Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Here was first-hand evidence of a perceptibly close synergy between Luther and Bach, though separated by almost two centuries. The bond between them was established at birth: by geography, by the coincidence of their schooling and membership of the Georgenschule choir and the extracurricular singing for bread.e It was reinforced by the thoroughgoing ways that Luther’s hymns and theology impregnated Bach’s school lessons (as we saw in Chapter 2): they really were the principal means by which he imbibed and assimilated knowledge of the world around him. By the time Bach reached his early twenties Luther’s teaching had become all-pervasive in his musical training, and now formed the very clay from which he modelled his first music for use in church. Three remarkable cantatas, all composed in quick succession during his year in Mühlhausen, provide an early snapshot of his musical intelligence and its mathematical application at work, showing us how he had already begun to deal with the faith he was required to expound and support. Giving close scrutiny to each of them will show us that Bach, by inheriting Luther’s late-medieval concept of the course of life being a daily battle between God and Satan (BWV 4), assented to the basic tenets of Luther’s eschatology (BWV 131): the need to make a good fist of life and to face death courageously, joyously even, with hope and faith (BWV 106). In each of these early works Bach comes up with a fresh and compelling exposition; each one propounds a highly original musical solution to biblical exegesis. Within the mechanics of faith, music is there first and foremost to praise God and reflect the wonders of the universe.

  The specific task of music, as defined by Luther, is to give expression and added eloquence to biblical texts: Die Noten machen den Text lebendig (‘The notes make the words live’).2 As two of God’s most powerful gifts to humanity, words and music must be forged into one invisible and indivisible force, the text appealing primarily to the intellect (but also to the passions), while music is addressed primarily to the passions (but also to the intellect).3f Luther maintained that without music, man is little more than a stone; but, with music, he can drive the Devil away: ‘It has often revived me and relieved me from heavy burdens,’ he admitted. This belief was to give fundamental justification to Bach’s vocation (Amt) and craft as a musician, lending credence to his professional status and comfort to his artistic goals, while his emphasis on a ‘vocal’ delivery of Scripture would later help to provide his raison d’être as a composer of church music.

  Luther is often said to have asked why the Devil should have all the good tunes. To make sure that he didn’t, Luther and his followers appropriated secular melodies that everyone in his congregation knew, redirecting the candid earthiness and bawdiness of folksongs to the service of faith, for ‘the whole purpose of harmony is the glory of God’, he claimed; ‘all other use is but the idle juggling of Satan.’g From this it is clear that Luther saw human emotions as free-floating Affekte (‘affects’) that can be pressed into service – for good or improper use. Not surprisingly he had no truck with co-reformers like Calvin, who banned instrumental music from worship, or Zwingli, an accomplished musician in private life, who, in his insistence on private prayer, would not allow any music at all, not even unaccompanied singing, in church. Evidence that Luther’s ideas were still working well in the Protestant heartlands more than a century and a half later can be found in Bach’s clear familiarity with the chorales, which, as we shall see, were to play a central role in his church cantatas – and in those very hymns, refashioned by Luther, we sang in Eisenach on Easter morning.

  Luther’s magisterial hymn Christ lag in Todesbanden brings the events of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection dramatically to life, depicting both the physical and spiritual ordeal Christ needed to undergo to bring about man’s release from the burden of sin. Christ is evoked simultaneously as the conqueror of death and as the sacrificial Paschal Lamb. The way Luther unfolds this gripping story has something of the tribal saga about it, full of graphic imagery and incident. If, as seems likely, Bach first heard this hymn in this church and in this season, he could have found no clearer formulation of the way in which Luther’s faith sprang from early Christian roots: from the Old Testament portrayal of Christ as the Easter Lamb; and the appropriation by the early church of pagan rites in which the essence and embodiment of life was connected to light (the sun) and food (bread, or the Word). As every farmer and stockbreeder knows, Easter is a critical time of year when the border between life and death is at its most slender, so to Luther’s Thuringian congregation these connections were easily made: ‘[Luther’s] genius seized on the fears of ordinary folk in a world full of evils and terrors, and helped his congregations roar away these terrors in song.’4

