Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  The battle with death from Heinrich Müller’s Himmlischer Liebes-Kuss (1732), one of several tomes in Bach’s library advocating constant preparation and training for the unexpected, arbitrary hour of one’s death. (illustration credit 33)

  Many of his later works, including the two great Passion settings, deal with the same subject as a dichotomy between a world of tribulation and the hope of redemption – quite standard in the religion of the day. But none does so more poignantly or serenely than the Actus tragicus.u This extraordinary music, composed at such a young age, is never saccharine, self-indulgent or morbid; on the contrary, though deeply serious, it is consoling and full of optimism. Unlike some of Bach’s busier contrapuntal inventions, it has good ‘surface’ attraction, no doubt as a result of its unusually soft-toned instrumentation: just two recorders, an organ and a pair of violas da gamba. With this restricted palette Bach manages to create miracles: the opening sonatina comprises twenty of the most heart-rending bars in all of his works. From the yearning dissonance given to the two gambas, to the ravishing way the recorders entwine and exchange adjacent notes, slipping in and out of unison, we are being offered music to combat grief. Jean-Philippe Rameau once implored one of his pupils: Mon ami, faites-moi pleurer! 24 Listening to Bach’s sonatina, we are shown what Rameau meant and are moved. The whole work lasts less than twenty minutes and flows seamlessly through several switches of mood and metre. As often in the best music, there is a brilliant use of silence. After inserting a sequence of pleas for release from this world in which the soprano sings ‘Yes, come, Lord Jesus!’ several times over, Bach ensures that all the other voices and instruments drop out one by one, leaving her unsupported voice to trail away in a fragile arabesque.v Then he notates a blank bar with a pause over it. This active, mystical silence turns out to be the exact midpoint of the work.

  This is just one example of deliberate and effective planning by Bach. The more you peer below the surface, the more complex the Actus tragicus turns out to be – considerably more so than the two cantatas we examined earlier. Composite texts had come into fashion in northern Germany from the 1670s onwards, the idea being to elucidate and interpret the Scriptures by juxtaposing different passages on a single theme. In all likelihood Bach got the idea of selecting seven biblical quotations and interleaving them with familiar Lutheran chorales from the aforementioned theologian Johann Gottfried Olearius. Through the text’s particular disposition and arrangement, we are presented with a clear juxtaposition of Old Testament Law and New Testament Gospel. Luther put it this way: ‘The voice of the Law terrifies because it dins into the ears of smug sinners: “In the midst of earthly life, snares of death surround us.” But the voice of God cheers the terrified sinner with its song: “In the midst of certain death, life in Christ is ours.” ’25 The timing of any individual death was God’s secret: it is He who ‘sets the clock’ of human life and orders matters according to His own timetable.26 Luther’s underlying purpose is to prepare the believer ‘to die blessedly’ and to comfort the bereaved with the notion that life is essentially a preparation for death: acceptance of this provides the only reliable way of coming to terms with our humanity and the futility of our endeavours. In his Bible commentary Olearius makes room for an image (by Christian Romstet) of St John the Baptist at the gate of Heaven and, behind him, Jesus tending his garden, entitled This is the Tree of Life. (See Plate 17.) There is a parallel here in the visual arts with the cycles of painting known as paysage moralisé that link the ages of man with the times of day, the seasons of the year and the eras of biblical history.27 Seen as a symbol of the way the human spirit attempts to create a harmony with its environment (though one in which the natural wilderness had been tamed and brought to heel), such works could be used allegorically to move the viewer to the contemplation of ‘solemn things’. The duty and purpose of art in the face of death was to represent the recently deceased to those left behind on earth, to console them in their grief and to facilitate communication and discourse about the unutterable. In conveying emotive and complex themes that depend on the interplay of past and future, hope and despair, music may often be more effective than painting.

  The way Bach matches his musical design to the theological principles outlined is breathtaking. As with Aus der Tiefe, he has to impose his own musical structure. To mirror the theological division between Law and Gospel, he sets out a symmetrical ground-plan, the individual movements arranged so that, as listeners, we can trace in music the journey of the believer progressing via Old Testament Scripture (with its bald statements about the inevitability of death) downwards to his lowest ebb and then, through prayer, upwards again to a more spiritual future. The solo interventions on both sides of the divide are arranged in contrasted pairs, making it easy to follow the chiastic pattern and the deliberate contrasts. So, for example, of two solos for bass the first is an authoritative Old Testament injunction to ‘set thy house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live.’ This is answered by Christ’s words from the Cross to the malefactor, ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Overlapping the second of these solos is Luther’s version of the Song of Simeon, Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin … Der Tod ist mein Schlaf worden (‘In peace and joy I now depart … Death has become my sleep’). If Bach intended a musical representation of physical extinction anywhere in the piece, it must be here, as the two gambas peter out at the end of the chorale, a reminder to the devout listener that the hour of death can unleash an intensification of the Devil’s wiles. And, as if he had not done enough already to mirror Scripture with music, Bach goes a step further, allegorically leading the believer to understand and accept the pattern of his life by providing a progression of keys, modulating downwards from E (the home key) to B minor (the remotest flat key in the circle of fifths, used by Bach later for the description of the Crucifixion in the John Passion) and back to E again (see illustration in Chapter 10, this page). So again we have a symmetrical design: a descent from E via C minor and F minor for those grim Old Testament injunctions, via that nadir of silence to B minor, then rising with the comfort of the Gospel texts via A and C minor back to E. The pattern is perhaps intended to prod the listener into reflecting on the successive stages of Christ’s own life, through birth, crucifixion, death and resurrection.

