Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  Trinity Sunday marks the last in the sequence of nine cantatas to texts by Christiane Mariane von Ziegler. The title of BWV 176, Es ist ein trotzig und verzagt Ding, translates as ‘There is something stubborn [or defiant or wilful] and yet fainthearted [or despondent or despairing] about the human heart.’ All the permutations of these adjectives apply to Bach’s setting, an arresting portrayal of the human condition – and might also reflect his own views, particularly as regards the intractable attitude of the Leipzig authorities. By interpreting the story of Nicodemus’ furtive nocturnal visit as a general human tendency Ziegler, working in cahoots with Bach, it seems, had given him the opportunity to set up a dramatic antithesis between headstrong aggression and lily-livered frailty. He opens with a defiant, indignant presentation of this Spruch, a terse, four-part choral fugue set against a string fanfare reminiscent of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. That applies to the first half only, with a rushing melisma up to the minor ninth on trotzig (‘defiant’) and then, at its peak, a melting and sighing figure over sustained strings to underscore the verzagt (‘despondent’) side of things. This ascending and descending contour persists throughout the fugue, two and a half expositions without ritornellos, the voices doubled by the three oboes, while the strings alternate between the vigorous Brandenburg motif and plaintive, sustained counterpoint.gg The exploration of these twin facets of human behaviour persists all through this cantata: the juxtaposition of Nicodemus (night) and Jesus (day) presented in the alto recitative (No. 2) is implied in the soprano gavotte aria in B (No. 3), in which the timid, hesitant yet happy believer is singled out as a contrast with the rebellious mind portrayed in the opening chorus. Nicodemus is personified in the bass recitative (No. 4), to which Bach adds the words ‘for whosoever believes in Thee, shall not perish’ to Ziegler’s text and sets them as an extended arioso to underline their significance. In the final aria, ‘Ermuntert euch, furchtsam und schüchterne Sinne’ (‘Have courage, fearful, timorous spirits’), a trinity of oboes in symbolic unison accompanies the alto. Just when the unwary might imagine Bach is going to end there on the subdominant, he breaks the symmetry by adding two more bars. With this dénouement at a far higher pitch, he asserts the essence of the Trinity – ein Wesen, drei Personen (‘one essence, three persons’) – and the remoteness of God in His relationship to humankind. And so in this way he signs off this mini-cycle of twelve cantatas spanning the period between Easter and Trinity Sunday 1725 with a cantata crammed with provocative thoughts and musical exegesis. Bach had come full circle.

  In the opening stanza of his Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934) T. S. Eliot berates modern society for losing faith in God, casting it in non-Christian symbols:

  The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

  O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

  O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

  O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

  The endless cycle of idea and action,

  Endless invention, endless experiment,

  Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

  Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

  Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

  All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

  All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

  But nearness to death no nearer to God.

  Where is the Life we have lost in living?

  Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

  The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

  Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

  The pity is that Eliot did not know Bach’s cantata cycles (though he might have heard individual movements). If he had, he might have appreciated that in Bach’s music the cycles of Heaven can bring us closer to God. They could also be telling us that the Dust is not the enemy, but part of our daily existence.hh At that point Eliot might genuinely have agreed with Thomas à Becket, when he has him say,

  I have had a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper,

  And I would no longer be denied; all things

  Proceed to a joyful consummation.21

  * * *

  a Johann Mattheson describes its succession of recitatives and arias as belonging to the ‘madrigal style’ (by which he probably meant the current operatic style), its polyphonic choruses and fugues to the ‘motet style’, accompaniments and interludes to the ‘instrumental style’, and finally its chorales to the ‘melismatic style’ (Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739); Ernest C. Harriss (trs.) (1981), p. 215).

  b Christoph Wolff estimates that nearly two fifths of the cantatas were lost one way or another because the estate was split up (The World of the Bach Cantatas (1997), Vol. 1 p. 5).