  Bach, by choosing this particular hymn as the basis of a celebratory Kirchenstück (BWV 4), was asserting his kinship with Luther. Aged twenty-two, this was his first attempt, in what was probably his second (or third) cantata, at painting narrative in music. It marked a significant expansion in his development – from acknowledged organ virtuoso in his first post, in Arnstadt (1703–7), to composer of figural music of amazing precocity and daring in his second. Most likely composed for his probationary audition for the position of organist at Mühlhausen at Easter 1707, it was in effect his tender for the directorship of the city’s musical life. No mere jeu d’esprit, it is a wonderfully bold, exuberant piece of concerted music-drama. Bach sets all seven of Luther’s verses (per omnes versus) verbatim and without additions; following a line of distinguished seventeenth-century composers including Samuel Scheidt and Johann Schelle, he uses the chorale tune as the basis for all movements, each beginning and ending in the same key of E minor, yet without a trace of monotony. At each step of the narrative Bach shows that he is alert to every nuance, scriptural allusion, symbol and mood in Luther’s hymn.

  Bach drew on the whole reservoir of his learning to date: habits of communication and performance, music he had learnt by heart, the family’s rich archive of motets and Stücken, the music put before him as a chorister in Lüneburg, as well as works that he had studied or copied under the aegis of his various mentors. His approach seems to exemplify the advice given to budding composers by the Bavarian music theorist Mauritius Johann Vogt (1669–1730): ‘to be a poet, not only so that he recognise the metre of the verse, but that his themes also be inventive and, like a painter, place the beautiful or frightful images lifelike before the eyes of the listeners through the music’.5 There were also techniques borrowed from the ancient art of rhetoric to help him on his way. The theorist who did most to make rhetoric an integral part of German musica poetica, with everything directed towards grasping and then sustaining the listener’s attention, was the Lüneburg cantor Joachim Burmeister (1564–1629).6 To the potentially overwhelmed student Burmeister advised: study the text, match it with appropriate musical devices and ‘the text itself will prescribe the rules.’7 A specific and indispensable aid for giving such vivid expression to the idea of the text was the application of hypotyposis, ‘when a person [or a] thing … is depicted through written or oral expression in such a fashion that it is perceived as though the described person was present or the event was personally experienced.’8 While we cannot know whether Bach was familiar with the terminology, this is exactly what he achieves in Christ lag in Todesbanden, as he was later to do in his Passions. Thus he connects with a theological strategy that began long before the Reformation: the process of humanising Christian verbal iconography by vivid narration and dramatic presentation such as in the medieval Mystery Plays.

  Next in importance for textual expression comes pathopoeia, ‘a forme of speech’, according to the seventeenth-century English author and musician Henry Peachum, ‘by which the Orator moveth the minds of his hearers to some vehemency of affection, as of indignation, feare, envy, hatred, hope, gladnesse, mirth, laughter, sadnesse or sorrow’9 in such a way ‘that no one remains untouched by the created affection’.10 Bach shows his ability to incorporate these and other rhetorical and pictorial devices that characterized the ‘modern�
� style of Heinrich Schütz (though dated, of course, by Bach’s day), itself drawn from Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, in which music serves the words (rather than vice versa), and the listener is invited to experience the imagery and emotions generated by words and music welded together. By this token there are both flashes of modernity in Bach’s musical treatment of Christ lag and traces of a distinctly medieval flavour to its ritualized drama.

