From all this confusion there is one thing to emerge with near certainty: it looks as if Bach’s initial intentions at Leipzig were even more grandiose than scholars have generally supposed, and that at his appointment in 1723 he had set himself the task of presenting his own music, mostly newly composed, some of it re-cast from his Weimar years, for at least the first two Jahrgänge, each cycle culminating with a Passion setting – radically new by Leipzig standards, theologically controversial in the case of the John in 1724, and ground-breaking and more time-consuming than he had expected in the case of the Matthew (in which he took a bigger swing at the ball), thus necessitating a deferral for a further two years.
In the midst of all this uncertainty Bach’s Second Leipzig Cycle came to a premature close on 25 March 1725 with the jubilant springtime cantata BWV 1, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (see diagram, Plate 16). This year, there was a rare coincidence of Palm Sunday (a movable feast) with the Feast of the Annunciation (with a fixed date). It needs little imagination to gauge the importance of this dual celebration to Leipzig worshippers, coming as it did towards the end of the forty days’ fasting period of Lent, during which they had heard no music in church. One hundred and twenty-five years later this was the first cantata to be published in Vol. 1 (out of forty-five) of the Bach-Gesellschaft (Bach Society) edition (hence its singular numbering), more than half of which was devoted to vocal music for the church. The subsequent numbering of the cantatas by BWV prefix was totally random and had nothing to do with the chronology of their composition.cc Both Schumann and Brahms were enthusiastic subscribers, and one wonders what they made of the inventive and masterly way Bach wove his contrapuntal textures around one of the most stirring of Lutheran hymns. The scoring is opulent and regal, redolent of the Epiphany cantata BWV 65 both in its ‘eastern’ instrumentation – horns, oboes da caccia and strings (but no recorders this time) – and in metre: a dignified ceremonial in F major for the opening chorale fantasia in which a grand choral proclamation of Nicolai’s tune is given out in long notes by the sopranos and the principal horn. As with Bach’s only other cantata for Palm Sunday (the skittish and much smaller-scale Weimar cantata BWV 182), the crowd’s greeting is stirring and jubilant. A measure of what Bach had achieved by this time in his handling of this form comes with the movement’s climax, his setting of the last line, Hoch und sehr prächtig erhaben (‘Highly and most splendidly exalted’), full of majesty and splendour. The effect is overwhelming – inspiration underpinned by unobtrusive skill.dd
The reasons for Bach leaving the chorale cycle incomplete at this point are unclear, but, whatever the cause, it was a breach he tried to repair in subsequent years by the insertion of appropriate chorale cantatas for this final segment, such as BWV 112 and 129. Meanwhile, for Easter Sunday 1725 Bach revived the earliest of his chorale cantatas, BWV 4, a worthy but by now old-fashioned addition to the cycle, and probably performed it in the university church; while for the two main churches he made a hasty parody of a (lost) Weissenfels pastoral cantata (BWV 249a) as Kommt, gehet und eilet, later to be revised as the ‘Easter Oratorio’, Kommt, eilet und laufet (BWV 249) – which, in the meditative beauty of its slow second movement (with its aura of a Venetian oboe concerto) and its long soprano aria with flute obbligato, catches the sense of loss at Christ’s death and the feeling that the use of spices and embalming ointments could now be superseded by the power of musical prayer. Resurrection has not yet fully registered in the believer’s mind.
After Easter he then resumed his production of cantatas by setting a group of texts, including nine by the Leipzig-born poet Christiane Mariane von Ziegler that may have been planned as sequels to the John Passion the previous year.ee What appeared to be a makeshift solution turned into a post-Resurrection sequence of twelve outstanding works, all beginning with biblical dicta, all with poetic texts that turned out to be more closely interrelated than any to be found in his other cantata sequences, and reflecting the liturgically unified character of the ‘Great Fifty Days’.19
The ‘Great Fifty Days’ from Easter to Whitsun were rooted in the Jewish tradition of marking the seven weeks plus one day between Passover (the Feast of Unleavened Bread) and Pentecost/Shavuot (the Feast of the Weeks, and also the Day of the Ceremony (Bikkurim) of First Fruits – harvest, in other words). They signalled the completion of Jesus’ work on earth, his last appearances to his disciples, his valedictory message to them to bolster their faith, and his promise to protect them through the coming of the Holy Spirit. It is thus a season of contrasts – of joy at Christ’s resurrection and reappearances, clouded by the prospect of his departure and the adversarial pressures of life in the temporal world. This duality between a world deprived of Jesus’ light and physical presence and a world of increasing spiritual darkness is very palpable in Bach’s cantata for Easter Monday, BWV 6, Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden. One senses that Bach had the final chorus of his John Passion, if not on his writing desk then still ringing in his ears when he sat down to compose this cantata, with which it shares in its opening chorus both the sarabande-like gestures of ‘Ruht wohl’ and the key of C minor with its characteristic sweet-sad sonority. (Since this chorus was omitted in the revival of the John in 1725, as we shall see, it strengthens the argument that BWV 6 and its two sequels belonged in Bach’s mind to the previous year’s cycle – and were perhaps even sketched then.)
But where the Passion epilogue is elegiac and consolatory, the cantata is tinged with the sadness of bereavement. Its tender pleadings for enlightenment become ever more gestural and urgent in a darkening world from which Jesus’ presence has been removed. It manages to be both narrative (evoking the grieving disciples’ journey to Emmaus as darkness falls) and universal at the same time (the basic fear of being left alone in the dark, both literally and metaphorically). The overall mood is one of descent and abandonment, a direction reversed by the subtle weaving in of a theological message to the faithful – to hold on to the Word and sacrament, those mainstays of Christian life in the world after Jesus’ physical departure. Bach finds a way of ‘painting’ these two ideas by juxtaposing the curve of descent via trajectories of downward modulation with the injunction to remain steadfast – threading twenty-five Gs, then thirty-five Bs played in unison by violins and violas all through the surrounding dissonance. This device is linked to the disciples’ pleas to Jesus to remain, intoned nine times during the ensuing choral fugue. We might see in the collision of these two ideas an affinity with Caravaggio’s first portrayal of the Supper at Emmaus: beyond the obvious parallel of contrasted planes of light and darkness is the further dichotomy of serenity and reassurance on the one hand – Christ in the act of blessing the meal affirms his identity and presence and seems to extend his hand of comfort right out of the canvas towards the viewer – and on the other, urgency, evident in the impulsive, theatrical gestures of the two disciples painted directly from life. It is religious drama presented as contemporary quotidian life, rather as if Bach were seeking to capture, here and in the next two movements, the disciples’ despondency in the Saxon twilight he observed outside his study window.
One of Bach’s most engaging habits we encounter in these cantatas is his turning to individual instruments, either alone or in various combinations, for expressive ends. In his hands they do a great deal more than just create special effects or moods, and it has been argued (by Eric Chafe and others) that they serve to underpin abstract theological ideas and associative links from work to work. But above all their presence creates immediacy in the listener’s consciousness. We come across heart-stopping moments in arias of both cycles where Bach’s chosen obbligato instrument – most often oboe or violin and, on rare and wonderful occasions, flute – complements the voice and adds a new layer of expression and meaning, beyond the reach of words.ff
Particularly noticeable in these final dozen cantatas is the rich and prominent use he gives to two specific instruments, each with a unique timbre and compass: the violon
