Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
Page 41
Bach extends his theme over four consecutive Sundays, for at some point he must have realised how aptly two of his Weimar cantatas (BWV 21 and 185) could be re-worked to round it out. In reviving BWV 21, Ich hatte viel Bekümmerniss, which had already grown into one of his more impressive works, Bach was able to enrich the duality of love of God and one’s neighbour with a vision of eternity as man’s eschatological goal. Remembering how the librettist Salomo Franck of BWV 185, Barmherziges Herze, had written that ‘the art of the Christian’ is ‘to know only God and myself, to burn with true love, not to judge unduly, nor nullify another’s deeds, not to forget one’s neighbour and to mete out ample measure’, Bach saw an opportunity to recycle this modestly scored work for four voices and strings with just an oboe and clarino in support. A further advantage to including these two earlier works was that it allowed him to display to his congregation a wide range of compositional styles painted on canvases of strikingly different sizes. It was a means, too, for him to gauge his listeners’ preferences.
Bach’s task all through this First Leipzig Cycle (see diagram, Plate 15) was to keep pace with the weekly demand. In the process he created forty new cantatas, binding them thematically in subunits to provide continuity and clarity, while remembering which earlier pieces could fit comfortably into the weave of this unfolding tapestry without stylistic disturbance. There was the copying out of parts and guiding his (as yet) untried group of young musicians in how to negotiate the hazards of his startling and challenging music with a bare minimum of rehearsal – tasks we explored in the previous chapter. Come the day, there was first a long, cold wait in an unheated church, then a single shot at a daunting target. Then, without a backward glance, on to the next, maintaining a relentless rhythm. For all the invention and originality of these initial works, this was a sequence to allay the fears of the Leipzig authorities, so suspicious of anything ‘operatic’ being heard in church; in comparison with the works he would go on to compose, there was at this stage nothing to alarm them.
With the long Trinity season stretching from late May to late November came a persistent thematic emphasis in the Lutheran lectionary on sin and sickness in mind and body. ‘The whole world is but a hospital’ declares the tenor at one point in BWV 25, Es ist nichts Gesundes an meinem Leibe: Adam’s Fall has ‘defiled us all and infected us with leprous sin’.k Sickness, raging fever, leprous boils and the ‘odious stench’ of sin are described in detail in the text of this cantata, making no concession to the listener’s delicacy of feeling or potential queasiness. Although the unknown librettist builds to an impassioned appeal to Christ as the ‘healer and helper of all’ to cure and show mercy, it is Bach’s music that completes the spiritual journey for us. As listeners we sense this happening, but it is difficult to say how he affects a change in our perception of what the words are saying. Take the opening chorus with its gloomy description of a sin-ridden world: ‘there is no soundness in my flesh because of Thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones, because of my sin’ (Psalm 38:3). Having set things in motion to underscore the words by every corroborative means he could devise (two-voiced canons, sighing motifs and unstable harmonies modulating downwards), Bach had, one might imagine, exhausted his expressive arsenal, but not so. In the fifteenth bar he brings in a separate ‘choir’ made up of three recorders, a cornett and three trombones to intone the familiar ‘Passion Chorale’,l one phrase at a time. Bach has added an independent commentary of his own which gradually works its magic, instilling the idea of hope and consolation. Here he reaches out to his listeners, his music serving as a kind of spiritual blood transfusion, in which the critical agency in the healing process emanates from the music, not the words.
Time and again in these early Leipzig works we notice how Bach’s most persuasive cantata-writing is all about helping listeners to see what choices they have in life, in showing them an ideal (‘heaven’), then focusing on the real world and how to deal with it – in terms of attitude, behaviour and conduct. This explains why his cantatas appear to escape their historical and liturgical confinement and reach out to us today. Thoughts and feelings that we have had find expression through Bach, but with so much more candour and clarity than we can ever muster. Then he draws together all the strands of exegetical gloss he has given to the devotional themes in the course of the work in a closing chorale (usually but not always) perfectly adjusted to its situation within the emotional scheme. This was a moment of comfort for his listeners, bringing them back to the here and now of their quotidian concerns – to a ‘sane’ present. For, however strange or complex the new cantor’s music was in the opening movements of his cantatas, the chorale was a familiar point of reference – a return to territory to which they could respond either by singing along with the melody or just by following inwardly.