  This is all very well for the present-day Lutheran listener, but not for those without the familiarity that comes with regular hymn-singing or an understanding of the many musical-rhetorical figures that were the church musician’s stock-in-trade; he or she may feel a bit at sea trying to understand Bach’s terms of reference or the subtle connotations his music carries. By utilising so many rhetorical figures, one might imagine that Bach’s music runs the risk of being remote, formulaic or pedagogically dull.h In fact it is anything but. What we encounter here is a youthful refusal to be tied to a single methodology, either of form or of rhetoric. Then, by making room in his composition for his own startling improvisatory skills as a performer, Bach draws us into the distinctive sound patterns of his world and a mode of musical expression that (among other things) is underpinned by its strong rhythmic outline. In his imaginative response to Luther’s text, Bach makes us aware that music can do much more than merely mirror the words from start to finish: he shows that it can hold our attention and captivate us by metaphors that strike like lightning. As long as we are willing to let go and allow him to describe the world to us as he sees it, we are soon provided with a first point of entry. i

  Luther’s narrative begins with a backward glance at Christ in the shackles of death and will end with his jubilant victory and the feast of the Paschal Lamb.

  Christ lay in the bonds of death,

  Sacrificed for our sins,

  He has risen again

  And brought us life;

  For this we should rejoice …

  So much excitement is generated by the inexorable forward propulsion of Bach’s music that, as listeners, we are caught up in the exuberance – especially at the point where the fantasia goes alla breve. Who else (Beethoven? Mendelssohn? Berlioz? Stravinsky?) would think of rounding off such a section with a fleet-footed canon based on the simplest of tunes – five descending notes, shaped as a syncopated riff?

  That mood of unbridled joy is short-lived, however. Luther takes us back to the pre-redemptive era, reminding us of a time when Death held humanity captive:

  No innocence could be found.

  Thus it was that Death came so soon

  And seized power over us –

  Held us captive in his kingdom,

  Alleluia!

  This is a grim evocation every bit as enthralling as those late-medieval ‘Dance of Death’ friezes mentioned in Chapter 2 or, closer to our own time, the allegorical chess game played between a medieval knight and the personification of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (1957). Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death. Bach uses his falling semitone in two-note fragments – segmented and desolate – as an exchange between soprano and alto in a grief-laden, rocking motion suspended over the basso continuo playing the same two-note interval in diminution but with octave displacement.

  The music is spellbinding. It conjures up humanity in the grip of death, helpless and paralysed, awaiting what Luther called the ‘most serious and most horrible’ penalty of death – God’s judgement against sin. On to this bleak stage Death now makes a stealthy approach, seizing mortals in his bony hands. Twice Bach freezes the music, first on the words den Tod … den Tod, handed back and forth four times between soprano and alto, and then on the word gefangen (‘imprisoned’), where the voices are locked in a simultaneous E/F dissonance – the captive state just prior to the onset of rigor mortis. j The surprising word Halleluja – so dulled by overuse – follows, as it does at the end of every stanza, but always with a different slant. Here its mood is elegiac and unremittingly sad, as though to convey the idea that God must be praised even at the moment of death. After the merest flicker of promise in the last phrase, the music sinks back in resignation.

  In the starkest contrast of mood the unison violins herald the coming of Christ: sin is overthrown and Death’s sting is plucked out. Bach uses the violins symbolically as the flail with which Christ slashes at the enemy to nullify the power of Death. There is something Miltonic about the way he dispatches the rebellious angel to the depths as the continuo line spins down to a bottom E: ‘plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour / Down had been falling …’ Death’s power is snapped in two. The music comes to a complete stop on nichts: ‘naught remained’ – the tenors slowly resume – ‘but Death’s mere form’, Death now a pale shadow of himself. Here Bach etches the four-note outline of the Cross with great deliberation, before directing the violins to resume with their concerto:

  (illustration credit 31)

  By now it has become a festive display of prowess, a victory tattoo heralded by the addition of the tenors’ celebratory Hallelujas. At the hymn’s core is an evocation of the wunderlicher Krieg – that ‘wondrous battle’ waged between the forces of life and death, the old season and the new, the spring corn about to burst through the earth’s wintry crust: ‘It was a marvellous battle when Death and Life struggled.’ The only instrumental support is that provided by the continuo, as groups of onlookers voice their reactions to the bout that will determine their fate. Yet they sing from the vantage of knowing the outcome already – ior it was ‘foretold by the Scriptures … how one death gobbled up the other’, reflecting Lutheran dogma that Christ’s resurrection signals the defeat of death itself.

