Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  e ‘Writing in 1752 to defend the use of dance rhythms in church music, Caspar Rüetz, cantor in Lübeck [Widerlegte Vorurtheile von der Beschaffenheit der heutigen Kirchenmusic], illustrated this perspective when he wrote, “If we should not bring into the church even the least thing that belongs to dancing, we would have to leave feet and hands, indeed the whole body, at home.” For him the dance floor was no dishonourable or sinful place but rather “the school of elegance, courtesy and bodily dexterity”. And if church music could promote “hopping and jumping in the hearts of upright Christians”, why should rhythms that produce such spiritual pleasure be avoided?’ (Joyce Irwin, ‘Bach in the Midst of Religious Transition’ in Bach’s Changing World, Carol K. Baron (ed.) (2006), p. 121). Doubtless Pietists would have been apoplectic, but Bach, along with Scheibel, would surely have agreed.

  f Even after Telemann’s departure in 1705 the tripartite stand of his orchestra’s activities remained firm – first under Melchior Hoffmann (with the famous violinist Johann Georg Pisendel as leader and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel as assistant composer), then under Johann David Heinichen, while a separate, twenty-strong ensemble was led by Johann Friedrich Fasch.

  g In the Leipzig academic chronicle of 1 June 1723 Bach is mentioned not just as the new cantor but as ‘director of the collegium musicum’ (Acta Lipsiensium academica (1723), Vol. 5, p. 514). Was this a confusion arising from the fact that he also directed music at the university or a slip of the reporter’s pen? Further evidence of his early involvement with the collegium has recently come to light. The original parts of the First Orchestral Suite (BWV 1066) date from 1724, and Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber reported that during the first six months of his Leipzig sojourn in 1724/5, before meeting Bach personally, he had heard not merely outstanding church music but ‘a good many concerts under Bach’s direction’ (see BD III, No. 476).

  h Michael Maul has uncovered evidence to suggest that this little interregnum was not of Bach’s volition. His former pupil-turned-tormentor, Johann Adolph Scheibe, was then in the midst of a campaign of self-promotion, paying heavy court to Carl Gotthelf Gerlach, a musician whose competence he had earlier set out to demolish in a coded attack as someone having no knowledge in composition – ‘Therefore he must always perform music by other composers, sometimes pretending to be the creator of these works.’ Bach seems to have been caught in the slipstream: either there had been a Putsch within the collegium to dispense with his services, or, thoroughly disgruntled, he left of his own accord (BJb (2010), pp. 153ff.). Had he been a little more sensitive to their situation, he might have seen that besides Gerlach, two other collegium colleagues, Johann Gottlieb Görner and Johann Schneider, had been mauled even more savagely by Scheibe – and instructed Magister Birnbaum to include them in his rebuttal. The fact that he didn’t probably meant that they in turn were indifferent to his decision to resign from the collegium musicum.

  i Every German child knows the Kaffee-Kanon by Carl Gottlieb Hering (1766–1853), which goes: C-a-f-f-e-e, trink nicht zu viel Kaffee, nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank, schwächt die Nerven, macht dich blass und krank. Sei doch kein Muselmann, der das nicht lassen kann! (‘C-o-f-f-e-e, don’t drink too much coffee. This Turkish brew is not for children, weakens your nerves and will make you sick and pale. Don’t be like a Muslim, who can’t keep his hands off it!’).

  j The layout of the Himmelsburg accords with what Christoph Wolff describes as ‘the Hebrew notion of the presence of the invisible prompted by a physical phenomenon’ (see Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), p. 339) – a concept that appealed to Bach, as can be deduced from the annotation he made in his Calov Bible to a section that deals with the presence of the invisible God at the divine service in the Temple. Verse 13 of 11 Chronicles 5 ends with the words, ‘when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music, and praised the Lord … then the house was filled with a cloud.’ At this point Bach added his celebrated comment: ‘NB Where there is devotional music, God with His grace is always present.’ (See Plate 13.) Wolff explains, ‘music prompted the appearance of the glory of God in the cloud, and the cloud demonstrated God’s presence.’