Successive penitential cantatas follow, maintaining this seasonal campaign of catechismal strafing, sometimes reinforced, sometimes tempered, by Bach’s music. We become accustomed to the way the human actor is positioned by the librettist in scenarios of faith and doubt, sin and Satan. The curious thing is that all this heavy theological attack neither blunts the audacity of Bach’s musical response nor diminishes the humanity of his sympathy with the faithful. For, although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them (just as such lives come to seem enormous the instant they are richly imagined and minutely observed by novelists such as Tolstoy or Flaubert). In this he exemplifies what Vico called fantasia: a faculty of imaginative insight or a capacity to get into the skin of others, or what Herder later called Einfühlung (‘empathy’).8
This comes to the surface in a work like BWV 105, Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht, in which the penitent servant rues ‘the errors of my [his] soul’. Bach turns to a device, a commonplace Baroque representation of anxiety, the tremolo, requiring his string players to make pulsated reiterations by twos or fours under a single bow stroke (a technique sometimes called ‘bow vibrato’)m and uses it astutely in three of the cantata’s six movements: first to represent the ‘unjust steward’ waiting nervously, knowing that he is about to be dismissed for failing to collect his master’s dues (Luke 16:1–9), then to represent the quivering conscience of the sinner, fixing the idea in the listener’s ear by means of the persistent thrum of semiquavers assigned to the two violins and the quaver-pulsed viola line tapping out a light but inescapable symbol of mental distress: ‘How the thoughts of sinners / Tremble and reel / As they accuse / And then dare to excuse one another / Thus is the anguished conscience / Torn asunder by its own torture.’ There is both a crystalline fragility to this soprano aria and a fragmented lyricism in the melodic line, first for oboe, then for the voice. They exchange tentative proposals and reticent retractions – two ‘voices’ echoing one another within a single mind manifestly at odds with itself. Bach avoids all melodrama. Where another composer might have seized on the obvious opportunities for vivid mimesis of the ‘anguished conscience’, Bach instead opts for a subtle and essentially human approach, varying his chromatic and diatonic harmonies to convey the mood-swings of a mind in a state of constant vacillation: tempted, resisting, succumbing, resisting again, achieving repose only with the final cadence (which even so we sense is only provisional). Then, in the finale chorale, to convey the progressive stilling of the sinner’s troubled conscience, he returns to the tremulant device of the cantata’s opening movement. First he plants pulsating semiquavers in the instrumental lines, then slows them down to triplet, then duplet quavers, then slower still to tripletised crotchets, and finally to plain crotchets chromatically descending – a gradual winding down to the point where both voices and continuo fall silent. It is a brilliantly graphic and original means to describe the release of the spirit from its earthly encasement.
At this dis
tance it is easy to empathise with the deeply human way Bach lays out the various choices we all have to face at different stages in our lives – the blind alleys we pursue, the temptations and the price we often have to pay for following or giving in to them, the various ploys for easing our troubled consciences. While the word-painting here is subtle and the imagery generally easier to grasp than in several other cantatas (much helped by the atypically high quality of the libretto), the real pleasure comes in following Bach’s prodigious musical inventiveness as it develops: those ideas which sparked his fantasy in the first place, and then the techniques used in presenting and elaborating them.
The relationship between this cantata and that for the following Sunday, BWV 46, Schauet doch und sehet, is far too close to be accidental. It goes beyond the obvious facts that they share warnings against sin, fear of reprisal in the shape of God’s harsh judgement and the same (by no means unique) symmetrical six-movement layout (chorus – recitative – aria – recitative – aria – chorale). For example, both draw on bassetchen texture (105/iii, 46/v) and both have highly unusual final movements in which the chorale is embedded within an independent orchestral setting, with interludes for upper strings (105/vi) and two recorders (46/ vi), in both cases unsupported by continuo. Even the tremulant device, such a prominent feature of BWV 105, reappears (perhaps to jog the listener’s short-term memory) in the second part of a storm-scene bass aria (BWV 46/iii), changing the mood of martial menace to one of anxious waiting for God’s vengeance to strike – and marked to be performed pianissimo. Most importantly, both cantatas announce themselves in grand opening movements structured as a chorale prelude and fugue to mirror the sentence divisions of the biblical text.
There are signs here of the way Bach was already thinking ahead to Passiontide, the two choruses revealing features we associate with the opening tableau of the John Passion (see this page): in BWV 46, the same pronounced sighing figure in the violas; and, in BWV 105, imploring choral shouts of Herr! Herr! linked to similar harsh suspensions in the upper instruments, and the same throbbing bass line and G minor tonality. BWV 46 begins as a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem in the words of Jeremiah (Lamentations 1:12). Jesus’ prophecy of the Roman destruction in AD 70 is recounted in the Gospel of the day (Luke 19:41–8), and both on this Sunday and on Good Friday in the Leipzig churches there were annual readings of the Roman historian Josephus’ account of the event as well as John’s Passion narration. By alluding to it here, Bach’s musical narrative is able to span separate historical eras – from that of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah to that of Jesus – and brand these successive catastrophes in the believer’s mind, giving them the form of metaphors for his self-inflicted woes, just as there is a similar spanning of time zones in his Passions.
It might have taken him nine or ten Sundays to get fully into his stride and develop these elaborate contrapuntal choruses, but from this point on there is no turning back. Bach had set out to develop a new cantata style in Leipzig, distinct from the works he had written earlier, and by reviving four Weimar cantatas in previous weeks he had given himself additional time to reflect and elaborate on it. BWV 105 and 46 are the result. Preference for one or the other of these imposing cantatas is a matter of personal choice, but one could easily be seduced by the richer instrumentation of BWV 46 – two recorders, two oboes da caccia and a slide trumpet added to the normal string ensemble – and by the fact that its first (‘Prelude’) section came to be re-used to the words Qui tollis peccata mundi in the Gloria of the B minor Mass, evidence of how highly Bach himself valued it.n Taken together, one senses that Bach intended the cantatas of these two weeks to form a musico-theological climax to this early Trinity season.