  Yet the most impressive feature of Bach’s fusion of music and theology occurs in that central silent bar to which we as listeners are irresistibly drawn. Bach’s final, masterly coup – to illustrate the believer’s crisis of faith and overwhelming need of divine help – is to leave the soprano’s immediately preceding notes tonally ambiguous – her voice just evaporating into that desperate cry. There is no resolution, not even a partial closure that might carry the harmony towards a stable cadence: so it is up to us how we interpret it in the silence that follows. If we hear it at face value as a weak perfect cadence (a tierce de Picardie in F minor), that would indicate death as a kind of full stop. But perhaps we are being gently nudged to hear the final oscillation between A and B as leading note and tonic respectively, in the key of the movement which follows, B minor. In that case Bach’s message is one of hope, the tonal upswing indicating that Christ’s intervention guarantees death is only a midway point on our journey, the beginning of whatever comes after. This planting of uncertainty, or rather ambivalence, is not the same as toying with our expectations, a use of hiatus that Bach (along with many other composers) employs on other occasions to hold our attention and keep us guessing.

  Bach’s Actus tragicus is music of extraordinary profundity. It comes closer to piercing the membrane of awareness that separates the material world from whatever lies beyond it than any other piece of music in this immensely fecund fin de siècle period. Again there are pointers to what he might have learnt from cousin Christoph, some of whose compositions also seem to inhabit and explore that shadowy borderline between life and death: vitally expressive on the one hand, fragile to the point of imminent extinction on the other. Of course one c
an no more define the emotional charge – or, for that matter, the pain or the pleasure – that Bach’s music affords us than a neuroscientist can distinguish between stimuli of reality in the brain and those of fantasy.

  The proportional lucidity of the Actus tragicus gives a deceptively simple feel to it, but it also makes for great complexity – of thought, structure and invention; both point to the same sense of trembling on the brink of understanding. Perhaps the unobtrusive complexity of mathematical structure that underpins much of the music draws in people of a certain type of mind, even if they are not wholly aware of what is taking place. For the rest of us for whom the mathematics embedded in the music appeals only on a subconscious level, if at all, we can content ourselves with the consoling beauty of the sounds on offer.

  The Actus tragicus also raises the delicate issue of religious belief – whether the partial or total presence (or absence) in the listener can influence receptivity to music. It would be invidious to insist that a person needs to hold Christian beliefs in order to appreciate Bach’s church music. Yet it is certainly the case that without some familiarity with the religious ideas with which it is imbued one can miss so many nuances, even the way his later music can be seen to act as a critique of Christian theology. For many, the path towards enjoying, say, an opera by Mozart is obviously much smoother and less troublesome than that to a Bach cantata or Passion: in the former you have recognisable human emotions, a rollicking good story, spectacle, comedy and drama (even though some of their morally dubious characters pose pleasurable dilemmas). All these elements are present in Bach, too, but in a covert form. The texts he sets do not always coalesce to create a smoothly integrated dramatic form such as we find in the Act finales to Mozart’s operas. The later cantatas are often laden with lurid imagery – of leprous sin, pus and boils – which, together with the thickets of theology, can create an impenetrable barrier to the uninitiated, to the point where part of what Bach may have meant gets lost in transmission. Something of the initial unveiling of the mystery is required to help the listener resist the temptation to drop (or shun) the religious content altogether because of the absurdity of the imagery, and to provide reassurance that the immense craft and complexity can be penetrated. In order to reach the human core of Bach’s church music, my contention is not that we are obliged to place the music back in its original liturgical context (opting for a cold church pew, instead of a padded theatre seat) – though that is what evangelical Lutherans were urging throughout the twentieth century. We do need, however, to be aware of its place in the liturgy, the original purpose of its composer and of the church authorities in commissioning it (not necessarily the same thing), and the peculiar dialectical relationship Bach seems to forge between his music and the word (which we will explore in depth in Chapter 12). Once these onionskins have been peeled, the rewards far outstrip our initial superficial response to the music.

  The problem is hardly new. In a letter to Erwin Rhode (1870) Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, ‘This week I heard the St Matthew Passion three times and each time I had the same feeling of immeasurable admiration. One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as Gospel.’28 Yet in 1878 he was to complain, ‘In Bach there is too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism … At the threshold of modern European music … he is always looking back towards the Middle Ages.’ Nietzsche points to the conflict some people experience in relation to Bach’s church music: put off by the harshness of some of the language, they are nonetheless in thrall to the music and the way it carries the conviction of his faith.