  c Kirchenstück was just one of several names (including Stück or just plain Musik) given to what for convenience scholars and musicians have called ‘cantatas’. From the strangely promiscuous descriptions Bach appended to his earliest works – actus (BWV 106), concerto (BWV 61), motteto (BWV 71) – with the appellation cantata confined to just two early works, both for solo voice (BWV 52 and 199), we can see that the title was manifestly not of primary significance.

  d This, as we have already mentioned, was an annotation (see Plate 13) Bach made in the margin of his copy of Abraham Calov’s Die Deutsche Bibel (see The Calov Bible of J. S. Bach, Howard H. Cox (ed.) (1985)), catalogued in his library in 1733. But since this and other equally illuminating personal marginal notes reveal to us the biblical foundations of his vocation as a church musician, some scholars think that Bach could have been familiar with Calov’s commentary at a much earlier date – when his activity in composing church cantatas was at its most intense. Bach clearly prized Calov’s commentary greatly. When he bought at a book auction in 1742 a copy of the seven-volume Altenburg edition of Luther’s Schriften that had once belonged to Calov, he added a note saying that he felt this was what Calov ‘probably used to compile his great Tütsche Bibel’ (see Robin A. Leaver, Bach’s Theological Library (1983), p. 42). The three Calov volumes were the first to be listed in the inventory of his estate drawn up after his death in 1750.

  e This was anathema to those who, like Scheibe, preached the gospel of new music, advocating the replacement of ‘artificial’ polyphony by simple, easily comprehended melody. Bach was soon accused of being the victim of his own unassailable skill: he expected his young singers and players to replicate the complex sounds that he could produce on the organ; and his habit of annotating even the most minute ornaments not only took ‘away from his pieces the beauty of harmony but completely [covered] the melody throughout’ (BD II, No. 400/NBR, p. 338). Scheibe simply misunderstood. It is the test of any Bach interpreter to avoid this happening: the skill lies in giving judicious weight to the individual lines so that they converse on an equal footing. The opening bars of a Bach cantata are an invitation to enter – and complete – a separate world of rhythm and harmony, complex yet lucid, transparent yet utterly mesmerising – an enthralling river into which the imagination can plunge.

  f The Lutherans adopted the historic lectionary that goes back to St Jerome in the fifth century AD and was standardised 300 years later by Charlemagne’s spiritual adviser Alcuin, who shortened both the Gospel readings and the Epistles so that they dealt with a specific topic each week. With the establishment in the thirteenth century of Trinity Sunday as a major festival of the church, so-called ‘Propers’ were then assigned for the entire year. Penitentiary texts predominate in the second half of the Trinity season and extend to its very end – the Lutherans adding Propers for Tr + 25 and + 26 as eschatological lessons designed to connect the end of human life with the end of all things.

  g The major languages spoken by both Jews and Greeks in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus were Aramaic and Koine Greek (and, to a limited extent, a colloquial dialect of Mishnaic Hebrew). All the books that we
re grouped together and eventually formed the New Testament were originally written in Koine Greek.

  h It appears in Revelation 21:4 (‘There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying’ and in 18:22 (‘And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee’).

  i Bach’s cousin Johann Gottfried Walther (Musicalisches-Lexicon (1732), p. 64) was the first writer to draw public attention to Bach’s frequent use of B-A-C-H in his compositions to express his surname – a cryptographic use of the simplest number alphabet, where A = 1, etc., with B in German standing for B and H for B, so both expressing the musical notes B-A-C-B and the numbers 2–1-3–8 = 14.

  j There is an alternative scenario in which Bach announced himself to his Leipzig public on Whit Sunday 1723 (16 May), two weeks before his reported arrival in the city. Alfred Dürr states categorically that the autograph of BWV 59, Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten, was written for Whit Sunday 1723 at the latest (although the surviving performing parts date from the following year). It is possible that before leaving Cöthen, Bach drew on some earlier material and assembled this four-movement cantata just in time for a 1723 premiere at Leipzig’s university church. This hypothesis is supported by a passage in one of his letters of complaint to the Saxon king in which Bach claimed that he ‘entered upon my University functions [in Leipzig] at Whitsunday, 1723’ (The Cantatas of J. S. Bach (2005), p. 350; BD I, No. 12/ NBR, p. 124).

