We see, then, that the impact of the reformer Luther on the impressionable young Bach was immense: it shaped his view of the world, bolstered his sense of vocation as a craftsman-musician and tied that vocation to the service of the church – far more profoundly than was the case with his German peers, Telemann, Mattheson and Handel. For, although they, too, had strong Lutheran roots that shaped their music-making, religion for them was tempered early on by wider exposure to the sophisticated world of opera, as we saw in the previous chapter. With Bach, on the other hand, you feel it was more a case of natural necessity. The Italian philosopher Vico could be speaking for Bach in his belief that ‘man’s nature and potentialities, and the laws which govern him, had been bestowed on him by his Creator to enable him to fulfil goals chosen for, and not by, him.’12 His particular goal at this stage of life he would very shortly define as a ‘well-regulated church music to the Glory of God’.13 (See illustration this page.)
Bach’s achievement in Christ lag is to draw the listener, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, into this drama of faith – by the techniques of the apprentice rhetorician and the compelling skill of his precocious artistry, but most of all by the basic honesty of his approach. Here, too, he set down a marker for his future accommodation between words and music, showing how, with a minimum of critical reappraisal, music can be used to interpret text in a way that is not just theologically compliant with Luther but profoundly empathetic towards him – as evidenced in Bach’s shared love of paradox and urgency of utterance, and in his presentation of a dichotomy in human nature between the spiritual and fleshly. o
It is instructive to set this work beside one that Handel wrote at around the same age when he was in Rome – his vivid rendition of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus – overwhelming proof that he, too, was a dramatist in the making. Where Bach is yoked to Luther, Handel, decidedly more of a man of the world even at this stage, shows us why he was so drawn to Italy, responding, like Dürer and Schütz before him, and Goethe later on, to her landscape, her art in all its vitality and vivid colours, and of course her music. Where we saw Bach seizing on the physicality of the crucial contest between life and death in ways that anticipate some of the crowd choruses in his two great Passions, Handel re-lives for us the wrath of the Old Testament God, giving drastic pictorial expression to the psalm text (‘He shall … smite in sunder the heads’) by pounding staccato repetitions of a single word – con-qua-sa-a-a-a-bit – in all voices and instruments. What we might respond to as ‘dramatic’ in both these compositions has very little to do with the theatre. The drama is all in the mind – conjured up experimentally by musical techniques both new and old, which in Bach’s case vivify biblical incident, and in Handel’s demonstrate the exercise of raw power bubbling just below the surface of the psalm text. Both works give us a foretaste of how these young Saxons would go on to play such a profound and innovative role in shaping the development of mutant opera, as outlined in Chapter 4. And even at this stage there are pointers to the divergent future preoccupations of these two giants: love, fury, loyalty and power (Handel); life, death, God and eternity (Bach).
A month after Easter 1707, the parochial council of the Blasiuskirche in Mühlhausen met to appoint their new organist. The burgomaster, Dr Conrad Meckbach, asked ‘whether consideration should not first be given to the man Pach [sic] from Arnstadt, who had recently done his trial playing at Easter’. Since no other name was put forward, the town scribe, J. H. Bellstedt, was instructed to communicate with the candidate. Bach replied that he would require a salary of 85 florins – the same as ‘he received in Arnstadt’ – slightly rounded up. Although this came to 20 florins more than his predecessor had received, Bach stipulated the same payments in kind: 54 bushels of grain, two cords of wood (one of beech and one other) and six times threescore faggots – all delivered to his door.14 He further requested the use of a wagon for all the chattels he had accumulated in his three years in Arnstadt – musical instruments, scores, music and books as well as clothes and furniture. The Parish Council did not demur. Bach asked for the agreed terms to be put in writing. These he received the next day (15 June), and the agreement was sealed with a handshake.
Two weeks earlier, a colossal fire had swept through the lower town, destroying 360 dwellings; the church, too, had nearly gone up in flames. Three of the council’s deputies, still too shaken by the calamity to focus their minds on matters such as music,15 could find neither pen nor ink to sign Bach’s appointment. Once they had righted themselves, the burgomasters recognised the need for a commemorative service of penance, and it’s more than likely that they commissioned their new organist to compose a cantata for the occasion. This may have been BWV 131, Aus der Tiefe (Out of the deep) – a work we know from an autograph inscription in the original score to have been requested not by Superintendent Frohne, Bach’s immediate superior at the Blasiuskirche, but ‘at the desire of pastor Eilmar’, archdeacon at the Marienkirche.16 Bach chose to set the complete text of Psalm 130, a prayer for forgiveness of sins, in Luther’s translation.p
This is the second of three early cantatas (BWV 4, 131 and 106) we explore in this chapter that display three successive, linked approaches to the mechanics of faith and how they operated within Bach’s musically active mind during his early twenties. On this occasion there was no simple structural device in BWV 131 for Bach to fall back on, such as the omnipresent chorale melody that unifies all seven stanzas of Christ lag and so providing a bedrock for his musical realisation. Here the psalm text demanded a more complex meshing of words and music, pointing to sharper contrasts of style, form and fluidity of expression. Bach’s solution was to spread the eight verses symmetrically over five interlinked movements and to leaven the psalm with two pieces of ‘troped’ commentary. These insertions, two stanzas of a chorale by Bartholomäus Ringwaldt (1588), Herr Jesu Christ, du höchstes Gut, closely mirror instructions for confession and repentance by a theologian, Johann Gottfried Olearius (1611–84), author of the five-volume Biblische Erklärung (1678–81), a copy of which Bach was later to own:17 that man should repeat daily these five words –
i. God …,
ii. show …
iii. me …,
iv. a sinner …,
v. mercy.