  For this Hieronymus Bosch-like scene Bach sets three of his four voice parts in hot pursuit of one another, a fugal stretto with entries just a beat apart, while the fourth voice (altos) trumpets out the now-familiar melody. One by one their voices peter out, devoured and silenced: ‘Death has been turned into a joke.’ Back comes the falling semitone that he has used from the very beginning, still the emblem of death, now spat out with derision by the crowd: Ein Spott!k Again there are strong Miltonic overtones – a parallel with Satan’s return to Pandaemonium, boasting to his minions of his success against man,

  … expecting

  Their universal shout and high applause

  To fill his ear, when contrary he hears

  On all sides, from innumerable tongues

  A dismal universal hiss, the sound

  Of public scorn.11

  All four voice parts round off the scene with the Halleluja refrain, each section reflecting on a separate facet of the battle scene: the sopranos with curious, sighing appoggiaturas – a moment of pathos recalling Death’s former power to inflict hurt; the altos more matter of fact (a plain rounding off of the tune); the tenors almost manic in their glee (articulated in jagged staccato quavers); and the basses descending through nearly two octaves before coming to a point of rest. It suggests a stage direction – exeunt – as the commentators file off stage.

  Returning as celebrants in the ritual Easter Mass the basses intone the fifth stanza over a descending chromatic bass line redolent of Purcell’s music for Dido’s ‘Lament’ in its solemnity. At this point a tense seriousness descends on the scene: it feels as though a mystical link has been established between the Paschal Lamb foretold by the prophets and Christ’s sacrificial death. Halting the harmonic movement for two bars, Bach requires each instrumental voice to pause symbolically on a sharp (in German, Kreuz, also the word for ‘cross’), while, once again, he inscribes each of the four points of the Cross: the basses in parallel tenths with the violins, then the continuo and lastly the violins – painting and re-painting the very symbol to which faith clings (‘burned in ardent love’) up to the point of death – like the Emperor Constantine’s battle cry, In
hoc signo vinces (‘In this sign conquer!’). The text then refers to the mysterious way ‘blood marks our door.’ Bach inscribes the new symbol several times (just as the doors of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt were marked): four separate attempts (basso continuo, bass voices, strings, then voices again) to launch the tortuous search for a means of escape, conveyed by means of an angular melisma. At the moment when faith is subjected to its greatest test, Bach forces his basses to plunge down by a diminished twelfth to a low E. Finally, to mirror the challenge Luther throws at the Devil (described as ‘the strangler [who] can no longer harm us’), Bach requires his singersl to sustain a high D at full force for nearly ten beats until the air drains from their lungs. This is music of magnificent defiance.

  This cantata never palls, and, as far as we know, it was the only one of his early cantatas that Bach chose to revive (in Leipzig eighteen years later). Performing it on Easter Sunday 2000 in the Georgenkirche in Eisenach brought a strong sense of its joint authors’ presence and personalities, as well as a fresh awareness of the medieval musical roots of their vision. Their concept of a cosmic battle between the forces of life and death links it not just to Paradise Lost but even to the writings of such different twentieth-century authors such as H. G. Wells, Charles Williams and Philip Pullman.m It shows us how Luther can imbue complex theological concepts with everyday experience, making them spring to life and become instantly more accessible. Then, totally faithful to the spirit and letter of Luther’s epic hymn, we see Bach do the same, and in the process reveal a basic similarity of temperament. The fiery personality that gave Luther the courage to break with Rome and to launch a new vision of Christianity is rekindled in Bach in this work.n We will see it re-surface in his cussed determination to withstand opposition and criticism all through his professional life and in his tenacity in devoting the first four years as Thomascantor in Leipzig (1723–7) to composing year-long cantata cycles and two monumental Passions that chart the bumpy course of doubt and fear, faith and disbelief, in life’s pilgrimage.