Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

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  a We should have come here ten years ago, the pastor said; for then, under the GDR, there was so little contact with the outside world that the only way his parishioners could pick up hints of Bach performance practice elsewhere was via the radio or CDs smuggled over the border by friends and relations. Still, it was good that we had chosen to stop here for the Easter weekend on our cantata pilgrimage.

  b ‘The Lord has struck me in the rear end with terrible pain. My excrement is so hard that I have to strain with such force to expel it that I sweat, and the longer I wait, the harder it gets … My arse has gone bad’ (WA BR, Vol. 2, Nos. 333, 334).

  c In his Reformation cantata BWV 79, Bach’s anonymous poet invokes God’s protection as ‘our sun and shield’ against ‘a blasphemous barking dog’ – perhaps a reference to Luther’s nightmarish vision (WA TR, Vol. 5, No. 5,358b).

  d The spread of Luther’s Bible had colossal implications for the German language, previously divided into many regional dialects. Luther wrote, ‘I have so far read no book or letter in which the German language is properly handled. Nobody seems to care sufficiently for it; and every preacher thinks he has a right to change it at pleasure and to invent new terms’ (quoted in Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (1910), Vol. VI, pp. 6, 10) – not that he himself was immune to this tendency. But in popularising the Saxon dialect and adapting it to theology and religion, Luther enriched the vocabulary with that of earlier poets and chroniclers and transformed it into the common literary language from which later writers and poets such as Klopstock, Herder and Lessing traced their stylistic origins. A contemporary of Luther, Erasmus Albertus, called him the German Cicero.

  e Luther admonished those who looked down on the Currende (‘busking choristers’): ‘I too was such a crumb collector … we were singing in four voices from door to door in the villages [surrounding Eisenach]’ (LW, Vol. 46, No. 250; WA, Vol. 30, No. 576).

  f On this point Bach’s contemporary Johann Mattheson wrote, ‘A right-minded cantor, by the function of his holy vocation [Amt], proclaims … God’s Word. Verbum Dei est, sive mente cogitetur, sive canatur, sive pulsu edatur [the Word of God is uttered by the thinking of the mind, by singing and by playing (lit. = striking)], as expressed in the words written by Justin Martyr’ (Critica Musica II, p. 316). But Robin A. Leaver has shown that this is based on a mistranslation (Luther’s Liturgical Music (2007), pp. 287–8). Despite Joseph Kerman’s warning that ‘Baroque composers depict the passions, Romantic composers express them’ (my italics) (Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue (2005), p. 100), it seems to me Bach goes a long way further here than merely ‘depicting’ the passions.

  g Yet, contrary to popular misconception, we have just one example of Luther himself composing a contrafactum (a parody of a secular song with a substituted religious text): he took a secular ‘riddle’ song (‘Ich komm aus fremden Landen her’) and made it the basis of his first version of the Christmas hymn ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her’ that appeared in the Wittenberg hymnal of 1535. But he was dissatisfied with the result and decided to compose a new melody for it – the one that has become inseparably linked to it ever since. Research by Robin A. Leaver (op. cit., pp. 88–9) does much to explode the myth surrounding Luther’s alleged support for the use of popular music in church. In his own words, Luther was keen to ‘wean [the young] away from love ballads and carnal songs and to teach them something of value in their place, thus combining the good with the pleasing’ (LW, Vol. 53, No. 316; WA, Vol. 35, Nos. 474–5).

  h In 1708, only a year after Bach’s Mühlhausen audition, his colleague and cousin, J. G. Walther, wrote, ‘the music of today is to be compared with rhetoric on account of its multitude of figures’ (Praecepta der musicalischen Composition, MS 1708, p. 152), a phrase that was lifted straight out of Christoph Bernhard from about sixty years before, though it is not immediately apparent whether Walther is being factual or slightly derogatory.

  i V. Ramachandran has researched the phenomenon of cross-activation between adjacent areas of the human brain: not just among synaesthetes (who see letters as expressing colours) but in any normal people who have a heightened sense of metaphor and are able to link seemingly unrelated concepts in their brains (BBC Reith Lectures, 2003).