  In the process of reconciling these opposite responses one can empathise with William James on the subject of religion in general – using ‘every fibre of his intellectual energy to defend and justify freedom of the will’ and, in his phrase, ‘the right to believe’. Religion, he recognised, ‘like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse … adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else’.29 At the same time it can embrace the torments of the ‘sick soul’ finding consolation in conversion, as seen in Augustine, Luther and Tolstoy, and the fascination of the divided self, as seen in John Bunyan – and indeed Bach.30 With him, music inspires a religious sensibility that is very common but not necessarily tied to a specific dogma. Just as there are many non-religious aficionados of Bach’s church music, so there are atheists among Bach-loving professional musicians. One of the most widely revered figures among contemporary European composers, György Kurtág, recently confessed, ‘Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it – as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails … That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.’31

  In September 1742 Bach, then aged fifty-seven, bought a de luxe edition of Martin Luther’s complete works in seven volumes. According to a little note in his own hand32 about ‘these German and magnificent writings of the late D.[octor] M.[artin] Luther’ that had previously belonged to two distinguished theologians, Calov and Mayer, he had paid ten thalers for them. On his shelves he already had fourteen fat folios of Luther’s writings, including the Tischreden, plus a Second Quarto volume of his Hauß-Postilla, besides many volumes of sermons, Bible commentaries and devotional writings by other authors, most of whom cited Luther generously. So why the new purchase? Was it just because this was the new Altenburg edition, whereas he already had the Jena version? Bach’s working library, estimated to have contained at least 112 different theological and homiletic works, was less like a typical church musician’s and more what one might expect to find in the church of a respectably sized town, or that ‘many a pastor in Bach’s day would have been proud to have owned’.33 It is slightly odd, too, that the price that Bach claimed he had paid for these new volumes appears to have been obliterated and rather clumsily altered to ten thalers from a figure likely to have been twice or even three times as large – in the same month a Leipzig bookseller, Theophil Georg, published a four-volume catalogue of new and old Luther editions which quoted twenty thalers for the Altenburg edition.34 Was Bach too embarrassed to admit to his wife the full price he had paid – amounting to perhaps half a month’s salary? If this little deception is evidence of a midlife crisis, it did not amount to very much – it is not as if he had splashed out, say, on a new edition of a forbidden titillating work like the Decameròn of Boccaccio or of Spinoza’s banned and allegedly atheistic Ethics. What it does reveal, beyond his personal piety, his lifelong reverence for Luther and the central importance of Luther’s writings in both his personal and professional capacities, is that ‘Bach was evidently deeply – and apparently uncritically – immersed in a mindset that was at least two hundred years old.’35

  There may indeed have been further cantatas composed during his first postings in Arnstadt and Mühlhausen that Bach felt no need to preserve once he had reached Leipzig in 1723, since they belonged to that ‘former style of music [which] no longer seems to please our ears’.36w Yet he might have agreed with Schoenberg when he said of his early pieces ‘I liked them when I wrote them’ – and, in the case of BWV 4, Christ lag, this was still true in his forties. Those that have survived show that Bach had charted an initial course for his music – not merely to articulate, support and interpret these doctrinal positions, but to go beyond them in actualising the position of religion in people’s everyday lives. In his hands, music is more than the traditional analogue of a hidden reality, more even than an instrument of persuasion or rhetoric; it encapsulates the role of religious experience as he understood it, charting the ups and downs of belief and doubt in essentially human terms and in
frequently dramatic ways, and rendering these tensions and quotidian struggles vivid and immediate. These early works show him exploring music’s power to provide aural, sensory comfort for life’s hardships, softening the impact of grief, like new skin over a wound. Aligning his music with the Lutheran conception of death as a reward for faith perhaps provided him with the means by which to subsume his own early pain of grieving. What it could not deliver was any softening of his attitude towards authority, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  As we filed out of the Georgenkirche at the end of the Mass on Easter Sunday, the pastor invited us to visit what remains today of Bach’s former school and the old Dominican monastery. We walked with him past the old town wall to the cemetery known as the Gottesacker (‘God’s acre’). Somewhere here are the unmarked graves of Bach’s parents. As a member of the local chorus musicus, the youngest of the Bach sons would have been expected to sing at his father’s interment and obliged to witness the ritual: the tolling of the funerary bell, the solemn procession of clergy, choir, family and mourners to the Gottesacker. There, on a small wooden dais, covered by a roof projecting from the town wall that was designed to give protection to the mourning family, Sebastian and the other Bach orphans would have foregathered.37 In the middle of the cemetery stood a timber hut – hardly more than a garden shed – and a small pulpit from which Magister Schrön gave the graveside sermon. While the coffin was lowered the cantor and his choristers intoned the medieval funeral hymn in Luther’s version: ‘Mitten wir im Leben sind’.x