  k BWV 25 was first performed on 29 Aug. 1723, the last of seven consecutive, interrelated cantatas all based on stern homiletic injunctions giving further expression to the core doctrines of faith already adumbrated in the first four Sundays of the Trinity season. They follow an identical ground plan: chorus – recitative – aria – recitative – aria – chorale.

  l So-called on account of Bach’s five-fold use of it in the Matthew Passion. Its famous tune by Hans Leo Hassler (1564–1622) was originally that of a love-song but was adapted to several hymn-texts. Probably the one Bach had in mind here was that based on Psalm 6, ‘Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder’ by Cyriacus Schneegass, whose fifth stanza sends a clear message of hope and relief. Apart from this, Bach’s weaving of this chorale into his contrapuntal fabric is an extraordinary technical feat, and the only time, incidentally, when he uses trombones other than to bolster the voices and add colour.

  m This is just one device that Bach could have learnt from Buxtehude, perhaps from his motet cycle Membra Jesu nostri or from his elder cousin Johann Christoph, who used it in his superb lament for bass, Wie bist du denn, O Gott.

  n The recorders also have a prominent role in the sequel – to illustrate Christ’s ‘brimming streams of tears’, set high above the sustained strings who inscribe nine successive bars without a common chord – and in anticipation of Jerusalem’s fall and Christ’s mercy in protecting the devout in a bassetchen aria for alto with oboes da caccia. They replicate that mood in episodes played between the lines of the final chorale – with the same cascade of semiquavers as well as melodic gestures recalling the opening chorus.

  o From the evidence of the hastily copied part-books for the cantatas, Bach was rarely able to compose ahead of schedule. However, his last newly composed work before Advent was BWV 90 on 14 Nov. Most of BWV 70 the following week had been pre-composed in Weimar and all of BWV 61 performed on 28 Nov., so that one could reason that he had almost six weeks in total to compose the Magnificat, his largest-scale vocal composition to date, and all the other works due for performance as part of his first Christmas festival.

  p Scholars have been quick to point to the smaller scale of a few works such as BWV 153 and 154 – so as ‘not to strain the choir unduly’ – requiring the choir to sing only simple four-part chorales or to have the help of instrumental doubling (BWV 64). But when was that ever a ‘compensation for the lack of rehearsal time’? (Christoph Wolff, Bach: The Learned Musician (2000), p. 264). In my experience, instrumental doubling by cornets and sackbuts, such as Bach uses in several of his stile antico opening movements, while providing the singers with a safety net, also requires extra time to ensure balance and good intonation. The truth is that this Christmas sequence comprises some of the most hair-raisingly difficult music in his whole œuvre: the succession of difficult tenor arias, the tempo changes mid movement in BWV 63, the opulent orchestration of BWV 65, the acrobatic Fecit potentiam fugue in the Magnificat, etc.

  q While this Johannine slant could be said on this occasion to come from the Christmas Gospel (John 1 : 1–14), there is unquestionably a detectable Johannine emphasis all through the cantatas of Bach’s First Leipzig Cycle that cannot be attributed to the Gospel formulations alone and must therefore have formed part of Bach’s overall design and the way he prepares his listeners for the ‘big event’ – his first Passion setting. Leaving aside the Passion narratives, there were thirty-four Gospel lections taken from Matthew, compared to twenty-one from John, or (in terms of verses) 319 verses from Matthew against 203 from John. (I am grateful to Robin Leaver for these figures.) On the other hand John’s Gospel marks the crucial starts of key segments of the liturgical year, and this is reflected by Bach in his first cycle, where he favoured a biblical citation as the text of twenty-eight out of forty of his newly composed cantatas.