  j Something similar to Bach’s use of the reiterated B/F to convey the thraldom of death recurs in the music of an otherwise unlikely follower – Hector Berlioz, when, in Les Nuits d’été, he came to set ‘Au Cimetière’ (from Théophile Gautier’s La Comédie de la mort, published in 1838): the harmonically ambiguous resolution of G to F and back to the words passe, passe). In his setting of Gautier’s words (Un air maladivement tendre / À la fois charmant et fatal, / Qui vous fait mal) Berlioz portrays death as a curiously voluptuous occurrence, a momentary distraction from the gruesome reality in the struggle of light over darkness, life over death.

  k Heiko Oberman identifies Luther’s language as ‘so physical and earthy that in his wrathful scorn he can give the Devil “a fart for a staff” ’ (WA TR, Vol. 6, No. 6,817): ‘You, Satan, Antichrist, or pope, can lean on it, a stinking nothing.’ Thus ‘a figure of respect, be he Devil or pope, is effectively unmasked if he can be shown with his pants down’ (H. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (1989), pp. 108–9).

  l Yes, plural, for in all the later cantatas there are no instances of Bach writing like this for a solo voice. Although we have no means of knowing precisely how many voices he intended – or were assigned to him – for the first performance of this piece in Mühlhausen (and it may have served a useful purpose for him in assessing the abilities of his new choir), its communal, hymn-like nature and the way Bach responds to Luther’s evocation of a many-voiced crowd in the middle verse suggest more than one voice per part. Its challenges are also technically more easily manageable with several per line. Of course not everyone agrees.

  m While it is true that in H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1898) good and evil appear to be evenly balanced and the defeat of the Martians does not involve any kind of direct divine action (the insane clergyman’s attempts to relate the invasion to some kind of biblical enactment of Armageddon seem only to reinforce his mental derangement), that is not the case either with Charles Williams (a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) or with Philip Pullman. Three of Williams’s best-known novels are War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937) and All Hallows’ Eve (1945). T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction for the last of these, described Williams’s novels as ‘supernatural thrillers’ because they explore the sacramental intersection of the physical with the spiritual while also examining the ways in which power, even spiritual power, can corrupt as well as sanctify. In his re-telling of Milton’s epic in His Dark Materials (1995–2000), Pullman inverts its conclusion, commending humanity for what Milton saw as its most tragic failing. What he most admires about Paradise Lost is ‘the sheer nerve of Milton’s declaring that he’s going to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”, to “justify the ways of God to men”.’ Isn’t that similar to what we have to admire also in Luther – and still more in Bach?

  n The professional historian, according to Richard Marius, would have us believe that ‘Luther’s insights came chiefly from the intellect and not from the gut – an attitude as wrongheaded as any effort to define Luther by psychology alone’ (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death (2000), p. 21). The same, I feel, could be said of those ‘positivist’ musicologists who seem intent on proving that Bach’s music was the consequence of prodigious cerebral control, thereby disregarding or diminishing the role of an emotional and spontaneous response to the devotional texts he was setting.

  o Here is an early instance of Bach’s ability to capture the imagination, so that ‘what the listener gets, then, is a span of musical time in which the fleetingness of the narrative moment is suspended, and by which the overall drama acquires an increased depth of field’ (John Butt, ‘Do Music
al Works Contain an Implied Listener?’, JRMA, Vol. 135, Special Issue 1 (2010), p. 10).

  p That in itself calls for comment, seeing that Luther, who, as a former Augustinian friar, testified to the transformative power of chanting the psalm-tones, called it a process in which the ‘affections’ seem to ‘pluck’ the ‘strings’ of the psalmist’s words, causing them to vibrate and be transformed into divine affections. Luther claimed vox est anima verbi – ‘the voice is the soul of the Word’: Scripture reaches the listener as words to be not ‘interpreted’, but ‘captured’ or ‘incorporated’ in sound via the body’s chamber of resonance. There is every reason to suppose that Bach was familiar with Luther’s theology of the Psalter and that he pondered how he might apply it to a figural, concerted setting of the psalm (see Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘ “Take Heed What Ye Hear”: Listening as a Moral, Transcendental and Sacramental Act’, JRMA, Vol. 135, Special Issue 1 (2010), pp. 91–102).