  k These numbers do not include servants and other workers whose choices for attendance were limited to a shorter midday service, ‘since they were prevented from attending the early service either because of lack of sitting– or standing-room or because of necessary and permissible work’ (Adam Bernd, Eigene Lebens-Beschreibung (1738), pp. 96–7).

  l Tanya Kevorkian (Baroque Piety: Religion, Society, and Music in Leipzig 1650–1750 (2007), p. 24) refers to the inappropriate kinds of luxury and fashion on display in the Leipzig churches. In 1742 councillors voiced their concerns about a particular style of dress, the Reifrock, with skirts so wide that women could injure themselves by falling off the plinth next to the baptismal font (‘Kirche zu St. Nicolaus Verordnungen und Nachrichten …’ (1740–83), Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Stift. IX.B.4).

  m In 1722 an electoral decree, reissued twice in the following years, attempted to counter the threat of a turbatio sacrorum brought about through ‘inappropriate walking to and fro during the sermon and by throwing [objects] from the galleries on to the women beneath’ (Christoph Ernst Sicul, Annalium Lipsiensium, Sectio XVII (1724), pp. 207–8). A Pietist writing to his father confessor wrote that ‘during services and especially during Communion, a public disgrace and abomination is carried on through excessive opulence in dress, alamodische styles and manners, fleshly shoving for precedence, and the envy and jealousy awakened by all of these’ (Johann Christian Lange in Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle, D57: 42–77, 55 (1695)). One councillor complained of ‘youth and other useless riffraff’ retiring to spaces behind the Capellen to make noise. These are among the documents examined by Tanya Kevorkian relating to this theme of congregational disruption (op. cit., p. 34).

  n Two and a half centuries later, in Oct. 1989, the Nikolaikirche saw 700 Party members and Stasi, prepared and armed for a riot, enter its walls. Surprised by their arrival, Pastor Christian Führer welcomed them to his church and treated them to an eloquent address on the subject of ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ (‘Blessed are the peace-makers’). It is a matter of conjecture whether the Stasi were more surprised by the sermon or by the peaceful candle-carrying procession that ensued.

  o They may have included members of the congregation who, as in Augsburg, felt that they needed more music (or a more silent ambience) than was usual in church, as Christian Gabriel Fischer reported after his visit there in 1731 (Nathanael Iacob Gerlach, Zwölffte Reise durch die mehresten Kreise Teutschlandes … Hoffe durch Christian Gabriel Fischer vom 3 April 1731 bis 12 Octobr 1731).

  p As we shall see in the next chapter and in the context of Bach’s church cantatas, we can conclude with John Butt that ‘music possesses an independent narrative function only when it does something exceptional, something that runs counter to the demands of the existing narrative’ (John Butt, ‘Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener?’, JRMA, Vol. 135, Special Issue 1 (2010), pp. 8–10).

  q As a foreign conductor invited to perform Bach’s church music in his homeland and leading a predominantly English choir and a thoroughly cosmopolitan group of instrumentalists (misleadingly called the English Baroque Soloists), I have been struck time and again by the exceptional attentiveness of German-speaking audiences, both in the former GDR and in the Federal Republic. Three hundred years after its inception, one senses this is still their music.

  r This appears in Chapter 8 of Forkel’s biography, when he describes how courteously Bach was received on his visits to the Dresden Opera with his eldest son: ‘He used to say in jest, some days before his departure, “Friedemann, shan’t we go again to hear the pretty little ditties?” Innocent as this joke was in itself, I am convinced that Bach would not have made it to anybody except his son, who, at that time, already knew what is great in art and what is only pretty and agreeable’ (J. N. Forkel, Ueber Johann Sebast
ian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke (1802), p. 86).

  s Why was he apparently unable to replicate, let alone build on, the unfeigned pastoral beauty of the Hunt Cantata composed in his Weimar years (BWV 208)? There, in the most famous of all of his pastoral mini tone-poems, ‘Schafe können sicher weiden’, known to English listeners as ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, he succeeds (not without a dash of sentimentality) in bridging the secular and sacred, so that behind the flattering homage paid to the beneficent aristocratic rule of Duke Christian of Weissenfels stands the caring image of Jesus the Good Shepherd.

  t We saw in Chapter 6 how Bach was drawn to the passage in I Chronicles 25 that relates to the elaborate use of music in Temple worship, seeing it as ‘the true foundation of all God-pleasing Kirchenmusik’ (Robin A. Leaver (ed.), J. S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary (1985), pp. 93–6).

  9

  Cycles and Seasons

  Rituals in Time are what the habitation is in Space. For it is good that the flow of time should not appear to us to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand, but should complete and strengthen us. It is right, too, that we see Time as a building-up. So I move from one feast-day to another, from anniversary to anniversary, from harvest-time to harvest-time, just as I went as a child from the council chamber to the bedroom within the thick walls of my father’s mansion, where every footstep had purpose.

  – after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle (1948)

  On the face of it, there is little reason for us to bother about Bach’s cantatas today. Never intended to be performed or listened to other than as part of a lengthy church service, they were composed (and rehearsed) each week at great speed to act as a foretaste of the Sunday sermon. The genre is essentially a bastard obsolescent form, ‘cobbled together from multiple styles of writing’.a Bach’s examples of the form were structured in an ungainly lopsided sequence – typically a long opening chorus, followed by pairs of exhorting recitatives and chastising arias, and then a closing hymn to wrap things up. Their texts (mostly anonymous) seldom rise above poetic doggerel, while the underlying theology is at times unappetising – mankind portrayed as wallowing in degradation and sinfulness, the world a hospital peopled by sick souls whose sins fester like suppurating boils and yellow excrement. What is one to make of a cantata (BWV 199) that opens with the words ‘My heart swims in blood, for sin’s brood turns me into a monster in God’s eyes … my sins are my executioners, as Adam’s seed robs me of sleep and I must hide from Him, He from whom even the angels conceal their faces’?1 Perhaps it comes as no surprise to find that only one cantata was published during Bach’s lifetime – BWV 71, Gott ist mein König, written for the inauguration of the Mühlhausen Town Council in 1708 – while at his death the bulk of them were distributed among four of his sons and his widow, but with scores and parts separated. Some cantatas lingered on for a while in the repertoire of his successors, a few were revived in bowdlerised form, many were sold, and an uncountable number disappeared into the recesses of church libraries or were lost for ever.b Some were used to light fires.

  So what is all the fuss about? If we are to believe the late Charles Rosen, ‘the fashionable placing of the cantatas as Bach’s principle achievement has only been harmful: it has led to an overemphasis on extra-musical symbolism.’ Great pianist that he was, Rosen not surprisingly felt ‘it is time to return to the old evaluation of Bach’s keyboard music as the centre of his work.’2 However, he failed to explain why the writers of the Nekrolog placed ‘five full annual cycles of church pieces [Kirchenstücke],c for all the Sundays and feast-days’ right at the head of Bach’s work-list of unpublished pieces if they – and Bach himself – had not believed them to be of huge importance. Bach saw himself as belonging to a line of north and central German organist–composers who considered themselves representatives of modern music within the life of the Lutheran church. Cycles were a constant theme and presence in his œuvre and a vital component of his cantatas. While the challenge for him was always to make every composition a complete and harmonious work in itself, composing in cycles gave him the possibility of moulding a single idea in multiple ways and of extending its expressive range beyond the horizons visible to any other composer of his time. Anton Webern grasped the significance of this in 1933 when he wrote, ‘You find everything in Bach: the development of cyclic forms, the conquest of the realm of tonality – the attempt at a summation of the highest order.’3 In terms of music intended for use in church, cycles opened up an inviting route for him to stretch his skills in mirroring the fullness and harmoniousness of God’s creation and in engaging deeply with what was essentially an ancient cosmology. For, as John Butt notes, ‘cyclic time is essential to a liturgical, ritualistic approach to religion, in which important events and aspects of dogma are celebrated within a yearly cycle.’4