  r Neither Bach’s autograph score nor the original parts contain any indication of articulation, which of course does not preclude their introduction in his performances. Experimenting with different slur-permutations and with localised crescendi aborted one beat earlier than their natural wave-crest, I found that this worked both idiomatically and pictorially, as did the final ritornello played smoothly and softly, as though now obedient to Christ’s commands. The stilling of the storm is also implicit both in the alto soloist’s concluding recitative and in the final chorale, the seventh verse of Johann Franck’s hymn ‘Jesu, meine Freude’ – a perfect conclusion to this extraordinary work.

  s Overall the cycle contains sequences where formal structures recur: a pattern for ten cantatas in the Trinity season that use a scriptural dictum and a closing chorale to act as bookends to two recitative/aria pairings, a further scheme at Christmas that interpolates a second chorale at the midpoint, and a third of pre-Lenten works similar to the second, only dropping the first recitative.

  t One need only reflect on how many of Bach’s children died in infancy and how both his parents had died on reaching the age of fifty to appreciate how human mortality and death were a constant reality for him – hence the continuing significance of eschatology. One of the books in his library was Martin Geier’s Zeit und Ewigkeit (Time and Eternity), a fat quarto volume of sermons on the Gospels throughout the church year (1664) in which each Gospel is expounded for its significance for time and eternity, now and then, showing that eschatological themes were explored at all times during the year.

  u Back in his Weimar days Bach had found what a powerful setting a French overture could make for a chorale cantus firmus in his Advent cantata BWV 61 – how Louis XIV’s most regal and ceremonial manner provided a naturalistic way to announce the arrival of Christ on earth.

  v It evokes Leibniz’s spectre of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, one that contains necessary and perfectly balanced dissonance, though Bach might have agreed with Spinoza’s twist to this: that ‘this is not the best of all possible worlds; it is the only possible world’. Leibniz apparently claimed to have lived by the Roman playwright Terence’s famous saying homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto – ‘As a man I consider nothing pertaining to human affairs outside my domain.’ Leibniz was a true polymath, as Bach was not. But it is instances such as these that suggest not just that he might have endorsed Terence’s aphorism, but that he included it within the purview of his cantatas and Passions.

  w Richard Stokes’s translation of the original is: ‘O mankind, save your soul / Flee from Satan’s slavery / And free yourself from sin / That in the pit of sulphur / Death, which plagues the damned / Shall not fo
r ever gnaw at your soul / O mankind, save your soul’ (J. S. Bach: The Complete Cantatas (1999), pp. 31–2).

  x ‘The power of music, especially Bach’s music, surely extends beyond what words or pictures or gestures can signify, which is why, at best, Bach seduces us with his subversive pleasures as much as he challenges us with his unique insights’ (from a lecture given at the Lufthansa Festival, London, 14 May 2011).

  y Alternatively the idea may have been hinted at discreetly, or even imposed, by the clergy, as a corrective to what they saw as Bach’s overtly Pietistic leanings in some of his first cycle works. Alfred Dürr questions darkly whether Bach might have ‘needed any special inducement’ (op. cit., p. 30). Perhaps what he had in mind was the Zusatz – the supplementary fee paid by the Stadtrat to an earlier Thomascantor, Sebastian Knüpfer, for composing a chorale cantata cycle in 1666/7 – something that Bach would surely have welcomed – but there is no evidence that he was similarly rewarded.

  z This was an anonymous adaptation of the chorale of 1584 by Martin Moller, and it reads like a penitential cry from the Thirty Years War: ‘Protect us from war and famine / Contagion, fire and grievous pain … Sin has greatly corrupted us / The Devil plagues us even more / The world, our very flesh and blood / Leads us astray incessantly / Such misery, Lord, is known to Thee alone / Ah, let us be commended to Thee.’