With summer giving way to autumn, the focus of the appointed texts for each Sunday is on the hazards of living in society – with warnings against false prophets and hypocrites and how to live righteously in a sin-affected world. One could choose any of the thirty cantatas he included from the start of his first cycle up to Christmas to illustrate this progression. Midway through BWV 93, Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, Bach has his tenor exclaim, ‘There is death in the pots!’ – an allusion likely to have puzzled even his Bible-reading congregation. (It turns out to be Elisha’s reaction in a time of death to an unappetising dish prepared for him which he somehow makes edible ‘for the people’ (II Kings 4:40–41) – an apt metaphor for Bach’s skill in regularly converting the hard doctrinal crust of this unpromising Trinitarian fare into something both palatable and varied.) Having already acquired the knack of how to vivify a doctrinal message and, when appropriate, of delivering it with a hard dramatic kick, he is now exploring ways of how and when to balance it with music of an emollient tenderness, humouring and softening the severity of his texts while in no way blunting their impact. Time and again one senses Bach’s exceptional level of engagement with the words, his music going far beyond literal mimesis or the codified use of conventional figures and symbols. (Bach’s complex braiding of words and music will be the subject of Chapter 12, where we will encounter more of his inaugural Leipzig cantatas.)
As autumn passes to winter the themes of the week become steadily grimmer as the faithful are urged to reject the world, its lures and snares, and to focus on eventual union with God – or risk the horror of permanent exclusion. From week to week this dichotomy appears to grow harsher, with the stress on sin and guilt deepening as the weather worsens. To convey the inner conflict between belief and doubt in BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben!, we find him assigning two opposing ‘voices’, sung by the same singer, one marked forte, the other piano. (How Schumann – the creator of Florestan and Eusebius, who hated to express himself in a single unified voice – would have loved this.) Polarity of a different kind is suggested in BWV 90, Es reißet euch ein schrecklich Ende – between the terrifying outcome that awaits sinners at the Last Judgement and the protection God guarantees to ‘His elect’. Bach opens with a ‘rage’ aria of unflagging energy – with tirades and flourishes of fourteen consecutive demisemiquavers, big jumps in tessitura, curtailed phrase-endings and dramatic pauses mid-word (schreck … lich). This is as theatrically extreme as anything his listeners (and performers) might have encountered during the years when Leipzig had its own opera house (1693–1720)9 – and not what they would normally expect to hear in church – and the first time he had risked this flagrant breach of protocol.
For his final cantata of the Trinity season, BWV 70a, Wachet! betet! betet! wachet!, with its play on words, Bach increases the voltage. In flanking accompagnati now added to his earlier Weimar cantata, with their repeated semiquavers hammered out in Monteverdi’s stile concitato (the ‘excited style’), Bach anticipates by many years the inherently operatic outbursts of two of Handel’s most formidable stage heroines: Dejanira, the unhinged wife in Hercules (1745) (‘Where shall I fly?’), and Storgè, the outraged mother in Jephtha (1752), (‘First perish thou!’). But it is not merely the full-throttle openings of these dramatic scenes that beg comparison with this cantata: Bach is a match for his Saxon contemporary at every step – in the power of his vocal declamation, in the vividly supportive orchestral accompaniment he invents to portray the cataclysmic destruction of the world and in the seraphic transition he achieves as Jesus finally guides the believer to complete ‘stillness, to that place of abundant joy’. In these two cantatas that bring the Trinity season to a close, Bach seems – presumably unintentionally – to have taken on his peer group of Italian-opera composers and beaten them at their own game. (This is all part of the evolution of a mutant form of opera proposed in Chapter 4.) In the process he manifestly broke the pledge he had given to the council barely six months previously – not to make compositions that were ‘too theatrical’ or of the kind he had composed in Weimar. As we shall soon see these were not not momentary slips but by now a habitual transgression – hugely entertaining and to be relished by a congregation numbed by cold and four hours on a ha
rd pew.
With Bach’s approach to his first Christmas season in Leipzig the mood lightens. After the Advent tempus clausum comes a collective intake of breath, followed by an explosion of festive music. A cluster of brand-new works suddenly appears on the music stands of the Thomaner – nine major pieces for them to master and deliver over the next sixteen days in three of the city’s churches. In his mind Bach must have set aside this first break in the cycle as the time to accelerate his speed of weekly composition.o In less than a month he would need to complete music for seven feasts, from Christmas Day through to the first Sunday after Epiphany: six new cantatas – BWV 40, 64, 190, 153, 65 and 154 – and two Latin works in a separate but equally challenging idiom – a compact Sanctus in D (BWV 238) and the Magnificat in E major (BWV 243a), more familiar nowadays in its later D-major version (BWV 243). These two were to be performed in tandem with his grand Weimar cantata BWV 63, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, on Christmas Day. A glance at the schedule reveals the immensity and relentlessness of the assignment Bach set for himself and his performing ensemble: