Smallman, ‘Endor Revisited’, Music & Letters, Vol. 46, No. 2 (1965), pp. 137–45).
dd There are thematic and musical cords that tie this sacred scena to Dido and Aeneas – ‘a troubled monarch tangles with a witch, but discovers that the spirit raised by the witch only speaks the monarch’s doom’ (R. Savage in The Purcell Companion, op. cit., p. 254).
ee The phrase is John Butt’s.
ff Winton Dean summarises this transition and the effect of Dr Gibson (Bishop of London) banning theatrical performances of works based on Holy Writ: ‘It is likely that Handel’s highest and longest dramatic flights … originated as a sort of compensation for the absence of the visual drama, which drove him to concentrate the action within the music itself’ (Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (1959), p. 37).
5
The Mechanics of Faith
Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.
– Bhagavad-Gita1
Pastor Robscheit of Eisenach welcomed us warmly into his church.a Eisenach, he insisted, is the place where ‘Bach meets Luther’. Both Luther and Bach had once stood as boy choristers exactly where we were now standing as honoured guests invited to lead the singing of the Hauptgottesdienst, or main service, on Easter Sunday 2000. From our position in the choir loft high up at the back of the late Gothic Georgenkirche, arranged like a three-decker galleon, we had an unimpeded view of its two most prominent physical symbols: the pulpit in which Martin Luther preached on his return from Worms in 1521 and the baptismal font where Bach was christened on 23 March 1685. (See Plate 1.)
For many people the hallmark of Bach’s music lies in the lucidity of its structure and the mathematical satisfaction of its proportions. These contribute to the fascination it holds for professional composers and performers; but they might also account for its proven attraction to mathematicians and scientists. Nevertheless, that secular and appealing clarity originated in a fundamentally religious outlook. As we have seen, a high proportion of Bach’s music, unlike that of his peers, was addressed to a church congregation, rather than a lay audience. Religion was central not just to his upbringing and his education but to the locus of his employment and to his general outlook on life. For him it went beyond dogma, having a practical as well as a spiritual application, and was underpinned by reason. The mechanics of Bach’s faith – the structured and systematic way he applied his religion to his working practices – is something that anyone searching to understand him either as a man or as a composer needs to address. The dedication of his art to God’s glory was not confined to signing off his church cantatas with the acronym S[oli] D[eo] G[loria]; the motto applied with equal force to his concertos, partitas and instrumental suites. And Eisenach, his birthplace and the site of his first encounter with Martin Luther, the founder of his inherited version of Christianity, is clearly a good place to start.
It was not hard for us to imagine Bach here in the town where he had spent the first nine and a half years of his life, one of the cradles of Lutheranism and outwardly so little changed. Hewn out of the same wooded landscape, both he and Luther had attended the same Latin School and both had had some of their earliest experiences of music in this church. Luther’s presence is most strongly to be felt in a tiny room with a high ceiling in the Wartburg, the medieval castle that towers over the town, skirted by woods where he used to pick wild strawberries as a boy. (See illustration this page.) After his challenge to religious authority and his dramatic appearance before the Diet of Worms in April 1521, this most talked-about man in Europe, so accustomed to seeing himself as the leading actor in God’s own drama, had become an outlaw. He spent the next ten months here hidden away, lonely, troubled and desperately constipated.b Years later he recalled how he had been haunted in his confinement by visions of Satan as a poltergeist snatching walnuts off his desk and flinging them at the ceiling all night long. Once he found a dog in his bed. Convinced that it was the Devil in disguise, he hurled the poor beast out of his window into the night.c
Luther called the Wartburg his Patmos – a reference to the barren island where St John supposedly wrote the Book of Revelation with its stirring evocation of the cosmic battle between Satan (the ‘Beast’) and the Lamb. His initial response to these terrors was to write furious polemical diatribes against his enemies; but soon he was launched on his ground-breaking translation of the New Testament. Using Erasmus’ Greek text as his base, he worked feverishly and in three months he had completed a first draft. He searched for a tone that would be comprehensible to as many people as possible across the different German-speaking regions. In the end he took as his standard the chancery language of Prague and Meissen, in which he was fluent, but changed its style drastically: in place of the stilted prose of lawyers, with its baffling tendency to pile syllable on syllable in clusters of compound nouns, he brought the translation closer to his own oral delivery – v
igorous and colourful, direct and impassioned – and to the thought patterns and colloquial ways of speaking people used in their homes or in the marketplace here in the heart of Thuringia.d
This was the same sturdy German prose with which he clothed the Easter Day hymns we were due to sing – linked to tunes that were at least as old as the Georgenkirche itself – Christ ist erstanden (Christ is risen) and Christ lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in death’s prison) – and then given a further twist by Bach through his stupendous four-part harmonisations. The sense of Easter as the pivotal feast of the liturgical year was inescapable here – from its origins as a pagan spring sacrifice, to the ancient Jewish ritual of Passover and the feast of Unleavened Bread, that Canaanite agricultural festival adopted by the Hebrews after their settlement there – all re-rooted by Luther in this unchanged, sylvan landscape. We were both participants and observers in this predominantly sung celebration, one in which the pastor and congregation responded to each other in fluent dialogue. At one point in the service we were suddenly joined in the gallery by a group of local men who sang a short litany in Thuringian dialect and then left.
It was difficult to gauge the congregation’s response to these sixteenth-century hymns – so plain but evocative and to us extraordinarily moving. We were all singing from the same Eisenachisches Gesangbuch of 1673 that was in use when Bach sang here as a chorister between the ages of four and nine, and whose tunes and illustrations may have combined to forge a link in his mind between the town, the family of musicians into which he was born and the dynasty of musicians who served King David in the Temple (see Chapter 3 and Plates 2a and b). In the reverence of the ceremony one could catch a glimpse of the way Luther, and probably therefore Bach after him, regarded the Eucharist – as a ritual in which the believer, like some character in a play of redemption, is called on to cast aside his doubts, ready to meet the immanent Christ in tangible form. For Luther, the Eucharist was as much physical as spiritual, and baptism was a physical sacrament of death and resurrection (justifying the font’s central position in the church), the means whereby the tension between fear and faith, which permeates Christian life, is resolved.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 19