  When the opportunity finally came for him to compose church cantatas on a monthly schedule at the Weimar Court, he met the challenge almost as though he were in training for more extended future ones. If we take, for example, the three cantatas he wrote for the Advent and Christmas season in 1714 and a fourth composed two years later, we see that they join naturally to form a plausible mini-cycle. Hearing them in sequence is a bit like opening the doors of a child’s Advent calendar: each is a brilliant cameo, a story linked by the underlying metaphor of the old year as the time of Israel and the new year as the time of Christ. The first, BWV 61, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (for Advent Sunday), addresses the hopes and fears of the Christian community in the context of Jesus’ birth as the beginning of God’s plan for our salvation. The second, BWV 70a, Wachet! Betet!, focuses on Christ’s second coming as judge of the world, beginning with an exhortation to watch and pray, and then alludes to Israel’s captivity in Egypt and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; dire warnings that ‘this is the end of time’ are, however, mitigated by a vision of release and final reconciliation. By way of contrast, BWV 63, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, celebrates Christmas itself as the long-awaited day of the fulfilment of God’s promise and the end of Israel’s captivity. Placed at the heart of this cantata’s symmetrical structure is the word Gnaden – the grace that comes with Christ’s birth and, with it, the release of humanity from sin and death – the very word that sanctifies music-making when two or three are gathered together with the right spirit: ‘Where there is devotional music, God with His grace is always present.’d

  Another word, Stein (‘stone’), lies at the centre of BWV 152, Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn, for the first Sunday after Christmas: it symbolises the cornerstone of faith set by God in Jesus’ incarnation, but also the way human inclination can take the form of a stumbling block to salvation. Bach and his librettist Salomo Franck make much of this duality – between humanity’s initial fall and the need for spiritual abasement, and the triumph of faith and the soul’s attainment of the crown as the terminus of the Glaubensbahn (the path, or ‘train’, of faith). It is constructed as an allegorical dialogue between Jesus (bass) and the Soul (soprano), an intimate chamber piece in which three archaic instruments – a recorder, a viola d’amore and a viola da gamba – standing for the old order (the Rock of Ages reinforced still more tellingly by the ‘old-fashioned’ counterpoint) are juxtaposed with a ‘modern’ oboe and basso continuo representing the new. You sense the evident pleasure Bach takes in the mixing and blending of these instrumental timbres before their final convergence to reflect the unity of Jesus and the Soul. Residual flaws in the genre itself seldom proved insurmountable for Bach, and he was rarely stumped for ways of getting round the problems of the texts in front of him – even when dull, peculiar or simply over the top. Indeed, there is such an astonishingly rich diversity and quality to these Weimar works that, had Bach never composed another cantata – that is, the 150 or so that have survived from his Leipzig years – he would still qualify as the most innovative composer of church music of his day. We have twenty-two immensely varied church cantatas from these years:
sparing and resourceful in their use of musical material, exuberant and sometimes dramatic in their response to their texts. His subsequent move to the Calvinist court at Cöthen in 1717 brought no further responsibility for church music. But if the next six years formed a period of Lutheran hibernation, they were far from wasted in terms of glorifying God: he was building up a rich store of secular works, admirable in themselves, and that had all the potential for recycling and transforming on to a higher level in years to come.

  The opportunity to resume composing cantatas, but on a far more regular basis than in the past, was one of the factors that weighed with Bach and a main reason why, after months of hesitation, he applied for the cantor’s job in Leipzig. Clearly he saw this as the chance to fulfil his Endzweck – the ‘ultimate goal’ of a ‘well-regulated church music to the glory of God’ (see this page). Indeed, it is as though he had reached a point where his desires as an artist were so imbued with strong religious leanings that he had to find an immediate outlet for them: there is no other logical explanation as to why he concentrated all his energies on composing cantatas over such a short period of time and to the virtual exclusion of all else. For, from the moment of his official induction as Thomascantor in Leipzig in the early summer of 1723, Bach set off at a pace of weekly church-cantata composition so furious that probably no one – not even he, with his extraordinary reserves of creative energy and powers of concentration – could sustain it for more than a couple of years (as indeed he didn’t). There is a sense of him saying to himself: ‘This is my time: I can do this.’ Far from being fallen wood-shavings from the great man’s workbench, the cantatas Bach went on to compose are substantial independent works in their own right. Now approaching the zenith of his powers, Bach poured some of his most striking creative energy into their individual shaping, voicing and content. What has come down to us is not just a residue of œuvres de circonstance, a splutter of glorious blazes ready for re-ignition in occasional performances today, but a procession of gripping musical works of exceptional worth.