cello piccolo and the oboe da caccia (see Plates 21 and 22). With its beguiling, wide-ranging sonority the violoncello piccolo has a smaller soundbox than the normal full-sized cello and (sometimes) a fifth string that extends its treble range. Both instruments are used wonderfully in successive movements of BWV 6, the da caccia as the chief agent in a dance-like appeal for Jesus’ continued presence (No. 2), the cello piccolo in a wide-ranging, mediating role between voice and continuo (No. 3). Bach is so enamoured of them that he uses the oboe da caccia in six and the cello piccolo in five of the twelve cantatas from the final segment of his second cycle, deliberately seeking out roles for their qualities that are central to his poetic and interpretative approach. Both have a plangent sonority in the tenor register that seems to tug on the listener’s heartstrings, but where the sound of the little cello suggests something essentially benign and consoling, the oboe da caccia tends to be used to convey suffering and anguish. As we shall see, Bach turns to it in the Matthew Passion at intense moments of suffering – for the Agony in the Garden (‘O Schmerz’), his innocence in the Roman trial (‘Aus Liebe’), his Crucifixion (‘Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand’) and burial (‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’). Bach does something equally compelling in the D minor aria ‘Vergib, o Vater’ (‘Forgive, O Father, all our sins and be patient with us yet’) from BWV 87, Bisher habt ihr nichts gebeten in meinem Namen, by drawing on paired oboes da caccia to merge with his alto soloist against ascending arpeggios in the continuo. In this way gestures of grief and entreaty are registered concurrently – and primarily by instrumental means. A fortnight earlier, in BWV 85, Ich bin ein guter Hirt, he had used the cello piccolo in a meditation on Christ the Good Shepherd, profiting from the special glow it brings both in range and in harmonic function. You sense that with this mantra-like sound, any ‘lamb’ would feel confidently armed against the sheep-rustler – wolf, fox or human. At the start of the calendar year, in BWV 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, Bach had composed for the five-string model (with a range extending from its lowest string, C, up to B three octaves above in the treble clef) as though to encompass the duality of earth and heaven and to mirror God’s control of human affairs both physical and spiritual (see Plate 23).
Jubilate (the third Sunday after Easter) in Leipzig marked the start of the Ostermesse, the Easter trade fair, when, for three weeks, a flood of visitors – book dealers, craftsmen, hawkers and international commercial travellers – swelled the resident population to some 30,000 citizens. Bach, who timed the publication of the four sets of his Clavier-Übung to coincide with these fairs, would have understood the need to provide special music for this Sunday (when no trading was allowed), ‘since visitors and distinguished gentlemen [would] certainly want to hear something fine in the principal churches’, as his predecessor Kuhnau had pointed out.20 All three of Bach’s surviving cantatas for Jubilate (BWV 12, 103 and 146) concern themselves with the sorrow surrounding Jesus’ farewell to his followers, with the trials that await them in his absence, and with joyful thoughts of seeing him again. Each is a journey, a musical and emotive progression – from profound gloom and anguish to euphoric celebration – based on the Gospel for the day: ‘Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy’ (John 16:20), from which BWV 103, Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, takes its title. It seems a little strange, therefore, to find that it opens with a glittering fantasia for a concertante violin doubled on this occasion by another unusual instrument – a soprano recorder in D, known as a ‘sixth flute’. These two are pitted against a pair of oboes d’amore and the rest of the strings, who engage in (apparently) festive dialogue. Only with the entry of the four vocal concertisten to an angular fugal theme (comprising an augmented second and an upwards seventh) do we realise that we have been caught unawares: Bach’s bubbly instrumental theme represents not the disciples’ joy at Christ’s resurrection but the sceptics’ jeering laughter at their distress – hence the malicious cackles of the high recorder.
With Pentecost only ten days away, Bach conspired with Frau von Ziegler to review and reassemble in BWV 183, Sie werden euch in den Bann tun, many of the themes that together they had brought to the surface in the past five weeks through their collaboration: worldly persecution (No. 1), suffering mitigated by Jesus’ protection (No. 2), comfort afforded by Jesus’ spirit (No. 3), surrender to the guidance of the Holy Spirit (No. 4) and the Spirit’s role in pointing to prayer as humanity’s means to obtain divine help (No. 5). In a terse and dramatic curtain-raiser, a five-bar accompagnato, Bach assigns the opening Spruch to four oboes (two d’amore and two da caccia), a permutation unique in his output outside the Christmas Oratorio and drastically different from his solution the previous year when for the identical line in BWV 44 he took eighty-seven bars for a duet and a further thirty-five bars for a chorus. This time the Spruch is dwarfed by its sequel, a hugely demanding aria in E minor for tenor with four-stringed cello piccolo, in which the singer insists that he does not fear the terror of death, while every ornate, feverish syncopation and rhythmic sub-pattern belies it. Meanwhile, the cello maintains its serene and luminous course with sweeping arpeggios. It is an intimate scena in which we can follow the believer in his struggles to overcome his fear of persecution and eventual extinction, sustained all the while by the soothing sounds of his companion, the Schutzarm (Jesus’ protective arm) referred to in the text – the cello piccolo.