  q Expressive gestures such as these and a detectable strain of mysticism in this cantata suggest if not an influence, then an affinity with another noble setting of the De profundis by the French composer Michel-Richard de Lalande, composed in 1689. Bach’s and Lalande’s versions share an overall sobriety of expression and, in particular, parallel ways of layering voices and instruments in dense contrapuntal webs of exceptional intensity.

  r The final fugal section of Österreich’s motetto concerto, Ich bin die Auferstehung, composed in 1704, is constructed on similar lines. Bach could have encountered other examples of Österreich’s music in the Lüneburg library. Despite the neglect of these composers today, thanks to collectors such as Düben and the Lüneburg cantors, and tireless copyists including Österreich himself, enough of their music has survived in manuscript for us to gain an inkling of their originality, their versatility and, above all, their ingenuity in adapting Italian Catholic music for use within the Lutheran liturgy.

  s After a year’s study in Venice, Schürmann was given a free transfer for four years as composer and Capellmeister to the court of Meiningen, where he met Bach’s cousin Johann Ludwig, who succeeded him in 1706. There he composed the most intriguing of his liturgical music: nine cantatas in which the characteristic alternation of recitative and aria developed in Italian opera – and these now included da capo arias, as Bach was to do ten or more years on – were now applied to church music by a German composer perhaps for the first time. Each cantata concluded with a chorale setting, treated in a variety of ways likely to have attracted Bach’s attention.

  t The first generation of Lutherans regarded their founder as the Wundermann, one who was called for, and sent, by God. Nearly 200 years on Robert L. Marshall concludes that ‘there can be little doubt that Bach revered Luther, strongly identified with him, recognized him as a supremely towering figure, as a truly “great man”, and venerated him almost to the point of obsession’ (Luther, Bach, and the Early Reformation Chorale (1995), p. 10). Peter Williams suggests an interesting alternative role model here: Luther’s close colleague Philipp Melanchthon: ‘orphaned (aged eleven), expressed fidelity to his fatherland and place of origin, was headstrong, and educated himself by assiduously studying what others had written’ (The Life of Bach (2004), p. 9).

  u It is here, too, that we see that his approach to death, as reflected in his earliest choral music, seems to differ from that of others within his immediate family circle. Life seen as a ‘vale of tears’ was the inherited seventeenth-century view, exemplified by Heinrich Schütz’s composing throughout the Thirty Years War, an outlook that resurfaces in the music of Bach’s elder cousin Johann Christoph Bach, whose Mit Weinen hebt sichs an (first performed in Arnstadt in 1691 when Johann Sebastian was six) describes the three Ages of Man in decidedly nihilistic terms, serving to guide the listener and charting the miseries of youth, middle and old age.

  v There is a parallel here with the deeply affecting conclusion of Johann Christoph Bach’s five-voiced motet, Fürchte dich nicht: at the point where the soprano enters with words O Jesu du, mein Hilf (from a funeral hymn by Johann Rist) there is a momentary intertwining of the two common words du and mein – as though a halting contact has just been made from one world to the next (see p. 71 above). This expression of the ‘freedom’ of the Gospel expressed in the free-flying soprano line (with no basso continuo to tie her down) is in marked contrast – and with intentional theological purpose, one can only assume – to the strict fugal exposition of the Law and its demands (Es ist der alte Bund).

  w One such composition may have been a second Ratswechsel cantata for Mühlhausen in 1709 after he had left, which may have been printed, like BWV 71, Gott ist mein König, but is now lost.

  x Four hundred and fifty miles to the west, in London’s Westminster Abbey, another musician would soon be laid to rest, one who had composed settings of these same sombre funerary sentences: Henry Purcell – ‘In the midst of life we are in death … Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts.’ These words, from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer, are taken almost verbatim from Miles Coverdale’s version of the Media vita, but they were translated not from the Latin but from Luther’s ‘Mitten wir im Leben sind’. The connection with Luther could therefore hardly be any stronger (see Robin A. Leaver, ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove 1535–1566 (Oxford Studies in British Church Music) (1991), p. 133). It suggests the possible existence of a common human condition extending right across Europe at this time, and even of something that links Bach (who never travelled abroad) to a living English tradition.

  6

  The Incorrigible Cantor

  He shows little inclination to work … he is not even willing to give an explanation of the fact … a change will be necessary, a break will have to come soon … 1

  – Court Councillor Adrian Steger

  In August 1730 relations between Bach and his municipal employers in Leipzig reached breaking point. The council minutes merely report: ‘He had not conducted himself as he should.’ But behind that opaque generalisation lay a long list of criticisms and alleged misdemeanours, different in detail but not in substance to those that had blighted relations between the young Bach and the Arnstadt Consistory nearly thirty years earlier (see below this page), and were now sticking in the Leipzig councillors’ collective craw. He had recently dismissed a choirboy and sent him back to the country without apprising the governing burgomaster of this fact. Then he himself had gone away without leave – ‘for which he must be reproached and admonished’, they noted – just as he had done twenty-five years earlier on his seminal four-month visit to Buxtehude in Lübeck.a Not only was the cantor ‘doing nothing’ in the fulfilment of his teaching duties, nor giving obligatory singing lessons, but then, most vexatiously, ‘he is not even willing to explain himself,’ Burgomaster Steger (see Plate 11c) declared. This was now the third time in his life that Bach flatly refused to work, the first time being in Arnstadt, the second in 1717 in Weimar after he had been passed over as Capellmeister. Meanwhile other complaints were mounting up: ‘a change would be necessary, for matters were bound to come to a head sooner or later, and he would have to acquiesce in the making of other arrangements.’ Even Burgomaster Gottfried Lange, Bach’s most vocal and longest-standing protector, had to admit, ‘everything was true that had been mentioned against the Cantor.’ So the council resolved to hit him where it was guaranteed to hurt: by cutting back his incidental income. They were exasperated by his non-compliance and taciturnity. In brief, they concluded, ‘The Cantor was incorrigible.’

  What had brought things to such a pass? It was all part of an increasingly acrimonious series of disputes between Bach and the council that had been simmering for the past seven years, and a classic example of the conflict that arises when an artist is placed in public office – expected to be both ‘a genius and an obedient subject’.2 On one side was an irascible man, passionate in defence of his craft and bristling at any perceived threat
to his right to practise it unobstructed. On the other was a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult for successive cantors. The conflict also points to a deep contradiction in the make-up of Bach’s personality: tacit acceptance of the hierarchical order that came with his time and his religion; and, opposed to that, as we will explore in this chapter, signs of constitutional truculence and a recurrent refusal to accept authority. To account for Bach’s curmudgeonly behaviour in 1730 we need to trace these patterns back to his earliest brushes with authority, and from there explore how his attitude to authority in general appeared at different stages in his career.

  First we need to take a look at the peculiar circumstances of the Leipzig cantorate. Back in 1657 negotiations were taking place between Adam Krieger and the council when, as organist of the Nikolaikirche, he applied (unsuccessfully) for the post of Thomascantor. Krieger made his attitude clear from the start: he should not have to ‘both labour in the school and act as cantor’ like the previous incumbentb – ‘not out of any [personal] ambition [such as] to cast aspersions on the school position, but because this effort, along with the studio compositionis, would be too burdensome, considering that one who works himself to the bone in the school subsequently has little desire to put together concerted music [in church], and if he lacks desire for composing, it tends to turn out poorly’. He added that the previous incumbents, burdened with school duties, had ‘become stiff with indignation and ill humour and suffered poor health’.3 Unwilling to teach Latin, Krieger was never to reach an accommodation with the councillors, who then, as in later years, refused to countenance a division of teaching and composing roles into two separate offices. Krieger’s analysis is strangely prophetic of the problems Bach was to face seventy years later, which narrowed on the questions of who had the final say in the discharge of the cantor’s duties and, in particular, who set the boundaries between him and the rector of the Thomasschule as regards pupil admissions and the appointment of prefects.