These five words open one section of Luther’s catechism, whose whole is almost mirrored in Bach’s five movements. Striving for an optimal characterisation of the text led Bach to a new music of powerful, if perhaps unequal, eloquence. He establishes three choral movements as the pillars of his structure. What stands out in the first movement, constructed on the model of an instrumental prelude and fugue, are the liberties Bach takes to permit rhetorical expressivity: the subtle way he places motivic links in the adagio prelude for oboe and strings that anticipate the shapes of the words that follow, how the voices then respond fugally in stretto with the instruments, how the whole flows seamlessly into the second verse, a choral fugue marked vivace, and how this concludes with a triple echo (f, p, pp) incidentally very similar to Handel’s practice in the sixth movement of Dixit Dominus, and in turn sets up motivic anticipations of the bass arioso that follows without a break to form one overarching unit.
Bach picks up and develops for the first time what has been called Luther’s ‘penitential exaltation’,18 a thread running through many psalm settings by German composers who had either lived though the Thirty Years War or suffered in its aftermath. Schütz’s settings of Psalm 6 (Ach Herr, straf mich nicht) and Psalm 130 (Aus der Tiefe) from the Psalmen Davids (1619), written at the outset of the war (as well as many individual compositions written during its course), are all touched by this spirit. If there is something a little contrived about the opening to the cantata, as though Bach were striving to strike the right attitude, by the time he gets to the central chorus it has vanished completely. This is the most telling portion of the work, set to the words ‘I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and I rest my hopes on His Word.’ Announced by three full-blooded af
firmations in block harmony followed by little cadenza flourishes for two individual voices, it opens out into a slow, long-arched fugue. The emotional tug of the music (indeed, its penitential exaltation) is lodged in a succession of diminished sevenths, major and minor ninths that Bach strategically places on strong beats to emphasise the ‘waiting’ or ‘yearning’ sentiment. Each successive fugal entry gains in poignancy and heightened delivery as a result; each voice has a musical personality very much its own and really ‘sings’.
Chord for chord, there is nothing so far that could not be traced back to the harmonic syntax of an inventive mid-seventeenth-century composer such as Grandi, Carissimi, Schütz or Matthias Weckmann; it is the instrumental fabric – Bach’s way of interlacing oboe and violin (and later violas and even bassoon) in decorative counterpoint to the impassioned voice-leading of the chorus – that gives this movement its distinction.q Animating the wordless was a significant new strategy in an age in which the ‘word’ had become so dominant at every level. It suggests that Bach may have already intuited a still more authentic logos residing in instrumental ‘speech’, which was there to glorify God and celebrate His universe just as powerfully as music linked to biblical or devotional words.
An original feature of Aus der Tiefe is not so much Bach’s utter faithfulness to the words, as the way he consistently adjusts his themes to the shapes of the sung words, their inflection and punctuation: changes of metre, tempo and texture enable him to characterise each verbal phrase and to change the Affekt almost instantly. So, for the impressive chorus that concludes the work, he constructs a mosaic-like sequence made up of four distinct but interlocking segments:
’Israel adagio three assertive blocks of open harmony
‘hope in the Lord’ un poc’ allegro imitative counterpoint with instrumental interjection
‘for with the Lord there is mercy’ adagio hymn-like, with decorative oboe cantilena
‘And with him is plenteous redemption’ allegro a vigorous imitative treatment with antiphonal figures in suspiratio
This leads without a break into an independent fugal sequence, its theme and counter-theme skilfully adjusted to reflect the dual character of the final sentence:
‘And he shall redeem Israel’ allegro a brief head-motif with an extended melismatic ‘tail’ for the word erlösen (‘to redeem’)
‘from all his iniquities’ allegro chromatically rising counter-subject
In this final section, culminating with this extended fugue subject and its chromatic answer, Bach finally distances himself from the earlier motet-like structures of his forebears’ music and reveals that, though certainly no modernist, he is au fait with up-to-the-minute devices taken from contemporary Italian practice that were being transplanted around this time by north German composers such as Johann Theile (1646–1724), Georg Österreich (1664–1735)r and Georg Caspar Schürmann (c. 1672–1751).s Obscure, shadowy figures today, all three composed German concertato motets and cantatas considered state-of-the-art in terms of style that stand out by the quality of their invention and craftsmanship. Though their innovative choral repertoire still languishes in obscurity, there are grounds for thinking that Bach’s music would have developed differently but for their example. This is not the same as saying that their music provided the immediate point of departure for his imagination; it may have acted more like a slow-release bolus, emitting its influence gradually and at successive stages in his development. But it is significant that at the point of taking his first experimental steps as a composer of figural music Bach was operating in a milieu close to the cosmopolitan cultured atmosphere of north German courts, where composers such as these were being encouraged to use their ingenuity and direct their experiments in music towards the edification (Erbauung) of believers. By choosing for musical treatment texts that combined a familiar chorale with a story taken from Scripture, they signalled a robust new approach to positioning the traditional Gospel message within the context of contemporary Lutheran worship and illuminating it in the manner of a musical sermon. Such powerfully affective music was underpinned by sophisticated fugal writing with tonally orientated themes (often with a chromatic counter-subject), an extended development of sequential harmony and the pronounced use of ostinato basses, particularly the ‘walking bass’ variety and those comprising a stepwise descent of four notes. They gauged how a personal response to core Christian beliefs could be teased out of their complex musical interweaving of biblical texts, contemplative poetry and Lutheran chorales, and probed new ways of drawing the listener in.