Whit Sunday might seem a strange day for a graphic depiction of hell. That, however, is the purpose of the alto aria ‘Nichts kann mich erretten’ from BWV 74, Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten, which makes demands of a solo violin at the opposite end of the expressive spectrum usually associated with Bach’s writing for that instrument. He seems determined to convey to his listeners with stark realism the image of hellish chains being rattled by Jesus in his struggle with worldly forces. Accordingly he sets up battle formations for his three oboes and strings, asking his violinist to execute fiendish bariolage, with the lowest arpeggiated note falling not on, but just after, the beat. The effect is both disjointed and invigorating. Soon the vocal line embarks on arpeggios that appear trapped within the vehement dialectic, as though it were trying to work itself free from the hellish shackles. At times this search for belief is plaintive, with cross-accented phrases reinforced by the oboe and solo violin against a menacing thud of repeated semiquavers. In the B section victory seems assured and the singer ‘laughs at Hell’s anger’ against colossal smashing chords by the winds and strings in triple and quadruple stops. The gloating comprises chains of tripletised melismas and a descent of an octave and a half before the da capo. Bach draws on illustrative techniques from opera, though not gratuitously: they serve an impeccable theological purpose, while the results must have been vastly entertaining to an audience still grieving for the loss of its opera house.
At this point Bach was near to completing his ambitious design for the twelve Sundays leading up to Trinity Sunday, based on biblical citations. His settings of John’s words are full of purpose, never more so than in the final chorus of BWV 68, Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt, when, in place of a chorale, he puts to his listeners the chilling choice between salvation and judgement in the present life: ‘He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already’ (John 3:18). Bach’s setting is as uncompromising as the text: a double fugue whose two subjects describe the alternatives, the voices doubled by his familiar alliance of archaic brass instruments, a cornett and three trombones. His contrapuntal working-out is full of the disciplined energy and invention we have come to expect, but the way it ends seems designed to give a sharp jolt to the congregation. He suddenly assigns the first subject to a new accusing text – ‘because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God’ – once loud, once soft. The second day of Pentecost may have been a time of celebration, elation and relief brought by the Holy Spirit (and that indeed is the tenor of the cantata’s earlier movements), but in projecting a world starkly div
ided between believers and sceptics, Bach would have left the congregation pondering.
Ziegler’s poetic contributions needed to be fitted to two pre-existing movements (Nos. 2 and 4), both festive in character, adapted by Bach from his Hunting Cantata (BWV 208) of 1713. Sometimes in Bach we come across a joyous inner spirit barely contained by a law-abiding artistic intellect. For example, the soprano aria ‘Mein gläubiges Herze’, one of his most unbuttoned expressions of melodic joy and high jinks (the polar opposite of those slow, extended meditations of the beleaguered Christian we encountered in the Epiphany season). In its original secular form the leaping dance-like bass mirrors the sheep gambolling as they are turned out to pasture every spring. The continuo line is once again allocated to a five-string violoncello piccolo, Bach’s chosen vehicle for announcing Jesus’ presence in the physical world – his second incarnation within the believer’s heart. On the last page of the manuscript he appended an instrumental coda, adding an oboe and violin to the piccolo cello and its continuo. At twenty-seven bars this occupies nearly three quarters of the length of the aria, almost as if the singer’s words were inadequate to express the full joy at the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the second of the arias Bach succeeds in fitting Ziegler’s paraphrase of Verse 17 of John’s Gospel to music he previously assigned to Pan, the god of woods and shepherds, who ‘makes the land so happy / that forest and field and all things live and laugh’. The retention of a trio of pastoral oboes is the key to the grafting process by which Bach externalises the message of joy caused by Jesus’ presence on earth.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven Page 45