In reflecting on his own beliefs later in life, and having acquired his own copy of Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary, Bach wrote Nota bene in the margin and underlined two almost identical passages: Ich will dich nicht verlassen, noch von dir weichen (‘I will not forsake you nor stray from you’) and Ich will dich nicht verlassen, noch versäumen (‘I will not forsake you nor abandon you’). One would dearly like to know how much of that confident assurance – of not being entirely alone in the world – Bach already possessed when he became an orphan, and how much of his grief returned twelve years later when he sat down to compose the work known as the Actus tragicus, or Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (BWV 106) (God’s own time is the very best of times). That we do now know the answer should not tempt us into applying a speculative post-Freudian psychoanalytical framework to assess his state of mind – postulating resentful thoughts towards his parents, anger, wish fulfilment, guilt, the search for an alternative father figure and so on.19 Such an approach to measuring the permanency of Bach’s psychological scars (if any there were) is just as inexact and unhistorical as applying adult thought patterns retrospectively back into childhood. What is beyond dispute is that all through his lifetime Bach had frequent and painful encounters with death, which scythed through his family: neither of his parents lived beyond the age of fifty, and he lost twelve out of twenty of his own children before they had reached the age of three – well beyond the average, even at a time when infant mortality was ubiquitous.
The Harmonischer Baum, a ten-part canon in the form of a tree, from the treatise Musicalisches Kunst-Buch by Johann Theile (1646–1724), known to his contemporaries as ‘the father of contrapuntalists’. (illustration credit 32)
To what extent did Bach share Luther’s overwhelming terror of death – a fear shared and admitted by many of his followers and theologians – ‘the one misery that makes us more miserable than all other creatures’?20 Indeed, to what degree was he truly convinced by Christian dogma, especially the kind that emphasised personal faith and the rewards of salvation? If he was, when did it begin? Beyond his links to Luther by geography, schooling and circumstance, was he drawn to the founder of that theology by real conviction?t These are questions to which no very convincing answers can be found in the archives. We need to look elsewhere. Once again, some of Bach’s early works provide fertile evidence of a kind, none more so than the Actus tragicus.
Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities. One such is the Actus tragicus – a funerary piece that Bach probably wrote shortly after Christ lag, when he was still only twenty-two, just twelve years from the time he was orphaned, and when he was preparing to set up house with his wife-to-be.
No one has so far been able to pinpoint the exact occasion for which the Actus tragicus was composed. There has been conjecture that it was written either for his uncle Tobias, who died in August 1707 and whose legacy of 50 gulden (amounting to more than half a year’s salary) allowed him t
o marry his second cousin, Maria Barbara, in the village church at Dornheim, a mile or so outside Arnstadt, on 17 October. Another possibility is that it was composed in memory of Susanne Tilesius, the sister of Bach’s friend and ally Pastor Eilmar of Mülhausen. Susanne was thirty-four when she died, leaving a husband and four children, just as Bach’s own mother had done twelve years before. Might the Actus tragicus in some way be a cathartic musical outpouring of his own unresolved grief? It is possible that Susanne and his mother are both being invoked and commemorated in the solo soprano’s entreaty ‘Come, Lord Jesus’, which is repeated over and over again at the very centre of the work. On this evidence the subject of death was a preoccupation, or at least a recurrent theme; it is supported by the significant proportion of books he amassed over time in his library devoted to the Lutheran ars moriendi.21 Precociously, he seems to have learnt how the colossal force of faith embodied and enacted in music could deprive death of its powers to terrify, as though concurring with Montaigne (whom he certainly never read), ‘Let us banish the strangeness of death: let us practice it, accustom ourselves to it, never having anything so often present in our minds than death: let us always keep the image of death in our imagination – and in full view.’22 Luther, too, had insisted, ‘We should familiarize ourselves with death during our lifetime, inviting death into our presence when it is still at a distance.’23
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 21
